Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922-43 Policies, Procedures and Protagonists

Censorship in Fascist Italy,
1922–43
George Talbot
Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43
Also by George Talbot
ESSAYS IN ITALIAN LITERATURE AND HISTORY IN HONOUR OF

DOUG THOMPSON, ed., with Pamela A. Williams
MONTALE’S ‘MESTIERE VILE’: THE ELECTIVE TRANSLATIONS FROM
ENGLISH OF THE 1930s AND 40s
Censorship in Fascist Italy,
1922–43
George Talbot
© George Talbot 2007
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-54308-9
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Talbot, George, 1963–
Censorhip in fascist Italy, 1922–43 / George Talbot.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Fascism–Italy. 2. Censorship–Italy–History–20th century. 3. Politics

and culture–Italy–History–20th century. 4. Fascism–Italy–History–Sources.
5. Censorship–Italy–History–20th century–Sources. I. Title.
DG571.T324 2007
303.3'76094509041–dc22 2007060075
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
1 Introduction 1
Historiography, politics and the idea of commonsense 1
Culture, myths and definitions 7
Censorship and surveillance 12
Methodologies and intentions 15
2 Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 21

Dismantling the Liberal state 21
The Press Office 28
Policing, censorship and surveillance 33
Media ownership and effective control 38
The Agenzia Stefani 43
State, church and censorship 46
3 Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State 48

The need for reform 48
The choice of Gentile 51
A programme of work 54
Reform and censorship 57
Consequences of the Gentile reform 62
‘Consensus’ and the marginalization of Gentile 67
Hearts, minds and bodies 70
4 Journalism as Mission 77
Inspiring loyalty 77
From Press Office to independent ministry 79
Policy and inconsistency 91
War, empire and the media 98
Mission accomplished? 101
5 The Duce’s Image 105

The Istituto LUCE 105
The Duce’s body 107
v
vi Contents
Other bodies 116

Racism and the imagination 125
6 Culture Wars 132

Writers and politics 134
From ministry for press and propaganda to Minculpop 139
Film 144
Theatre 148
Literature and translations 153
7 Censorship, Secrets and Lies 159

Public and private 160
Covert operations 162
Informers 165
Lies, corruption, deviation and degeneration 171
Minority communities 175
War and public opinion 182
Morale and popular culture 190
8 Conclusion 196
Continuities 197
The panopticon model and its limits 198
Censorship and complicity 203
Notes 210
Bibliography 234
Index 243
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of staff at the Archivio centrale

dello Stato in Rome, the Biblioteca nazionale centrale in Florence, the
British Library and the University of Hull library. I am also grateful to the
British Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the University
of Hull for research leave in 2002. Parts of the work in progress were
delivered and discussed at conferences including one on Censorship,
Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy (organized by Dr Guido
Bonsaver and Dr Robert Gordon in London, Institute for Romance
Studies, 2002) and another on The Body in Italian Culture (organized by
Dr Loredana Polezzi and Dr Charlotte Ross in London, Society for Italian
Studies, 2004), and at seminars held in the University of Hull. Discussion
and debate in all cases helped to clarify my ideas and sharpen points.
Dr Neil Vickers read several chapters in draft and made a number of
helpful suggestions, from a perspective outside of Italian Studies, which
I hope will commend the book to a wider audience. Professor Brian
Moloney and Professor Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin read the entire typescript
and provided welcome and judicious advice. Research for this book has
meant that my family members have seen less of me than they might
have wished over the last few years, and they have tolerated and sup-
ported my academic obsessions with patience and good humour.
George Talbot, Hull, November 2006
vii
List of Abbreviations
ACS Archivio centrale dello Stato (Rome)

b. busta
BBC British Broadcasting Company
BCI Banca Commerciale Italiana
cat. categoria
CEKA Secret police
co carteggio ordinario
cr carteggio riservato
DAGR Divisione affari generali e riservati
DG Direzione generale / Directorate generale
DGPS Directorate General of Public Security (Direzione generale
di pubblica sicurezza)
DPP Divisione polizia politica
EIAR Ente italiano per le audizioni radiofoniche
f. fascicolo
FP fascicoli personali
Gab. Gabinetto
GIL Gioventù italiana del Littorio
IRI Instituto per la ricostruzione industriale
LUCE L’Unione cinematografica educativa
Mat. Materia
MCP Ministero di Cultura popolare
MI Ministero dell’Interno
MiCup Ministry of Popular Culture (Minculpop)
NAZI German National Socialism
OMNI Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia
ONB Opera nazionale Balilla
PCI Italian Communist Party
PNF Partito nazionale fascista – National Fascist Party
RSI Repubblica sociale italiana – Salò Republic
SASP Societa anomina Stefano Pittaluga
sf. sottofascicolo
SPD Segreteria particolare del duce
SSR Servizio speciale riservato
UC Ufficio criptografia
viii
List of Abbreviations ix
UCI Unione cinematografica italiana

UTPN Ufficio tecnico di propaganda nazionale
1
Introduction
Historiography, politics and the idea of commonsense
The legacy of Fascism continues to cast a shadow over modern Italy.

This is demonstrated by the ample coverage of its history in scholarly
and popular media; and the sorts of questions about coercion or com-
plicity which they have provoked among contemporary German histo-
rians have analogues in the case of Fascist Italy.1 Daniel Goldhagen’s
controversial anthropological reconstruction of German ‘common-
sense’ in the Nazi period, presents an argument for the eventual rise of
the Nazis drawing on a number of factors, principal among them a
deep-seated anti-Semitism spread wide in German society. According
to this argument, anti-Semitism combined with other factors such as a
smarting defeat in the Great War, the crippling economic conse-
quences of that military defeat and the settlement at the Treaty of
Versailles, which with a widening of suffrage created conditions suffi-
cient to enable the acceptance of a profoundly anti-democratic model
of consensus. Out of this emerged a generation of willing executioners.
Few historians would accept that things were quite so simple, but the
debate the book engendered has had repercussions outside of German
history. The Italian case is different in many ways from the German
one, not least in that the Fascists achieved power far earlier, and the
common wisdom brings anti-Semitism into the Italian model far later,
dating it to the Race Laws of summer and autumn 1938.
Robert O. Paxton, however, in his stimulating comparative study of
Fascism in Europe has argued recently that the assumptions about
German anti-Semitism need more careful analysis, and that other
European countries actually had far more anti-Semitism latent in their
mentalité than did Germany.2 The rise of the Nazis, he concludes, was
1
2 Censorship in Fascist Italy, 1922–43
not an inevitable consequence of the social, cultural and economic

factors at work in Germany. Equally Giorgio Fabre has demonstrated
that the roots of Mussolini’s own anti-Semitism extend well beyond
Hitler’s suggestive influence in 1933 and other Italian historians,
among them Enzo Collotti and Michele Sarfatti have demonstrated the
existence of a spontaneous anti-Semitism in parts of the Italian popula-
tion which cannot be attributed to the theatrical ravings of a couple of
dictators.3 Some historians and TV pundits in Italy, nonetheless, while
critical of the record of Fascist Italy have drawn comfort from the fact
that whatever wrongs the Italian Fascists may have committed, at least
they were not directly responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews,
gypsies, homosexuals and other marginalized minorities. Such a view is
difficult to reconcile entirely with the archival evidence presented by
Mimmo Franzinelli in his Delatori (2001).4 Other historians, less critical
of the Fascists, continue to praise various social and educational
improvements achieved during the ventennio. The Fascists’ direct spiri-
tual descendants, the Alleanza nazionale, have occupied ministerial
portfolios in two Italian governments since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Their leader, somewhat to the dismay of some of his supporters has
now accepted publicly that Fascism was a ‘male assoluto’ or an
‘absolute evil’.5
In the case of Italian historiography, the late and extremely industri-
ous historian Renzo De Felice has inspired several schools of thought
which have in common the view that the early and mid-1930s were
essentially ‘years of consensus’ in Italy, with the vast majority of the
Italian population giving their willing allegiance to a benevolent
tyranny.6 Repressive measures, he accepted, were certainly necessary
for the early survival of the dictatorship, but after the plebiscite of
1929 they were brought to bear only on adversaries of the regime. De
Felice set these years of consensus between 1929, the year of the
Lateran Pacts with the Catholic Church and 1936, which marked
Italian involvement in the Spanish Civil War. In his view, reconcilia-
tion with the Church brought the first phase of Fascism to an end
and established the regime in the minds of the king’s loyal subjects as
their natural temporal power, whose protectionist economic policies
insulated the country against the worst effects of the Wall Street Crash
and ensuing Depression and then, in defiance of the League of Nations
inaugurated a new empire across the Mediterranean, in a popular
attempt to turn back the clock to Roman times. More critical historians
argue that reconciliation with the Church allowed a brutal, rapacious
but short-sighted imperial programme to be cloaked in the convenient
Introduction 3
mystification of a civilizing mission, which could be interpreted with

characteristic Fascist ambiguity as bringing either imperial values to
Africa or the light of Christianity to the darkness of superstition.7
In cultural terms, Philip Cannistraro argued that the regime put in
train a progressive programme which attempted to bring culture to the
workers, the peasants and other groups traditionally marginalized in
Italian society.8 It did this by means of ‘theatre for the masses’ and a
socialization of the intellectuals, in the interests of bringing to an end
the symbiotic relation between culture and wealth.9 He argued that
unlike in Nazi Germany, Mussolini and the Fascists tolerated a plural-
ity of artistic and cultural expression as part of that cultural pro-
gramme. There were neither extensive book-burnings nor campaigns
against degenerate art in Fascist Italy. On these points Cannistraro was
mostly correct: there was no modern-day Bonfire of the Vanities in
Piazza della Signoria, or any other public space in Italy, although
Socialist books certainly were burned by squadristi in isolated incidents
during the early phase of Fascism. That does not mean that the powers
of the state as censor were significantly fewer than across the Alps as
we will see.
There are those who take a less subtle and nuanced line than
De Felice or Cannistraro and argue further that Mussolini’s anti-Semitic
campaign and alliance with Nazi Germany were the tragic mistakes
which have obscured an authoritarian but otherwise relatively benign
regime. This view has been advocated with insistence especially in the
media over the last 30 years. It has been advanced most recently by
Marcello Staglieno, a popular historian writing in the Mondadori Storia
series, who has emphasized the positive aspects of Fascism, such as
land reclamation and job creation through extensive public works.10
His is far from being a new thesis in Italian historiography: indeed it
largely repeats the regime’s own propaganda.11 Aside from the occa-
sional diatribe against the role of the Italian communist party (PCI) in
the resistance, Staglieno has put forward, again, the comforting view of
Italian history according to which it was really the Nazis who were
responsible for the racist policies and the war which toppled Fascism.12
But for the seduction of Hitler, according to this view, Mussolini’s
regime could have lasted as long as Franco’s in Spain. In other words,
Mussolini and the Fascists bear little responsibility for the Endlösung
and the cataclysm of the Second World War.13
Issues of memory and forgetting have been aired now for over a
decade in often heated public debate over the resistance, often on the
broadcast media, over whether the period 1943–45 should be regarded
as a civil war and how it should be commemorated. Claudio Pavone, in

his preface to the second edition (1994) of his seminal Una guerra civile.
Saggio storico sulla moralità della Resistenza (1991), has described the
context in which his book appeared and indeed helped to inform:
Discussion of the Resistance risked sinking into indifference.

