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roots§routes announces a Call For Proposals, asking artists and scholars to submit proposals, beginning with the magazine’s theme for the upcoming quarter. Submissions should be sent in the form of an abstract, with a maximum of 350 words, to the following email address: redazione@roots-routes.org, with the subject heading “Article Submission.” Abstracts written in English, Italian, French, Portugues or Spanish are acceptable. In case of interest on the part of the editorial board, an email requesting the full paper will be sent to the author of the abstract. The paper is to be written in the language of the author’s choosing.
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edited by Viviana Gravano
All declinations of the term “fascism”, after the Second World War and the subsequent fall of the two major dictatorships of the early 20th century in Germany and Italy, have acquired a broader meaning, often becoming a generic adjective to refer to those who explicitly refer to those who use systematic violence, those with overpowering attitudes and those who attempt to assert autarchic power. The epithet “fascist” has begun to be used in a negative sense, as an explicit insult, in a somewhat generic, popularized manner, depreciating its original, and current, meaning.
One hears President Putin of Russia being called a fascist, the new US President Trump, the head of state of Israel Netanyahu, to name but a few examples. The doubt that arises is that this label, smeared on any form of contemporary authoritarian government, ends up watering down the real forms of neo-fascism that are resurgent particularly in those countries where the original fascism was born. This consideration is not a philological subtlety, or an invitation to philosophical purism, but starts from the observation that the right-wing in Italy, for example, those clearly inspired by the fascism of the origins, or the insurgent neo-Nazi movements in Germany, have learnt to use linguistic and cultural appropriation to twist the meaning of documentary sources, and produce historical revisionisms to clear their respective dictatorships. Putting any super-conservative, supremacist, nationalist and racist regime into a sort of cauldron in which ‘a little bit of everyone’ can basically be called a fascist, is a complex, if not dangerous drift. And those who are building new forms of dictatorship are not by chance taking possession of certain iconographies, not so much to draw a real adherence to the principles of the original fascisms, but to have an imaginative identity that is easy to evoke. This has led to saying, for example in Italy, that being fascist or communist was the same thing, just the opposite side of the same coin, and then recounting the Resistance as a civil war between two opposing sides, guilty of the same violence at different times.
Pluralizing the term “fascism” into “fascisms” can acquire a precise meaning: to identify all the forms that neo-fascisms have created over time, declining not generic oligarchic attitudes, but being inspired by a precise and circumstantiated historical period, a well-delineated cultural vision, a philosophical and even ‘scientific’ thought.
In this issue of roots_routes we want to talk about the different legacies that fascism left behind, through a series of successive variations, which maintain an essential link with their ‘mother house’, which in Italy is that of the Duce’s fascism. That mussolinian fascism, the first model of fascism in Europe, later declined in the genocidal Nazism of Germany, and in the two dictatorships of Francisco Franco in Spain and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, both explicitly inspired by the Italian experience.
The Italian dictator, from his very first public speeches (Cfr. Ben-Ghiat, 2004), expressed his personal desire to create first a movement, and then a power, that, although literally incorporated in his figure, would survive him. Every political act, every communication or cultural action, was aimed at imagining a future for fascism, far beyond the short life of its founder himself. This consideration should make us reread the entire history of fascism in Italy, and more generally in Europe, as a history that does not end with the death of Mussolini and the formal fall of his dictatorial government but writes new pages immediately after the Second World War, and knows how to survive in absolute continuity with the previous period.
The architecture, the foundation cities (città di Fondazione), the modification of public odonomastics, the massive production of magazines, periodicals and books, the production of regime art, the construction of a fascist “body”, the invention of collective rituals, the invasion of the colonies, are acts that do not have a value linked to the “here and now” of Mussolini as a man, but are grafted like deep roots into the Italian people, drawing collective imaginaries and visions. The post-regime, while producing a constitutional and anti-fascist Republic born out of the Resistance, did not manage, if only to a small extent, to weaken the foundations of strong thinking in Italy.
