Suchergebnisse

In this paper I trace the many debates about the past, and its relationship with the present and the future, that have eddied around Rome over the last two centuries. I spend quite a bit of time illustrating the Catholic line on the "eternal city" and on its contestation from, first, Italian nationalist and then more imperialist and Fascist expositions of "sites of memory" there. After "liberation" in 1944, there were new approaches to elucidating the city's meaning, headed by the "myth of Anti‐Fascism" and extending to a left terrorist reading by the Red Brigades. In recent years, "post‐fascism" has grown in importance in Italy's capital, especially as embodied by the mayor since 2008, Gianni Alemanno. These ideological and politically inspired reckonings of history have squared uneasily with the more popular comprehension of the place of the past, all the more given that Rome has been in rapid growth, first from within Italy and nowadays from across the globe. Specific urban groups, notably the city's Jews, have also read history in their own manner. In sum, Rome has not been a venue for a simple, two sided, "culture war", as cliché assures us is our fate in Australia. Rather, as is also true here, Rome has proved a site of constant and multi‐fronted arguments about the meaning of history, as should be true of any serious democracy.

The article uses a range of archival material to commence an investigation into how and with what assumptions Italians lived under a Mussolinian dictatorship which called itself totalitarian. It suggests that 'revolutionary' Fascism – what Emilio Gentile and others have seen as a new 'political religion' – met with some scepticism in the daily behaviour of many Italians. The family, the locality, the most helpful functioning of patron–client networks, the search for special advantage for oneself and 'friends' conditioned Fascist militancy and framed 'ordinary life', all the more because the practice of the dictatorship was itself so shot through with contradictions.