The debate had often been punctuated by radical critiques which
sometimes came close to outright condemnation. There were
serious-minded efforts at critical understanding, usually from parts
of the Left, but these never achieved consensus as commonsense,
and they were knocked off course not by reasoned argument
(although there have been contributions of this kind too) but by the
mere redefinition of terms, thinly veiled by colourless platitudes.
All this generated a defence strategy on the part of upholders
of the Resistance who, caught off their guard, felt slighted and
offended. The dispute between the detractors and the hagiographers,
which serious historical research thought it had left behind, sud-
denly flared up again. Despite all the claims that the matter had been
resolved, it became evident just how deeply felt is the historical and
civil problem of the war and the Resistance. At the same time, we
have risked generating more heat than light, to the point of public
spectacle in the form of televised show-downs.14
In the intervening decade plans have been brought forward by gov-

ernment ministers, and then dropped, to name a street after Giuseppe
Bottai, in a transparent attempt to rehabilitate Fascist hierarchs.15
Italian television audiences have been treated to ever more emotive
documentaries on the foibe, atrocities allegedly perpetrated by Com-
munist resistance fighters in Istria which involved throwing their
opponents to their deaths in deep limestone caverns, bringing such
issues into the ambit of 1990s examples of ethnic cleansing in the
Balkans.
There are several important political and methodological issues at
stake here. The traditional and sentimental presentation of italiani
brava gente (‘good-natured Italians’) is being pressed into service in the
media to demonstrate the truism that there were victims on both sides
of the contest over Fascism.16 The argument then goes on to take the
relativist turn, urging that if there were victims on both sides, then
there must have been right on both sides, and therefore it is impossible
to regard one side as right and the other as wrong. To be a victim,
however, is not necessarily to be in the right. This needs to be borne in
Introduction 5
mind when watching and listening to what has been characterized by

some historians as the anti-anti-Fascism which has come to dominate
the Italian media representation of Italy’s twentieth-century past.17 A
rose-tinted view of the Fascist past can be made to stand up only by
taking a very selective approach to evidence, and filtering out or dis-
missing evidence which contradicts that interpretation in order to
shape an understanding of ‘commonsense’, to use Pavone’s term, later
taken up independently by Goldhagen and Robert Gellately in the
German context. These practices correspond alarmingly to interpreta-
tions of contemporary history put forward by the Fascists themselves
in the 1930s, and which I will be characterizing as aspects of censor-
ship in action, something far more insidious than book-burning. The
pages which follow are intended as a contribution to an understanding
of ‘commonsense’ as promoted by Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, by
examining the interplay between that concept of ‘commonsense’ and
the various forms of censorship which at times shaped it and at other
times were shaped by it.
Studies of Italian Fascism are, understandably, dominated by the
figure of Mussolini and some of the more discerning of them have
demonstrated ways in which the regime set about using text and image
to create a myth of him as the embodiment of commonsense.18 He
may well have coined the term ‘totalitarian’, and even if he did not, it
is now fatally linked to his regime. The concept of totalitarianism pre-
supposes an underlying consensus, a commonsense. Not many would
argue against the interpretation that he set about re-balancing the
social contract between the individual and the state, harnessing
human and technological resources against personal freedoms, creating
mass forms of socialization and culture, and establishing a personality
cult which dominated that state for over two decades. Given that he
had inherited a ruined economy in 1922 and raised expectations
inspired by D’Annunzio’s rhetoric of a ‘mutilated victory’, what else,
his apologists argue, could he have done in the circumstances? As this
book is not an essay in counterfactual history, I will not attempt to
answer it here.
Any state, but more especially a dictatorship, will rely on censorship to
limit the public’s horizon of expectation and therefore to shape consen-
sus. It would be naïve to believe that this does not hold to some extent
for democratic states too, but in many ways the process is more visible in
democratic states which now have Freedom of Information legislation.
No regime, however, to my knowledge, has left to posterity the mass of
archival, documentary and visual evidence which we have inherited
from the Italian Fascists. Patient sifting of documents in the Archivio

centrale dello Stato in Rome’s EUR district yields up detailed information
of censorship policy and its implementation, ranging from phone
tapping, to sequestration of private mail, to daily veline (carbon-copy
instructions) for newspaper editors and broadcasters, to networks of
police informers engaged in spying on their neighbours, foreigners and
occasional passers-by; not to mention casual denunciations from
members of the public. De Felice’s contention that repressive measures
became less prevalent after 1929 is less convincing when checked against
the archival evidence. The evidence, some of which is set out in this
book, may not all constitute censorship as such, but a totalitarian state
which has embarked on policies of systematic censorship will inevitably
also develop corrupting practices of surveillance to carry them through.
One of the uses of such surveillance in Fascist Italy was to assess the
extent to which censorship was working. The mass of information col-
lected and archived by the censors and the police provides the historian
with a vast source of evidence for what the Italian population really
thought, and it is evidence which is far more reliable than the often self-
serving retrospective accounts by former protagonists and the accounts
which come down by means of oral history.
My hope for this book is that it will provide a comprehensive
overview of at least part of the very large mass of archival evidence
generated by acts of censorship and the closely-related practices of
surveillance. It draws on recent scholarship, especially work published
in Italian, as well as my own work in the archives. The early Fascist
impulses to silencing opposition were violent in nature. Once the
Fascists were established in power, the initial impulses found an insti-
tutional place in various pieces of illiberal legislation and in police
structures inherited from Liberal Italy. Both the legislation and the
police forces came to be modified and moulded into something quite
different from the Liberal inheritance. The police forces under Arturo
Bocchini (from 1926 to his death in 1940), and especially the divisione
polizia politica, developed very extensive archives on individuals,
movements and what might be described euphemistically as ‘security
problems’. The Prime Minister’s Press Office (Ufficio Stampa), was even-
tually transformed into the Ministry for Popular Culture (whose official
abbreviation was MiCup, but which is generally known by the slightly
ironic title ‘Minculpop’), via the Under-Secretariat for Press and
Propaganda and later the Ministry for Press and Propaganda (modelled
on Goebbels’ initiative north of the Alps). In its various bureaucratic
incarnations it was scarcely less diligent in its archiving of files. Most of
Introduction 7
these police and Minculpop files are now available for consultation in
the Archivio centrale dello Stato, and they have been drawn upon exten-
sively in the pages which follow.
There is some excellent recent work in Italian on Fascist censorship,
spying and policing by scholars such as Mauro Canali, Giorgio Fabre,
Mimmo Franzinelli, Nicola Tranfaglia, and others.19 It is not generally
available to an English-speaking audience. Where this book differs
from their work, and from those of earlier contributions to our know-
ledge of censorship by Maurizio Cesari, Aurelio Lepre, Lorenzo Greco
and Loris Rizzi is that it deals systematically with a wide range of differ-
ent forms of censorship, rather than concentrating on a specific aspect
such as literature, the press, or military censorship.20 Aside from the
work of these authors, there is surprisingly little explicit coverage of
censorship in the existing body of work on Fascism, especially that
written in English. This is all the more surprising given that much
recent scholarship has tended to focus on culture rather than politics,
taking Fascist texts and ideology often at face value.
Culture, myths and definitions
Censorship inhabits an intersection between culture and politics.

Implementing a totalitarian vision has to involve both filtering out
images and messages held to be deviant by those exercising power as
well as the other side of the coin, promoting images and messages
which constitute the acceptable norms on which society is to be orga-
nized. In the memorable formulation of Curzio Malaparte, a dissident
Fascist, in a totalitarian state everything which isn’t banned is compul-
sory. I want to consider different kinds of censorships in this book
because it would be misleading to think of ‘Fascist censorship’ as a
straightforward monolithic term. Both noun and adjective are almost
equally mercurial. Before examining definitions of ‘censorship’, it may
be helpful to map out the terrain of culture and politics. David Forgacs
has drawn some distinctions within the term ‘culture’:
A study of twentieth-century culture, particularly in its relations

with the state, cannot afford to ignore the fact that modern cultural
products are characteristically made to be distributed and sold on
markets beyond the local level – regionally, nationally or interna-
tionally –, that they tend to be made using technologies of mass
reproduction and distribution, and that all this affects the ways in
which the state intervenes in relation to them.21
He illustrated this proposition with the example of film production.

Films are expensive to make. They require extensive financing. A state
wishing to stimulate the creative and cultural industries, for reasons of
prestige or regeneration, can promote the interests of production com-
panies by providing them with soft loans or tax breaks, for mutual
benefit, as has been done successfully by various other governments
since, authoritarian and democratic ones. The Fascists in the 1930s
belatedly created very favourable economic conditions for the Italian
film industry. A government can also apply protectionist tariffs to
defend the interests of domestically-produced films. This is precisely
what the Fascists did in the 1930s in order to promote the interests of
Italian film-makers in the face of competition from Hollywood.
Competition of this sort, of course, was not simply an economic
matter. The Italian government had invested in its domestic films,
directly or indirectly, and these productions, to a significant degree
encoded Fascist commonsense and values for transmission on to the
large screen. Hollywood values, regulated by the Hays code, became
contentious for Fascist Italy only when international relations deterio-
rated from 1935 because of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and Italy’s
alliance with the Nazis. Hollywood values came to be perceived as
more of a threat to the Fascist way of life because they represented
America, potentially an enemy. Hollywood values, in themselves,
could be accommodated or imitated in the Italian film industry.
The distinctions drawn by Forgacs apply with even more force to news-
papers. The State’s interventions in setting the news agenda and trying to
control it are likely to be more co-ordinated but also more subject to risk,
given the real-time nature of news stories. Mussolini came to power in
1922 with a well-developed practical grasp of journalism, newspaper
management and media funding. He had been editor of Avanti! in his
days as a Socialist, before expulsion from the party for his espousal of
interventionism in 1915. At that point he set up Il Popolo d’Italia. In his
capacity as editor of Avanti! he had come into contact with censorship as
practised by the Liberal state through the offices of the local prefects,
who were no friends of Socialism. Among Mussolini’s allies in 1919 was
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the Futurists who was also no
stranger to the prefects. Marinetti participated in both the founding
meeting of squadristi in Piazza San Sepolcro on 23 March and the move-
ment’s first ‘spectacular’, three weeks later.22 He has left a text which is
both a witness statement and a participant report of the latter:
One, two, three, twenty, thirty revolver shots. A volley of stones