The post-war period built at a legal and institutional level a continuity with the dictatorship, first and foremost thanks to the pardon signed by the then communist minister Palmiro Togliatti (Cfr. Franzinelli, 2016), which effectively allowed the reinstatement of all key figures in the state apparatuses such as politicians, administrators and magistrates. At the same time, there was little mention of the massive reintegration of people from the world of culture into their positions of power, reabsorbed into a generic as well as false anti-fascist compact, which immediately denied the essential involvement in the regime’s propaganda machine of intellectuals and artists of all kinds. ‘Independent’ intellectuals, artists, museum directors, officials of the apparatuses of the various ministries of culture and education, suffered almost no consequences for having been, often not subjugated to fascism out of fear or out of the need to survive, but because they participated based on their evident and declared adherence. True “aedi” of Mussolini, his fundamental instruments of mass persuasion, promoters of the aberrant racist visions of fascism in hundreds of exhibitions, magazines and public events, since 1946 they have become martyrs of the regime, victims unable to resist and therefore forced* into a kind of self-exile in their homeland.
Even today, there is still much acrimonious discussion in the academic world of art history about the need not to stigmatize artists such as Sironi, Campigli, Carrà and Funi. Therefore, we would like to reread some sentences from the beginning of the Manifesto of Mural Painting (Manifesto della Pittura Murale), signed by the same artists in 1933: «What can and must be done as of now is to clear the problem facing artists of the many misunderstandings that exist. In the Fascist state, art comes to have an educative function. It must produce the ethos of our time. It must give unity of style and grandeur of line to common living. Art will thus return to being what it was in its highest periods and within the highest civilizations: a perfect instrument of spiritual government. The individual conception of ‘art for art’s sake’ is superseded» (Cfr. Pittura murale, 1932 e Manifesto della Pittura Murale, 1933).
Not only does a more than clear willingness to adhere to fascism emerge, but the intention to be its fundamental instrument of ‘education’, hence of collective manipulation, is equally evident. How is it still possible today to produce exhibitions and publications that only speak of Sironi as a creator of masterpieces, without in the least mentioning his fundamental role as a builder of a certain fascist imagery? In the catalogue of the exhibition at La Sapienza that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the university in 1985, the text by Massimo Carrà, the painter’s son Carlo, speaking of his father’s attitude in painting the great fresco Il Giudizio Universale (The Last Judgement ) for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan in 1933, writes: «And it is a concept that Carrà shows he wished to pursue in painting these two frescoes where iconography and narratives reveal themselves as occasions, or pretexts, depending on the values of space, compositional rhythm and formal solutions» (M. Carrà, 1985, p.17).
In a country like Italy, which boasts a history of iconological studies of the highest value and a long tradition of Warburg-style research, one almost always justifies, as in this case just cited, adherence to fascism as a choice that disregards the formal values expressed, over and above the implications of content, ethics and propaganda. The most interesting misunderstanding of this absolutist reading of the arts in the fascist era is to think that the re-proposition of stylistic features and neo-Roman forms, the hyperbolic use of monumentality in painting as in architecture, archaism, are absolute values, adopted by the artists independently, and not as essential signs of adhesion to the aesthetic demands of the regime and of Mussolini himself. Art at the time of the “ventennio” (the twenty years of Fascism), which the duce also allowed to change its form much more than in other dictatorships, certainly not out of fluidity or tolerance, but in order to be able to incorporate all artists into his single thought, produced works prone to the ideas of the regime, drawing deep-rooted imagery into Italian culture, such as to contaminate and still subterraneously feed the current ones.
It has often been argued that the arts, in the broadest sense of the term, being basically born for propaganda purposes for the regime, cannot in some way even be defined as ‘arts’, thus eliminating at the root the problem of asking questions about who and how the artists contributed decisively to the establishment of fascism in Italy.