and flying cudgels. Cudgels hitting their mark. One for all, Arditi!
Introduction 9
The cordon of carabinieri breaks up and disappears. […] Leaving us

poised and ready for action. Then, like a flash, pell-mell towards
the enemy. They break apart. Lots of them, gripped by terror, dive
for cover. […] The revolver fire, which now has the rat-tat-tat-tat of
the infantry, resounds down Via Dante. We stop in front of the
Teatro Eden. The battle has lasted an hour. […] We reform our
column which, half an hour later, having broken through more
cordons of troops, reaches Via San Damiano and attacks and sets
fire to the offices of Avanti!. We throw furniture out of the windows
but we don’t find Serrati, the editor, skiving as usual and far away
from the struggle. Pinna, the Futurist, was one of the first to break
in to the Avanti! rooms and he was wounded in the hand. Many
others wounded. The column now lording it over reconquered
Milan marches back to Piazza del Duomo chanting ‘L’Avanti! is
finished’ and carrying the wooden insignia of the burned-out news-
paper, which was then given to Mussolini at the offices of Il Popolo
d’Italia.23
In Marinetti’s vivid account, this could be the treatment for a movie

scene. The violence is valued aesthetically; but it was real enough for
those on the receiving end of it, as was the implied complicity of the
carabinieri who made themselves scarce, leaving the way open to the
mob. Marinetti’s description of ‘the first victory of Fascism’ captures
the exhilaration felt by squadristi as they set about destroying the
nerve-centre of the enemy newspaper and bringing a trophy back to
Mussolini, and it contains, even in this fragment, some of the charac-
teristics which Roger Griffin has identified as hallmarks of Fascist texts:
Any Fascist text of substance will reveal a recurrent set of images and
themes relating either to the condemnation of the decadent, liberal
notion of decline, weakness, crisis, anarchy, or to the celebration of
the reborn, post-liberal nation of regeneration, strength, stability,
order which Fascism aspires to be creating – and very often to the
gulf which divides the ‘old’ Italy from the ‘new’. Ideal-typically,
therefore, each contrasting permutation of Fascism manifests an
identical mythic core of ‘palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism’.24
Marinetti’s was one of the earliest Fascist texts, and there is certainly
implicit condemnation of weakness and decadence, and celebration of
strength and bravado. The early Futurist strain of Fascism, however,
did not aspire to creating the stability and order that pervades later
Fascist rhetoric of the sacred state. Marinetti’s model and his language
drew on the rhetoric and shared experiences of trench warfare. In 1919

he belonged among the Intransigents. To cite Griffin again:
The precondition of the national rebirth was […] a revolution in

culture. Instead of reflecting, celebrating even, the fragmentation of
world-views into a myriad personal outlooks, private ways of seeing
and idiosyncratic experiences or values, culture would, so Fascist ideal-
ists trusted, once more come to embody the total vision and ethos of
the whole people. Instead of forming a separate sphere of social life
divorced from politics, economics and sciences, and bracketed by asso-
ciation with art, religion and leisure, it would again be inseparable
from them all, nourishing and harmonizing them. Contemporary life
itself would become a living Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, with
the Italian people as both its performers and spectators.25
There are some fairly obvious dangers in taking a text such as

Marinetti’s account of the destruction of a printing shop and reading
it as a ‘total vision and ethos of the whole people’. Firstly Marinetti
was a well-educated creative writer and a performance artist with an
internationally notorious reputation. This is therefore not an account
from below. It is violence transformed into art, mediated by an experi-
enced manipulator of audiences. It is not spontaneity. The military
terminology he deployed in this text and more especially in his per-
formances was a provocative call to arms for the veterans of the
trenches, many of them barely literate, who were now returning, with
the right to vote, to a shattered economy. Marinetti was aware of the
audience for which he was performing: Intransigents avant la lettre.
He was exploiting a military rhetoric and harnessing the sentiment of
the trenches against the non-interventionist Socialists who had stayed
at home along with the big business interests which were alleged to
have made profit out of the war.26 Secondly, there has been greater
emphasis among cultural historians on the intentions of the Fascists
and how they interpreted what they read in the pages of Gustav Le
Bon, Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto or their divulgators, rather than on
the effects and consequences of their actions. The squadristi who
wrecked the Avanti! offices in April 1919 may conceivably have
thought they were expressing a popular will by their action. In an
objective sense, what they thought they were doing is an irrelevance:
what they actually did was strike a physical blow against a newspaper,
and cultural interpreters might just as easily read that action as a
symbolic attack on the free press.
Introduction 11
The official, authorized, vision of the Fascist state, the palingenetic

myth, required not just passive acceptance by the people: it required
their active participation, and a good number of the recent books on
the subject have detailed the forms assumed by this active participa-
tion or ‘communion’ with the state, with individuals cast as both per-
formers and spectators.27 There is further potential for controversy
here. ‘Myth’ is a term used quite loosely – perhaps surprisingly so – by
a number of cultural historians. For the Fascists of the First Hour, the
notion of myth derived specifically, if not always directly, from the
writings of Sorel, and that notion was quite precise in Sorel’s work,
even if it may now appear somewhat bizarre. According to Roberto
Maggiore, a minor Fascist ideologue of the time:
Whereas in common parlance myth is a form of fable, or an histor-

ical deed transformed by fantasy, in the language of Sorel it becomes
not a description of things but an expression of will, the ideological
content of a programme of action. Utopia is that which has been or
which is to come, an optical illusion projected on to the past or the
future; myth, on the other hand, is that which must be, or better still
an imperative which aims unfailingly towards its realization.28
Without some appreciation of Giovanni Gentile’s philosophy of

Actualism, of which Maggiore was obviously an adept, passages such as
the one above are unlikely to have much meaning, or even to make
sense at all. Maggiore, writing in 1939, was not talking about myth as a
form of coercion or consensus building. It was both something more
complex and more profoundly simple: it was the bedrock of ‘common-
sense’. David D. Roberts, in an admonition to some cultural historians,
has written:
Myth is especially tricky, because even Sorel’s concept is widely

misread as a manipulative notion, whereas for Sorel it entailed a
kind of primitivism: bound up with pre-rational commitment
and belief, myth could only well up from below. Familiar though
it is, the notion of elites consciously using myths to mobilize
masses was absolutely antithetical to Sorel’s notion. […] To be
sure, the Sorelian idea could be taken from its original context to
stimulate others – Mussolini, for example – to make manipula-
tive use of myth. But the distinction is important to any attempt
to understand the connection between intellectual innovation
and subsequent political departures. 29
This is a valid distinction, but while there might be heuristic value in

interpreting the attack on the Avanti! offices as an example of Sorelian
myth, of commonsense in action, it is also true that this direct action
had been whipped up by manipulative rhetoric and that the mytho-
logizing accounts of it, such as Marinetti’s, sought to manipulate the
crowd further, inculcating in the Italian masses a spirit of intransi-
gence. Embracing a myth must constitute an act of faith, and so scepti-
cism, irony, satire and dissent had no place in the official vision of
Fascist culture. In Mussolini’s own contemptuous dictum, which effec-
tively personifies a scapegoat of scepticism and dissent: ‘I prefer the
squadrista who takes decisive action, to the doddering professor’.30 The
satirist was even less welcome.
Censorship and surveillance
The work of many recent scholars has dealt with the various uses of
culture in the forging and sustaining of a Fascist identity for the Italian
masses. Chief among these has been Emilio Gentile, distinguished ex-
student of De Felice, who has argued consistently over the last 30 years
for Fascism’s being an attempt at anthropological revolution, a forging
of the new man, and perhaps even the new woman (though she was
rarely at the forefront of attention). Gentile has asserted that:
The regeneration of Italians was, for Mussolini, a genuine obsession

that accompanied him until the collapse of the regime. He saw the
anthropological revolution as a personal contest between himself
and the Italian people, whom he held in rather low esteem.31
According to this view, Fascism’s ‘totalitarian pedagogy, its propa-

ganda, its educational monopoly over the young generations, its mania
for a capillary organization through which to organize Italians, its rites,
its parades, symbols and style of behaviour, as well as its racism, anti-
Semitism, social reform, and anti-bourgeois campaign’, even the
Second World War itself were a part of the projected, and ultimately
failed anthropological revolution.
Well perhaps they were. The problem with intentions is that they are
most readily measured in the actions which follow from them, and
actions may be open to more than one interpretation. Gentile is cer-
tainly no apologist for the regime, but a concentration on nebulous
intentions, and a willingness to suspend disbelief, and take Fascist texts
at face value may be a dangerous approach to evaluating the historical
Introduction 13
record. To be fair to Gentile he has also accepted in his writings that

the rhetoric of Fascism was as successful as it was because it was under-
pinned and enforced by its dark side. This dark side was constituted by
an organized structure of state power, guided by a set of rational, sober,
cynical and often brutal policies, implemented by the security forces,
the civil service, a tightly-regulated media industry and the school
system, as well as a network of spies, informers, paramilitaries and part-
time censors. It is this dark side which we will explore in the chapters
which follow, rather than the positive side of spectacle, parades,
‘Fascist Saturdays’ and theatre for the masses. Before that we need to
clarify what we intend by the term ‘censorship’.
On one level, censorship was the instinctive reaction of the squadristi
after their founding meeting in Piazza San Sepolcro, as we have seen,
but systematic studies of its operation have been limited mainly either
to literary culture or to military and civilian correspondence. These are
clearly important spheres of activity but censorship had wider
ramifications, and more subtle levels of power, which crossed govern-
ment ministries and which had effects on virtually every sector of the
population, whether or not the people were aware of them. The
opening of archives and the deaths of just about all those involved in
the murky world of censorship and espionage, taken together, allow us
a broader and quite dispassionate view in order to understand the
policy and operation of censorship in Italian Fascism.
Prima facie, censorship is an instrument of suppression, and as I have
already indicated, it certainly is not unique to totalitarian states. Postal
censorship was introduced in twentieth-century Italy by a Liberal gov-
ernment, using a royal decree (regio decreto no. 689) during the Great
War on 23 May 1915. That decree had not been repealed when
Mussolini came to power seven and a half years later.32 According to a
modification made in July 1915, civil censorship had been dropped
except in areas which were considered subversive. The boundaries of
these ambiguous areas were to widen considerably under Fascism, as
we will see. In essence though, this royal decree ushered in an instru-
ment for dealing with military correspondence, and it ran in parallel
with similar provisions in the other belligerent state armies. What was
its purpose?
At its crudest, military censorship was of course a repressive instru-
ment. Its intention was to prevent soldiers, wittingly or otherwise,
sending home from the front scraps of information which might com-
promise military operations. Words or larger parts of letters might be
blacked out by the censor before the message could be delivered. In
more extreme situations a letter might be suppressed altogether. This

is common practice in every state during times of war. Censorship of
this kind can be judged successful if information is kept from people.
The more that can be hidden away, the better. It would be reasonable
to call this preventive censorship. Numerous examples will follow in this
book. It would later be extended to cutting telephone lines and then
to jamming foreign radio stations and cutting or banning foreign
films. Even in advanced western democracies, we are familiar with the
beeping out of unacceptable language on radio and television broad-
casts. Until relatively recently, the voices of members of a proscribed
organization could not be heard on British or Irish radio and televi-
sion. Their words had to be dubbed.
But there is more to censorship than its preventive function. In Italy,
phone taps were authorized as early as 1903 by a Giolitti government.
A state, once it has developed the habit of snooping on its people, can
use the intelligence it gathers at its listening stations to gauge the
morale of its troops, or in the case of civilian censorship, the morale
of its subjects or citizens, as well as keeping tabs on where they are
and what they are getting up to. Mussolini’s state machinery was
engaged in an increasingly sophisticated, intrusive and secretive prac-
tice of informative censorship from within days of his coming to
power, in what was still nominally a Liberal administration rather
than the totalitarian one which he was bent on establishing. Informa-
tive censorship is more qualitative than quantitative and can provide
an evidence base on which to formulate social or cultural policy, or
track down ‘subversives’. As Rizzi has put it:
Censorship is not just repression and a prohibition on speech,

it also produces knowledge, a knowledge built up by means of a
minute examination of everything written by the military and civil-
ian population. Censorship is not just the suppressing of dangerous
information which is essential to the safe-keeping of military secrets
or harmful to public spirit, it also collects all that information on
the morale, on the political sympathies and on the living conditions
of the military and civilian population which is useful to those in
power to enable them to control the home front and the soldiers
under arms.33
This qualitative interpretation of censorship came to be used by

the Fascist state and in its totalitarian aspirations, as did its preventive
interpretation.
Introduction 15
The third strand of censorship is the productive one, in which censor-

ship can be seen (or perhaps to put it better, cannot be seen, except by
those trained to find it) in the construction of positive messages. In
other words, productive censorship is that which cannot be seen but
which gives shape to presentations of the duce, or the Italian landscape
or stories in the news. It can be detected in Istituto Luce newsreels, in the
telefoni bianchi films of the 1930s, and very graphically in suppressed
images of Mussolini, recently published by Mimmo Franzinelli and
Emanuele Valerio Marino in Il duce proibito (2003).34 In this function,
censorship goes hand in hand with propaganda.
The powers of extensive censorship, however, gave the Fascist regime
a novel problem to resolve in the early 1930s, the ‘years of consensus’.
On the one hand they wanted to maintain the firm grip of control
they had established over a decade in power on setting the political
agenda in the domestic press through censorship. On the other, they
wanted a differentiated domestic press, a scenario in which Italian
newspapers maintained distinct identities, while retailing substantially
the same censored news and uncritical editorial interpretation, so as to
reinforce a commonsense Fascist view of the world.
Methodologies and intentions
How then does ‘commonsense’ relate to censorship and propaganda?

Commonsense is more a matter of culture than of politics, and it is
likely to be dominated by media presentation and opinion-making in
all its varied forms, rather than by open and rational political debate.
The question of who controls the media and who sets its agenda is of
course a political one. It applies to other opinion formers too, such as
the churches, schools, youth organizations, popular entertainers and
others. So culture, power, and politics interact on various levels.
Mussolini was helped to power because the king and enough of his
subjects had little faith in democracy. The political culture of the day
rejected democracy with the failed entity of Liberal Italy.
Recent work on Italian Fascism has concerned itself with the question
of whether the myths of culture or of politics should be given primacy
in its interpretation. This debate, which has widened out to embrace art
historians, literary and cultural historians, geographers and anthropo-
logists, has helped to deepen our understanding of sets of assumptions,
conscious or otherwise, which were present in Italian society in the
1920s and 1930s. From the work of cultural historians, guiding theories
have emerged which involve the ritualization, aestheticization and
‘sacralization’ of power. Following in the wake of Emilio Gentile there

are stimulating North-American cultural historians, such as Ruth Ben-
Ghiat, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Marla Stone, Jeffrey T. Schnapp,
Emily Braun and Mabel Berezin who have shed important light on
these processes.35 This has proved an extremely fruitful model for cul-
tural historians working in related disciplines as well as for more
traditional historians who have claimed the primacy of culture over pol-
itics in the study of Fascism.36 These scholars have examined the con-
struction of the sacralized state in the terms Fascism’s own rhetoric:
re-born phoenix-like out of the ashes of the Great War, and ritualized
by religious discourse and public spectacle.
Another related strand of recent work looks at the construction of
masculinity. A seminal text here is Luisa Passerini’s Mussolini immaginario
(1991) and there are several North-American Italianists working in this
area such as Karen Pinkus and Barbara Spackman, following in the wider
European traditions of George L. Mosse and Klaus Theweleit.37 These
latter scholars have dealt more with Germany than with Italy of course,
and in the Germanic context Mosse has argued that in the 1930s
‘respectability provided society with an essential cohesion that was as
important in the perceptions of men and women as any economic or
political interests’.38 In this case, to codify ‘respectability’, nationalism
and sexuality combined to generate a virulent racist mix of anti-
Semitism and homophobia. Respectability for Italian Fascists may have
assumed some slightly different forms but a conception of the body was
central to both the German and the Italian interpretations, and we will
pursue this point further in a later chapter.
The background context to the consensus argument put forward by
De Felice, Cannistraro and others is Italian imperial expansion in the
1930s. This pits Fascist ideological constructs of ideal manliness and
virility against representation of its opposite, or Other, that is to say
Black Africa, regarded as poor, backward and alien. These various
images, particularly regarding the covering or disclosure of nakedness,
involve evaluation of the messages encoded in those representations in
terms of intention, category of text, technological medium, media lan-
guage and demonstrable or likely audience response. Censorship and
propaganda are inextricably linked to such presentations.
Mussolini (or perhaps it was his tame philosopher Giovanni Gentile)
wrote in the Dottrina del Fascismo (1932) in the Enciclopedia italiana
that:
For Fascism, the push towards empire, national expansion, is a

manifestation of vitality. Its contrary, the stay-at-home, is a sign of
Introduction 17
decadence: peoples who rise [sorgono] and rise again [risorgono] are
imperialist, peoples who die, renounce life.39
Consciously implying an affiliation with the Risorgimento in his use

of verbs, Mussolini was enunciating a variation on his familiar theme
of virility, which was, according to Barbara Spackman not simply one
of many Fascist qualities:
The cults of youth, of duty, of sacrifice and heroic virtues, of

strength and stamina, of obedience and authority, and physical
strength and sexual potency that characterize Fascism [were] all
inflections of the master term virility.40
We recognize in that characterization the various still photographs,

paintings and drawings of Mussolini himself as hero, ‘the invincible
Man’, to cite another recent commentator who in turn is quoting
Giuseppe Prezzolini.41 Prezzolini was writing in 1913, almost a decade
before Fascism found itself in power, and even before the beginning of
the Great War, indicating that the myth of Mussolini as redemptive
hero had long roots. Describing developments of a decade later Emily
Braun has written of Mario Sironi’s early 1920s representations of
Mussolini that:
In the early twenties, Sironi still depicts Mussolini as an earthbound

politician in Blackshirt garb or parliamentary suit; yet already
at work are the myth of his more than human prowess and the
emphasis on physical might in the achievement of his aims.
Mussolini’s malleable face – the exaggerated protrusion of the jaw
and furrowed brow – could border on the grotesque, making him
easy game for the infamous anti-Fascist caricatures by Gabriele
Galantara (1865–1937) in the pages of L’Asino and Il Becco giallo. By
contrast, Sironi pictures the middle-aged future dictator with a
youthful visage, his features bearing a fearful symmetry.42
Clearly we could multiply the illustrations of this point almost to

infinity of Mussolini once he had become the duce. The object of the
exercise is to demonstrate the power of charisma in the presentation
of an image of power as a phenomenon of nature, or a matter of
commonsense.43
Mussolini had imbibed Max Weber’s concept of charisma, probably
not directly, in his disordered reading during the early decades of the
twentieth century. According to this concept, the charisma of political
(or religious) leadership is to be found either in the outstanding indi-

vidual or in the office of leadership. Mussolini’s supporters and cham-
pions actively sought to muddy that distinction and to identify in his
own person the individual and the role, transforming the duce into a
myth: the myth of the Strong Man, the Maciste of ‘real life’ which we
find in the newsreels. Indeed, the mythology of the Man is something
which Mussolini appears to have convinced even himself to take at
face value. Aquarone cited a 1943 letter from the duce, before 25 July,
in which we read of what he regards as his titanic struggle with inferior
material:
If you could only imagine the effort it has cost me, this searching for
balance and compromise in order to avoid collisions between antago-
nistic influences which rub shoulders, diffident towards each other:
Party, King, Vatican, Army, Militia, prefects, provincial party secre-
taries, Ministers, the ras of the Confederations and huge monopolistic
interests! You would understand just what are the indigestions of
totalitarianism. We have not succeeded in melting down that legacy
(asse ereditario) which I had to take on in 1922, without the benefit of
an inventory. A pathological tissue holding together the traditional
and contingent deficiencies of this great little Italian people, (questo
grande piccolissimo popolo italiano), which a tenacious therapy of
twenty years has managed to modify only on the surface.44
Here we have the Fascist refrain, derived from Le Bon, of the feminized
masses being unworthy of their selfless, generous and paternal Dux. This
is the ideological justification which required on the one hand a mystify-
ing public synthesis of ritual, spectacle and entertainment, and on the
other a cynical, secretive, clear-sighted and centralized administration,
run through the Ministry of the Interior.
But the Ministry of the Interior, while centrally important, was just
one of five ministries which dealt with censorship, and this allowed for
further nuances to what was never a monolithic concept of ‘Fascist
censorship’. The other ministries involved were the Ministry for
Popular Culture (formerly the Press Office of the President of the
Council of Ministers, the Under-Secretariat for Press and Propaganda
and the Ministry for Press and Propaganda), the Ministry for Foreign
Affairs (Ministero degli Affari Esteri), the Ministry for Posts and
Telegraphs, the Ministry of Finance. To these should be added the pre-
fects who had devolved executive powers on censorship, especially
censorship of newspapers and public spectacle, not to mention the mil-
Introduction 19
itary censorship of the armed forces. Therefore in theory, and often in