This apparently anti-fascist stance conceals a desire not to address in a clear and finally decisive manner the heavy cultural legacies that fascism left in our country, which in this way, labelled only as ‘propaganda’, can escape serious historical and iconological analysis, which would reveal their pervasive presence in our imaginations today.
In what way do current “fascisms” live on in a daily and pervasive way in our living spaces?
For example, this allows us to maintain in public places, which represent us as a community of an anti-fascist republic, symbolic objects, works of art, which clearly exalt symbols linked to the dictatorship.
When in 2017 the Ministry of Culture decided to restore Mario Sironi’s L’Italia fra le arti e le scienze fresco in the Aula Magna of Rome’s La Sapienza University, it brought back to light the “fasci littori”, the inscription of the fascist year and Mussolini on horseback on a Roman arch, which a partial intervention by partisans in 1946 had removed. A recent photo shows President Mattarella with his back to the official celebration of the painting’s return, looking at the fresco returned to its ‘original splendor’. The University’s institutional website writes in the file dedicated to the restoration: «The scene set in a timeless dimension, is composed of monumental figures arranged on the sides of Italy: Botany, Geology, Mineralogy, Geography, Painting, Architecture, Sculpture, Law and Literature. Figures that collectively allude to the richness and value of knowledge, against a rocky backdrop dominated by the imposing figure of Winged Victory. With the fall of Fascism, the painting was concealed with sheets of wallpaper glued and nailed to the pictorial surface. In 1950, the mural was almost entirely repainted to eliminate the fascist symbols and cancel out the Sironian stylistic matrix of the work [1].
Regime art thus has the gift of remaining timeless. It seems to be forgotten that the figures defined as monumental and of clear neo-Roman ancestry refer to Mussolini’s real obsession with the return to the power of the Roman Empire, which served to justify, among other things, the occupation and genocide of populations in the Italian colonies. In 1934, at the national assembly of the PNF, Benito Mussolini declared: «[…] after the Rome of the Caesars, after that of the Popes, there is today a Rome, the fascist Rome, which with the simultaneity of the ancient and the modern, imposes itself on the admiration of the world». The work of removing the most explicit fascist symbols by the partisans is defined as a ‘concealment’ and as an attempt to annul Sironi’s ‘stylistic’ matrix, which must therefore be considered as an absolute value beyond its being a harbinger of an oppressive and neo-imperial thought (Cfr. Visser, 1992, p. 5).
We would like to invite you and us to reflect, in these times of declared, philological and no longer ill-concealed neo-fascism, on how the legacies of that time, pervasive and widespread in our country and increasingly in Europe, are today instruments of dangerous rebirth, and at the same time cultural organisms capable of taking new forms, of defining new meanings, while remaining fundamentally faithful to those initial instances, to those imaginaries and visions that were born precisely to always be able to recycle themselves and always allow themselves to survive.
Notes
[1] See “La Sapienza” University website: https://orientamento.uniroma1.it/views/cu/cu-aula-magna.html
Bibliography
Ben-Ghiat R., Fascist Modernities, Italy, 1922-1945, Berkley-Los Angeles-London, University of California Press, 2001; trad. it. La cultura fascista, Il Mulino, Bologna 2004.
Carrà M., Carrà e la pittura murale, in cat. mostra 1935. Gli artisti nell’università e la questione della pittura murale, Università La Sapienza Multigrafica Editrice, Roma 1985.
Franzinelli M., L’amnistia Togliatti. 1946 Colpo di spugna sui crimini fascisti, Feltrinelli, Milano 2016.
Pittura murale, in «Il Popolo d’Italia», 1º gennaio 1932
Manifesto della Pittura Murale, in «Colonna», dicembre 1933.
Visser R., Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of the “Romanità”, in «Journal of Contemporary History», n. 27, 1992.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
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abstract submission deadline
by 03 march 2025
PUBLICATION
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publication 15 May 2025
article by 20 April 2025