practice, different policy lines could be promoted by different min-
istries and could be variously implemented at local level, at the discre-
tion of the prefects. The creation of the Under-Secretariat for Press and
Propaganda (later Minculpop) in 1934, the first fiefdom of Galeazzo
Ciano, brought a new level of co-ordination to censorship policy and
implementation, but anomalies persisted right up to 1943.
This book differs from recent studies which have explored Fascist
spectacle, ritual, myth, and cultural policy. I set out instead to triangu-
late three constituencies: (1) the rarefied sphere of cultural policy (the
world of Giovanni Gentile, of Alfredo Rocco, of Giuseppe Bottai, of
Galeazzo Ciano and Mussolini himself); (2) the world of its implemen-
tation, by prefects, secret policemen, ex-squadristi, part-time censors,
informers, schoolteachers, editors, writers, publishers, booksellers,
librarians, and various agents of the state; and (3) those at the sharp end
of the procedures (opposition politicians and newspapers, prominent
dissident individuals, ordinary men and women, writers, foreigners,
black Africans, individual Jews and later entire Jewish communities).
The book seeks to understand the motivations and intentions of policy
and to examine the procedures of its implementation, but crucially this
includes a study of its consequences, both intended and unintended. As
all or virtually all the protagonists are now dead, even the lowliest of
them, I make no direct use of interviews or oral history, the usual modus
operandi of triangulation. Instead, I draw on the archival sources already
mentioned as well as documentary evidence which has long been in the
public domain.45
If there is a unifying thread running through the various constituen-
cies which made up Fascism, whether Futurists, arditi, squadristi, ex-
Anarchists, Corporativists, Nationalists, Syndicalists, Racists, Patriots,
Right-Wing Catholics or mere opportunists, it is the authoritarian
instinct to silence opposition. This instinct drives policy through the
ventennio but it was evident in Italian governance well before Mussolini
came to power, as we shall see. The instinct, unlike its counterpart in
Nazi Germany, was usually moderated by political expediency and
cunning. Studies of Fascist censorship such as Giorgio Fabre’s ground-
breaking L’Elenco, tend to deal with the period from 1934 to 1943. My
book demonstrates how the impulse to suppress opposition, evident as
early as 1919, developed into a series of policies, provisions and proce-
dures designed to implement the Fascists’ totalitarian vision of Italian
society. Censorship was in place well before 1934 although policy
underwent one mutation that spring and another one in 1938.
The chapters which follow address different aspects of Fascist censor-

ship. I will begin by exploring the place of censorship in the daily life
of the regime through the initial consolidation of power. I then move
on to the shaping of young identities through reform of the school
system. Next comes regulation of the news in the print media, fol-
lowed by a chapter on the shaping of the imagination through censor-
ship of performers, writers and films and the presentation of the cult of
the leader in the context of race and cultural identity. After that there
is a study of the culture wars between the intellectual factions. This is
followed by an account of the effects of censorship and surveillance on
private individuals. The unifying thread is provided by an interroga-
tion of the concepts of commonsense, consensus, negotiation, and
mystification.
2
Consolidating Power and Silencing
Opposition
Dismantling the Liberal state
Mussolini came to power in a bloodless coup, without the need for any
clearly-articulated censorship policy. Three years earlier, however,
Fascists of the First Hour, less than a month after their meeting
at Piazza San Sepolcro on 19 March 1919, had committed their first
symbolic act, and that was a direct-action approach to censorship: the
effective destruction of the newspaper offices of Avanti!, the Socialist
newspaper which Mussolini himself had edited until 1915. This was a
symbolic act because it represented an attack on the freedom of the
press but the symbolism was secondary to practical objectives on the
part of a motley crew of Arditi, demobilized veterans of the Great War,
Futurists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Emilio Settimelli and
erstwhile Anarchists. These latter constituencies were using the very
methods of violent repression on their Socialist adversaries which had
previously been used against them by agents of the state not many
years before. It did not do them much good at the polls in 1919, the
first Italian election with near-universal suffrage. The Socialists and the
Partito popolare both emerged with far more votes than the Fascists, but
failed to agree a compromise coalition government, leaving the reins of
power precariously in the hands of the old guard of pre-war Liberal
Italy, who proved sitting-duck targets for revolutionary rhetoric.
D’Annunzio was the first to batter the door of Liberal Italy by defiantly
leading his Arditi into the city of Fiume, given up by the Italian govern-
ment at Versailles, despite a secret deal done in London which the US
president Woodrow Wilson refused to accept.
Next came the Fascists and the biennio rosso, the two years dominated
by strikes and fears of a Bolshevik revolution in Italy. An important
21
point about the squadristi smashing up of the Avanti! offices, however, is

that it probably was an example of Sorelian myth in action. It was not
the programmatic act of a totalitarian state, because that state had not
come into existence and indeed Mussolini had not yet coined the term
‘totalitarian’. The violence came from below, giving vent to a sense of
moral outrage:
Our violence is different in its intention from that of the others:

theirs is simple delinquency. Our people face danger openly;
the others lie in wait to ambush and murder. We are always fired up
by a generous spirit and we do not forget the great moral law of
humanity; they are guilty of barbarous cruelty. […] Violence for us
is not a system, but a necessary means imposed on us by our adver-
saries, and we use it only to counter their violence. We are always
ready to disarm and to make peace, as soon as the other side runs up
the white flag.1
To most of us, this is an assault on commonly-accepted meanings of

words and a case of bad faith or extreme self-delusion, which is not to
say, by any means, that the squadristi were the only source of violence
in Italy during the biennio rosso. There were street-fighting men who
felt drawn in almost equal measure to direct action inspired by both
Left and Right. It produced front-page news. Fascism emerged out of
violent disorder, with Marinetti and the Futurists fanning the flames,
but the ideological core had its roots not only in street fighting but also
in revolutionary syndicalism. And the chief proponent of syndicalism,
writing in 1922, was scathing about a distinctive, violent group of
Fascists:
They have joined up with Fascism just as yesterday they were

Bolsheviks and tomorrow they will join some other movement which
gives free rein to their antisocial tendencies: mercenary rapaciousness,
spirit of adventurism or hope of easy success.2
This is a very different nuance of Fascism from that proposed by the

adepts of castor oil and the manganello, or big stick. If Fascism had
been nothing more than violent repression it would not have endured
for two decades. De Ambris’ critique, however, is not inconsistent with
the aspiration to censor the expression of opposition.
Once in power Mussolini knew that he had to moderate squadrista
violence in order to establish himself by gaining acceptance and
Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 23
respectability. Fascist violence had to be removed from the newspaper

headlines in the interests of this normalization. Mussolini was a
pragmatist. He knew that one way to do this was to put down Fascist
violence. But that was a risky strategy. Would the genie return so
readily to the bottle? The other strategy was to control the newspaper
reporting. Censorship was one means to the latter end. The challenge
Mussolini faced was to develop and implement policies which would
protect his authority and undermine that of his opponents, and those
opponents were to be found across the political, economic and cultural
spectra: all of them making use of the press. In the event he saw a way
to combine the two strategies, developing policies which tended to
avoid violence (while maintaining a constant level of threat), and to
present himself as the epitome of rugged commonsense and pragma-
tism, and the defender of Italian society against the extremists of what-
ever faction: ‘Extremism in the middle’, in Seymour Martin Lipset’s
memorable characterization of Fascism.3 Well before Italian Fascism set
out to become ‘totalitarian’, Mussolini sought to capture the middle
ground of ‘commonsense’ by means of negotiation, intimidation or
use of the calculated risk.
Part of the reason why Mussolini came to power without a clear cen-
sorship plan of action was that in October 1922 there was virtually no
culture of mass communications in the country. Historically, Italy had
high levels of illiteracy, especially in the south, and the Liberal regime
had done little to improve public education. For that reason, there was
a very limited market for print culture of any kind, and cinema was not
yet a mass medium, being largely confined to the urban wealthy. Such
national newspapers as did exist – chief among them Il Corriere della
Sera in Milan and La Stampa in Turin – were written in a literary and
rhetorical style of Italian which was far removed from the linguistic
experience of most Italians. Therefore newspapers were largely the pre-
serve of the ruling classes and they sold no more than a few million
copies per day. A further reason for the weak presence of the Italian
press was that Italy had a very limited rate of participation in politics
and political debate, with no significant public commitment to demo-
cracy and the idea of a free press.4 There was no public outcry when
Mussolini obtained from the King a Royal Decree on 15 July 1923
which limited the power of the press. At first he made no use of this
power but a law had replaced direct action.
The later totalitarian ambitions which required consensus-building
measures to win over the intellectuals and the people have been studied
in great detail in recent years.5 The ambition to control ‘commonsense’
has usually been studied in terms of the overt propaganda produced or

sponsored by the regime.6 That is certainly an important aspect of it,
although there is obviously more to achieving an anthropological revo-
lution than effective propaganda. The dark side of the anthropological
revolution included censorship which the regime came to use as a tool
to implement a number of its cultural policies, and the main players
were doing this long before the attempted fascistization of intellectuals
in the early 1930s. Censorship has seen less extensive study than propa-
ganda and ideology, at least until quite recently.
It is important to bear in mind, however, that Mussolini and his
Fascists did not invent either censorship or propaganda in Italy. Both
had a very long history on the peninsula. Preventive censorship had
been practised extensively by the Catholic Church, especially from the
Council of Trent onwards when the combination of reform and the
printing press threatened its hegemony in Christendom. In secular terms
King Carlo Alberto’s pre-Unification edict on the press of 26 March 1848
remained in place until the Fascist laws of 1923–25. Within that legisla-
tive context Francesco Crispi had exercised political influence over the
press as President of the Council of Ministers.7 In 1898 he had required
prefects to keep a register and make quarterly reports on all local period-
icals, in which they were to supply details of political leanings, the
interests the papers represented, the circles and associations with which
they were connected and the sources of their funding.8 Tame newspapers
could expect to receive modest subsidies of secret funds through the
offices of the prefects. Opposition papers knew there was a line across
which it was imprudent to tread, on pain of sequestration, which
brought obvious financial penalties and encouraged a spirit of self-
censorship, of going with the flow. Within a decade of Crispi’s adminis-
trative provision Giovanni Giolitti introduced law no. 278 of 28 June
1906 which liberalized Italian journalism by abolishing preventive
sequestration (sequestro preventivo); but only after he had authorized a
system of phone tapping.
When Italy entered the Great War, however, in common with all
other belligerent states, tighter censorship was introduced. Law no. 273
of 21 March 1915 required newspapers to suppress any news concern-
ing defence of the realm. The next week (28 March 1915) a specific
period was set during which newspapers could not publish reports con-
cerning the armed forces. Two months later, law no. 675 (23 May
1915) banned publication of any information relating to the military.
In addition, prefects were again given a free rein to impose a sort of
censura preventiva on publishers and editors, who had to submit their
typeset newspaper one hour before publication.9 In such circum-

stances, preventive censorship had financial teeth. Antonio Salandra,
the President of the Council of Ministers, issued a secret circular to pre-
fects, requiring them to monitor the local press, just as Crispi had done
almost 20 years before, and also authorizing a wider use of phone taps.
Some of the more overt censorship of newspapers was lifted at the end
of the Great War but local papers continued to be subject to the same
restrictive measures on the part of prefects. Even the editors of papers
with national circulation such as Il Corriere della Sera (in Milan), Avanti!
(also in Milan) and Il Roma (in Rome) all complained of continuing
phone taps. Local papers which supported the government line contin-
ued to be subsidized through the use of secret funds. The purpose of
such funding was quite blatantly to influence public opinion at local
and regional level by setting the news agenda. The Caporetto crisis in
1917 ushered in a short-lived, but generously funded, Under-Secretariat
for Propaganda abroad and for the Press, which reported directly to the
new prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando.10 This would become
an important precedent for Mussolini as he set out to dismantle the
Liberal state in the following decade.
While he made play of the rhetoric of sweeping away antiquated
laws and customs, a rhetoric inherited from the trenches, Mussolini’s
actual practice was more subtle and cunning, and quite distinct from
that rhetoric. He was careful to take over successful administrative
procedures and modify them to his own ends. Given that he had to
work with the legal code, civil service and security forces of the prev-
ious administration, it could hardly have been otherwise. His first
instinct was to put trusted followers into key posts and his first initia-
tive was to gather information rather than to censor, although the
instrument he chose lent itself to both activities. Phone taps were
the domain of Servizio speciale riservato (SSR), which reported to the
Council of Ministers. According to the procedures laid down by
Giolitti’s government in 1903, requests for a phone tap came from
the Chief of Police, only, on a proforma.11 Mussolini, as President of
the Council of Ministers, on 27 January 1923 – at that point head of
a democratically-elected government – specified that transcripts of all
intercepted calls were to be delivered to him alone, and no other
copies were to be kept.12 The SSR was based in the Ministry of the
Interior, one of the key ministries over which Mussolini presided for
most of the ventennio. The service had been expanded during the First
World War to facilitate counter-espionage and was also applied to
private citizens.
Censorship was added to the simple phone tap by giving operators

the power to break the connection. Under Mussolini, the SSR was
transferred within the Ministry of the Interior to the Directorate
General of Public Security (Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza –
DGPS), by means of Royal Decree Law 2 July 1925, no. 1205.13 The
Rocco laws of 1926, taking account of anti-Fascist activity abroad,
extended the provision to set up monitoring offices in cities from
which the police could eavesdrop on border areas and international
lines. Offices were instituted in Turin, Milan, Genoa, San Remo, Trieste
and Fiume. Mussolini took personal charge of appointing the Head of
the SSR in 1933. Up until 1925, the SSR had tapped no more than 50
lines. Once it moved to the DGPS this increased to 90 in 1926, going
up to 560 with the application of new, American, technology. By 1938
the SSR maintained 462 stenographers, 200 of them based in Rome.
Two thirds of these had a passive knowledge of at least one other
modern language. The Rome office could monitor over 1,000 city lines
and 400 inter-urban or international lines. In March 1942 the govern-
ment ordered an extension of the monitoring and censorship service to
all major towns in the provinces.
Mussolini remained a newspaper man for most of his adult life.
Famously he drew no salary from the state, but supported himself,
his family and his mistresses by his royalties, his journalism and his
editorship of Il Popolo d’Italia. After he transferred to Rome in late
1922, his brother Arnaldo, until his death in 1931, continued to run
the family newspaper in Milan, and the brothers spoke on the tele-
phone every evening to decide on the details of the following day’s
edition. As a journalist and editor, Mussolini had a practical know-
ledge of the print media which was unique for a prime minister in
1922. He understood the power of the press and its capacity to set the
news agenda and manipulate public opinion. His strategy for media
control, which became ever tighter over the 20 years, took things
back to first principles. He took effective charge of the source of news
by ensuring he had his man in charge of the Agenzia Stefani, which
although nominally a private company, became the de facto state
news agency. He set about weakening the independence of rival
newspapers, both national and local, and he increased discretionary
powers in relation to censorship.
Mussolini’s media policy also led to some legislative provisions.
Royal Decree Law of 15 July 1923, his first summer in power, granted
to prefects ‘the power to issue a warning to the editor of any news-
paper or periodic publication which may have printed news of public
disorder or which may have excited class hatred or disobedience of the

laws’.14 Article 3 of Royal Decree Law no. 3299 gave prefects the power
to revoke the editor’s licence. Furthermore the prefect could refuse to
recognize a new editor, which in effect would mean the death of the
publication. For almost a year, however, Mussolini did not make
formal use of this statutory instrument, although the threat of it hung
over editors and newspaper proprietors, and that threat was no less real
than the occasional visits of groups of armed squadristi, especially to
provincial newspaper offices of limited means. Thus the police had the
power to sack newspaper editors and to sequester newspapers and peri-
odicals if they published:
False or tendentious news, injurious to the government’s foreign

policy or to the reputation of the nation, causing unjustified alarm
among the population, or liable to disturb public order, or if they
incited to class struggle or civil disobedience, undermined discipline
in the public services, favoured foreign states or companies at Italy’s
expense, or calumniated the king, the royal family, the pope, the
state religion, state institutions or friendly powers.15
In the changed political circumstances after October 1922, the com-

petition between local newspapers drove some of them out of business
in a Darwinian struggle for market share: in Trieste Il Piccolo pro-
claimed its adherence to Fascism on its mast from 1923 and its rival, La
Nazione went out of business altogether. The police were also the pro-
prietors’ defence against gangs of squadristi. But Mussolini encouraged
restraint in the ambiguous manner that characterized Italian Fascism.
Here was an extremely-repressive instrument dressed up as common-
sense and patriotism. Who could reasonably object to a government
defending the monarchy or the pope from calumny? To object would
be to court subversion and to declare oneself fair game for the forces of
law and order, in the public perception, and commonsense might also
regard such subversives as fair game for gangs of squadristi in Fiat 18 BL
trucks with large clubs (manganelli).
Even before the Royal Decree of July 1923, however, and therefore
under Liberal legislation, the will of an individual prefect or questore
was sufficient to close a newspaper. For example the communist weekly
newspaper L’Avanguardia was suppressed daily from 15 February to
15 March 1923 without any formal order, and on the basis of spurious
technicalities.16 Recognizing inconsistencies in practice, Mussolini
moved on 9 August 1923 by ministerial decree to make the Press Office
(Ufficio Stampa) report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office (Presidenza

del Consiglio), i.e., directly responsible to him. As Prime Minister and
Minister of the Interior, he could call upon the resources and expertise of
the Press Office and the DGPS, led by his Chief of Police, who managed
the prefects and questors.
The kidnap and murder of Giacomo Matteotti in summer 1924,
however, was to have important and enduring consequences for both
the Press Office and Mussolini’s direct control over the Ministry of the
Interior. Matteotti’s death spelled the end of liberal Italy and the
demise of the free press for a generation.
The Press Office
Galeazzo Ciano’s Italian biographer Giordano Bruno Guerri claims

that Mussolini was not a nepotist, ‘or at least not excessively nepo-
tist’ in his distribution of posts and sinecures.17 It is nonetheless true
that his brother Arnaldo and nephew Vito, son-in-law (Ciano) and
his own son Vittorio all occupied significant positions respectively
within the family newspaper, the government Press Office and, even-
tually, the nationalized film industry. He also surrounded himself, in
the manner of a mafia boss, with men who had demonstrated their
loyalty in his rise to power, and he relied on them every bit as much
as on family members in the promotion of his political vision.
Nonetheless, he kept files on their various weaknesses and misde-
meanours. When they fell from grace there were few safety nets if he
wanted to destroy them. Once in office as President of the Council of
Ministers, according to Cannistraro, it was through the Press Office
that Mussolini formulated that complex and more or less coherent
corpus of propagandistic themes which he needed for his first decade
in power.18
With his brother Arnaldo safely in charge of the family newspaper,
Il Popolo d’Italia, he appointed Cesare Rossi as his Press Officer. Rossi
had passed through the ranks of Socialism and syndicalism, and had
been war correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia. He had also been with
Mussolini at Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919. In late 1922 Rossi
was one of Mussolini’s closest advisors and an important figure in
his first administration. Under the direction of Rossi the Press Office
was transformed from a simple channel of government communica-
tion into an instrument for suppressing anti-Fascist opinion and
dissent. Its main brief at this early stage, however, was to monitor
and comment on all Italian and foreign newspapers. Rossi, from the
Press Office, filed regular reports on press coverage. The following is

one example of many:
Il Mondo this evening on its front page and in the Cronaca section
continues its campaign to damage the well-deserved success of the
Fascist list. It makes out that the Italian Constitution and tradition
have been overturned and that the Government, fearing the moral
inferiority in which it would have found itself if it had been limited
to the minimum of the votes laid down by the law, in order to gain
more votes has turned a blind eye to violent intimidation in very
many cases. […] You can easily imagine that in the next few days
the columns of Il Mondo will be filled with stories of our violent acts.
[…] La Voce Repubblicana on its front page, over six columns talks
about victorious demonstrations throughout Italy despite the
violent atmosphere in which the elections took place. […] All the
other papers, including Il Giornale d’Italia, give great weight to
the victory illustrating the disappointment of the opposition. Don
Sturzo’s Il Popolo in an editorial titled ‘Resistenza popolare’ talks
about violence, vote rigging, mystification and conspiracies, etc,
promising to continue its opposition.19
Thus the Press Office was the main source of media intelligence,
brought directly to the duce and not shared with the prefects. The pre-
fects, on the other hand, were usually the ones who ordered the
sequestrations, against informal criteria such as the following:
I have received news of the imminent publication of issue 3 of

La Riscossa dei giovani repubblicani […]. A previous issue of this
paper contained a lively protest against the anniversary of the
Fascist government’s ascent to power and it was my view that the
distribution of this newspaper would constitute a grave threat to
public order, re-igniting hatred and dissention […] so I proceeded,
without delay, to the sequestration of all copies as well as the
typographic plates.20
In this phase, prefects were required to keep more detailed records of

provincial newspapers and magazines, especially in relation to their
funding. Mussolini knew from experience that newspapers needed
funds and expensive equipment in order to operate.21 Meanwhile
squadrista direct action continued against printing presses, distribution
points and sales outlets.
Mussolini’s double track of intelligence, at the centre and from the

periphery, allowed him to intervene directly with the prefects and send
out orders from the centre for immediate implementation, rather than
trusting to the prefects’ initiative. Examples include the following
instruction from Mussolini to the prefect of Palermo:
Make it known to the executive of the Palermo Press Association

that the newspaper Babbio has been shamefully abusing the freedom
of the press by insulting members of the Fascist government in the
most vulgar manner. Let it be known that the Blackshirt Revolution
does not allow insult and mockery to go unpunished. […] I leave it
up to your discretion whether or not to suppress this newspaper but
make sure the editor changes his attitude, otherwise the suspension
which I have ordered personally will become definitive.22
Such examples fuelled the myth of his omniscience.

The official response to the Matteotti crisis and the Aventine
Secession drove a new policy initiative and some changes in personnel.
On 8 July 1924 the government approved an edict which brought into
force the Press Law of 15 July 1923. On 10 July 1924, by means of a
new decree law, Mussolini devolved to prefects the powers to sequester
any newspaper or periodical without warning.23 Luigi Federzoni had by
this stage replaced Mussolini as Minister of the Interior. Rossi, tainted
with involvement in the Matteotti abduction and murder, was replaced
at the Ufficio Stampa by a conservative nobleman Giovanni Capasso
Torre di Pastene, who had not been a Fascist of the First Hour.24 Indeed
he had been personal secretary to Vittorio Scialoja, Liberal Minister of
Foreign Affairs and had been at Versailles for the Treaty negotiations.
As editor of the Corriere italiano, however, he had supported the gov-
ernment through the Matteotti affair. He had an aristocratic pedigree
and he brought respectability and gravitas to the post. His term in
charge was characterized by stability and normalization: he managed a
team of eight which included five journalists. The office was given
enhanced powers, located in the Viminale, headquarters of the
Ministry of the Interior, and encouraged to work more closely with
Federzoni and the prefects, looking after the collection and distribu-
tion of communications and orders to national, regional and local
newspapers. Capasso Torre stepped up monitoring and surveillance of
newspaper reporting. A section was moved from the Ministero degli
Affari Esteri and added to the Ufficio stampa. Personnel in this section
combed the foreign newspapers for coverage of Italian affairs.
Once organized in this centrally-managed structure, the police pro-

ceeded to draw up inventories of all daily and periodical newspapers
for each province. These lists (alphabetical by province, beginning
with Alessandria) included data on sales and political orientation, and
formed the evidence base on which to develop an action plan. This
plan had three principal objectives. The first of these was the stamp-
ing of state authority on the already pliant press, throughout the
kingdom, and especially in the provinces, where because of Italy’s
peculiar history, local papers often had more influence on opinion
than the national dailies such as Mussolini’s own Il Popolo d’Italia. The
second objective was to take effective political control of the non-
Fascist, liberal press and to make sure it did nothing to undermine
the regime. The third objective was the complete elimination of all
opposition newspapers.
The plan had been put into effect in the second half of 1924, culmi-
nating in the governmental crisis at the end of the year when, between
31 December and 1 January 1925 all of the following opposition news-
papers were sequestered: the nationals Il Corriere della Sera, La Stampa,
and L’Avanti!, as well as the locals Il Piccolo, Il Popolo, Il Momento, La
Voce repubblicana and Il Sereno. Federzoni intensified his circulars to
prefects inveighing against newspaper subversion in the form of edito-
rial comment, stories of violence or police heavy-handedness, pho-
tographs of crime scenes and humour, especially satire. He also took a
close interest in the independent news agencies, closing down one
after another until only the Agenzia Stefani was left.
From newspapers and press services, the Ministero dell’Interno
broadened its remit to take on cultural magazines such as Piero
Gobetti’s Rivoluzione liberale, Il Caffè, edited by Riccardo Bauer and
Ferruccio Parri, Lelio Basso’s Pietre, Giovanni Amendola’s Il Mondo and
Non Mollare, the Florentine journal founded and run by Gaetano
Salvemini, Ernesto Rossi, Carlo Rosselli and Nino Traquandi.25 The
combination of legal and illegal raids in the course of 1925 drove
opposition papers and journals into bankruptcy or pushed them
underground.
Not satisfied with that, however the Testo Unico or Consolidation
Law no. 2307 of 31 December 1925 stipulated in article 1, that all
periodical publications had to have a director-in-charge (direttore
responsabile) as opposed to a managing editor (gerente) and in article 7
that all journalists must be registered in the albo professionale dei gior-
nalisti, or professional register of journalists. Journalists could be struck
off this register for two offences as defined by the laws relating to news
media. If the direttore responsabile was struck off, the publication would
remain suspended until such time as the Procurator General, through
the Court of Appeal, agreed to recognize a new managing editor. This
was the legislation which effectively fascistized the Italian press.26
That is not to say there was no opposition at this relatively early
stage of Fascist rule. On 7 May 1925, during the Aventine Secession,
Luigi Albertini, long-time editor of Il Corriere della Sera, delivered a
stinging speech in the Senate attacking press censorship:
Today the press is reduced to saying only what the government and
the prefects allow it to say, like during the war. But this is worse:
because during the war censorship was just, and the censor made
clear the criteria, nearly always obvious ones, which motivated the
Ministry of the Interior. But now it’s different: you take pot luck.
Publications are sequestered not in relation to the general political
criteria but to criteria inspired by personal and interested considera-
tions. The most monstrous prohibitions are imposed. One news-
paper is persecuted more than another. Writers have the torment of
not knowing what they may and may not say, how far they can
push a story or a criticism. And they don’t even know if sequestra-
tion will be the only misfortune which may befall them. No! What
we have learned from the cases of La Voce repubblicana and Il Caffè
as well as the recent business involving Il Mondo, the principal organ
of democratic opposition, is that sequestration can be followed by a
warning which is a prelude to complete suppression of the news-
paper. And this suspension or suppression, ordered not by the
courts but by the Executive, is not only an unprecedented legal and
moral excess, it is also a penalty which strikes the owners, the jour-
nalists, the workers and the staff of the whole newspaper. Where
will it all end?
This extract of Albertini’s speech was printed in Il Corriere della Sera

the following day. The Times editorial commented:
A telegram from our Milan Correspondent to-day shows the shame-

less partisanship with which the decree against the freedom of the
Press is applied where Opposition papers are concerned. A local
journal has been suppressed ‘for having given prominence to the
speech delivered in the Senate by Senator Albertini, by publishing
the full text of it on the front page with prominent headlines.’ […]
The Press decree under which acts like this are done at the arbitrary
discretion of the Prefects is in flagrant contradiction with the Italian

Constitution. Last Friday [8 May 1925] the Minister of the Interior
[Federzoni] repeated the promise that it would be abandoned in
favour of a regular Press law, but he omitted to give any information
as to when this much-needed law would be introduced into the
Legislature.27
The provisions which Federzoni promised did indeed come into

force. The remaining left wing newspapers were suppressed in late
1925 following an attempt on Mussolini’s life. Liberal papers such as Il
Corriere della Sera were not suppressed, though the threat of periodic
sequestration hung over them. They were gradually fascistized. In the
case of Il Corriere della Sera, Ugo Ojetti, a conservative rather than a
subversive, who replaced Albertini’s choice of successor, was ousted
from the editorship to make way for a more committed Fascist.
Conditions were ripe for a culture of self-censorship on the part of
editors.
There was a largely successful strategy to tame foreign newspapers
too by offering cheap wire services to proprietors, which in most
cases overcame the political qualms which some of their journalists
may have entertained.28 (Many of the foreign correspondents,
in any case, were quite bewitched by Mussolini’s law and order
bluster, and wrote eulogies about trains running on time and other
inconsequentials fed to them by the Press Office). A further 1925
law made Mussolini responsible for appointing all editors-in-charge
(direttori responsabili) of Italian newspapers. From his position at the
centre of this web of power would come pressure to eliminate cronaca
nera (crime stories or scandal) from news reporting. Italian readers
(very largely the middle classes) were to have their commonsense
myths reinforced by sober daily news coverage which stressed patri-
otic values. By all accounts they were as impressed as foreign cor-
respondents by the duce. The fact that he survived the Matteotti crisis
indicates that by summer 1924 Mussolini had done just enough to
hang on to power. That gave him confidence.
Policing, censorship and surveillance
The provisions of the 31 December 1925 Consolidation Act (Testo

Unico) established Fascist control over the domestic press. Homo-
geneity of the domestic press, however, was not the most immediate
concern of the newly-proclaimed dictator. Police reform, on the
other hand, was a matter very high on Mussolini’s list of priorities

when he achieved power in 1922. As an agitator and subversive, he
had been well known to the Italian police, and he had more reasons
than most incoming prime ministers for wanting to make radical
changes. But in the early days, he was hampered by budgetary con-
straints which frustrated his desire to have his own police force,
outside of traditional structures.29 He could not afford to recruit paid
informers, so another Royal Decree Law (12 July 1923, n. 1602), pro-
vided for the commissioning of secret agents, what Canali describes
as a CEKA fascista, made up of loyal volunteers, hard men from
among the ex-squadristi. These included the likes of Amerigo Dumini
and Albino Volpi, Matteotti’s assassins. The initiative foundered
with the public outcry over the Matteotti murder in 1924. The posi-
tion of secret agents was regularized by Royal Decree Law 33, Jan
1927, articles 8 and 9. By this point, informers with important polit-
ical information to impart were reporting to the divisione polizia
politica (DPP or POLPOL) of the Directorate General of Public
Security (DGPS).
In September 1926, Arturo Bocchini replaced Francesco Crispo
Moncada, in charge of Public Security, i.e., Chief of Police. This was to
be the beginning of a complete restructuring, and a consolidation of
the dictatorship. Bocchini had been Prefect of Bologna, and had
demonstrated himself favourable towards Fascism. Each morning, from
his appointment as Chief of Police until his death in 1940, he had a
briefing with Mussolini. In November 1926, a further Consolidation
Act (testo unico) of the Laws on Public Security (RDL 6/11/26, n. 1848)
banned political parties other than the PNF (art. 215), set up a Special
Tribunal and Provincial Commissions for the Issuing of Warnings
(ammonizione) and Internal Exile (confino). Warnings and confino were
not Fascist innovations; they had been used in Liberal Italy too. What
the November 1926 law did was to remove the suspect’s right to a trial
or even a hearing. Warning and confino, henceforth, were to be punish-
ments imposed by Mussolini and Bocchini on the basis of reports from
the prefects. This really marked the birth of a police state. Those eligi-
ble for a spell in confino included anyone who:
Engages in activities or shows signs of proposing to engage in activ-

ities aimed at the violent subversion of the political, economic or
social order of the state, or who opposes or obstructs officers of the
state, or who engages in any activity which may damage the
national interest.30
Later that month, Bocchini set up the divisione polizia politica, as the
elite body within the Italian police. RDL 9, January 1927, n. 33, art. 4
began a clear out of questori in order to improve performance. In very
short order seven questori, four vice questori, 20 commissioners, six
adjunct commissioners and five vice commissioners were put out to
grass. Bocchini’s estimation of them was that they were all men who
whether because of their limited intelligence, defeatist attitude, un-
inspiring physical condition or lack of motivation no longer carried
out their work in a satisfactory manner.31
Mussolini elaborated on police reform in his famous Discorso
dell’Ascensione on 26 May 1927, in which he recommended to his audi-
ence that the police should be not merely respected, but honoured.32
Furthermore, he continued:
Ladies and Gentlemen, the time has come to say that mankind
felt the need for order before feeling the need for culture. In a sense
we may say that historically the policeman preceded the teacher
because where there is no armed force, the laws remain a dead
letter. Fascist courage is needed for speaking in these terms.33
Along with the Rocco laws (the 1925 and 1926 Consolidation Acts)
there was also a considerably increased budget: 110 million lire in
1926–27 for the Public Security, 50 million going to the Political
Police, including 33 million lire for informers, i.e., ‘spese per il servizio
di investigazione politica’. This rose to 40 million in 1929–30. Bocchini
had access to very significant resources. According to Carmine Senise’s
subsequent account, when he succeeded Bocchini in 1940, he found in
the safe 21 million lire of secret funds, earmarked for paying inform-
ers.34 Bocchini, like Mussolini, brought in his own men, starting with
Ernesto Gulì, who had worked with him at the Prefecture in Brescia.
Gulì was given expedient promotion in order to bring him to the
appropriate grade, to enable him to take charge of the Political Police.
He also brought in Michelangelo Di Stefano from Bologna. He too pro-
gressed rapidly through the ranks, becoming a questore in October
1933.35
In order to keep their activities as secret as possible, in 1927 the
Political Police set up its own divisional archive of documents, presided
over by Domenico Farese, Tommaso Nesci and Emilio Pellecchia. It is
worth dwelling on the detail of their procedures as the files they kept,
which now reside in the Archivio centrale dello Stato, provide a mass
of primary documents for historians of the period. Farese ran a team of
ten archivists. Originally the Political Police archive was divided into
two parts: (1) ‘materia’ which held reports from informers, divided by
operation and subject (known as ‘categorie’), identified by a letter and
number, and (2) the personal files (known as the ‘fascicoli verdi’) on
individuals who were the objects of informers’ reports. The final part of
the archive consisted of the red files (‘fascicoli rossi’).36 These were per-
sonal dossiers on informers who were recruited directly before October
1938. Each of these informers was identified by a numerical code and
also by the pseudonym used by the informer in his or her report. The
combination of numerical code and pseudonym allowed Farese both to
match the incoming report to the informer’s file and to keep the
informer’s identity secret. The typewritten transcription of the report
would carry only the informer’s number, and would be filed in the
appropriate ‘categoria’ or ‘fascicolo verde’. The original went into the
‘fascicolo rosso’.
At first the ‘fascicolo rosso’ was made up of two sub-files, the ‘sem-
plice’ which contained the original report and the ‘bis’ which included
correspondence with the informer and any other information received
on him or her from other sources. From October 1938, when Guido
Leto joined the service, a third sub-file (‘ter’) was introduced, detailing
the amount of money paid to the informer. The ‘ter’ files are particu-
larly useful as they provide an indication of the scale of resources
which were channelled into surveillance.
Incoming reports were read by the divisional head (‘capo divisione’)
and sent to the copying office, where normally three typewritten
copies were made. More would be made if there were references to
other individuals, in order to supply copies for their files too. The
original document was put in the ‘semplice’ sub-file. Two of the three
copies remained with the capo divisione while Farese wrote the
informer’s code on the third typewritten copy, put it together with any
existing file on the individual spied upon and sent this file to the
investigating officer. Of the remaining copies, one went to Bocchini,
for his daily briefing session with Mussolini, and the second was
intended for the Undersecretary of the Interior.
There was further reorganization in 1933 with the replacement of
some key staff by experienced operators such as Renzo Mambrini, who
soon took charge of the ‘gruppo Francia’ which dealt with investigat-
ing anti-Fascists in exile in France and French colonies in North Africa.
The other main group, known as the ‘gruppo Spagna’ or the ‘gruppo
SBS’, directed by Saverio Caccavale, took charge of Spain (including
Latin America), Belgium and Switzerland. (Surveillance of dissidents in
North America was relatively independent of Rome and involved close

liaison with the console generale in New York). When an anti-Fascist
abroad moved from one territory to another, his or her file was passed
from one group to the other.
This core of about a dozen officers also monitored dissidents inside
Italy. Unlike when dealing with abroad, domestic activities worked not
in geographical terms but in terms of political groupings. For instance,
the novelist Antonio Pizzuto and a colleague Gesualdo Barletta were
responsible for co-operation with OVRA, working against any groups
which were maintaining links with subversives abroad, e.g., commu-
nists, anarchists, giellisti and republicans.37 Pizzuto has left an impor-
tant slightly-fictionalized account of his time in the political police in a
novel published posthumously.38
Between mid-1927 and 1930 Bocchini set about using the consider-
able financial resources at his disposal to build up OVRA, the service
known only by what one might take to be its acronym, although what
the letters stood for has never been clear. This phase of Fascist consoli-
dation corresponded to a moment in which the opposition had been
weakened and dangerous anti-Fascists were either in exile or were not
in a position to cause much trouble in Italy. OVRA was based within
the Ministry of the Interior rather than being under regional prefec-
tural control. Officers gathered intelligence and had access to technical
expertise and equipment which allowed them to copy photographs,
break secret codes, monitor mail and generally to study the activities of
known and suspected subversives. By the end of 1927 there were files
on 100,000 individuals. This represented a substantial police database.
In the words of the director of the DAGR:
The records (rubriche) allow us to examine, at any time, the total

number of subversives sorted by their political affiliation and geo-
graphical location; the number of people in confino, those under
warning (ammoniti) and under suspicion (diffidati); the most danger-
ous subversives who are subject to special attention; the subversives
who have lost Italian citizenship; the individuals who have been
rehabilitated in a political sense and other data which may be
extracted using more elaborate searches.39
Keeping track of anti-Fascists abroad, from an office in Rome,

required a well resourced and tightly-managed network of informers
who could infiltrate dissident groups and pass information without
raising suspicions. This information was sifted by the Political Police,
who could call on the Prefetture and Questure to supply further informa-
tion as required. The purpose of assembling this intelligence was to
prevent dissident groups abroad from establishing working relations
with groups inside Italy. Intelligence received on groups or individuals
within Italy was passed either to the regular police or to OVRA for
action. The relationship of the Political Police to OVRA was very close.
Other parts of the DGPS could not liaise with OVRA directly. They had
to work through the DPP. Mambrini’s group cooperated very closely
with OVRA in the period 1933 to 1936 during which time they had
important successes against the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà in
Turin, on the basis of information gathered in Paris by his informers.40
The Political Police were not involved in the Turin arrests, but took
charge of the interrogations once the captives had been brought to the
Regina Coeli jail in Trastevere. The Political Police, not OVRA – and
certainly not the Questure – possessed the archive of evidence against
the accused. Mambrini himself interrogated the distinguished musicol-
ogist Massimo Mila in 1934.
The rivalries between different branches of the police were consider-
able, but for all that, the Fascist reform of the police created a well-
resourced, highly centralized and generally effective machine for the
surveillance of the population and repression of dissent.41 There is
some justified scepticism as to whether Italian police officers were
effectively fascistized but their activity proved fit for the purpose of
reporting to Mussolini on the activities of subversives and popular
feeling.42 They provided a rich source of up-to-date information.
The significance of these police reforms for censorship policy is that
Mussolini was now in possession of a very large amount of intelli-
gence, thanks to the work of Bocchini and his men. The chief of police
and the Press Officer, both based in the Viminale, were daily visitors to
Mussolini’s office. Rossi had begun the practice of sending instructions
from the Press Office to the prefects and newspapers giving instruc-
tions on how news stories were to be presented in the press.43 After
1926 these instructions to the press became more frequent, on the
basis of police intelligence. The duce observed and manipulated from
the centre of his web.
Media ownership and effective control
Retailing news even in a free market can be a precarious business,

which depends on reputation, brand loyalty and revenue from adver-
tising and sales. In a more controlled market, such as that operating in
Liberal Italy, with various forms of state intervention, there were addi-
tional constraints, such as hidden subsidy of newspapers which sup-
ported the government’s line and censorship of dissident ones. As a
newspaper owner prior to October 1922, Mussolini had been acutely
aware of both commercial pressures and invasive state interference, of
the need for cash flow and of the financial consequences of censorship
and sequestration. Cash flow, in particular, was a recurrent problem.
Manlio Morgagni, later to be his lynchpin at the de facto state news
agency, the Agenzia Stefani, had been responsible for raising advertising
money on behalf of Il Popolo d’Italia. There are several letters from
Arnaldo Mussolini to Morgagni similar in character to the following,
written on 20 September 1922, five weeks before the March on Rome:
I need to pay out 35,000 lire and I have no money. If you have none
yourself then you can’t help me. But if you do have some, then I
need you to send it so that I can avoid the mortifying spectacle of
last Saturday when I had to borrow from friends and even dig into
my own pocket, to the point of not being able to pay the postage
costs. […] And as we are on the subject of advertising, allow me to
express my concern over the drying up of this source. You have said
that in senior management we think that advertising is a gold mine.
Let me tell you that we regard it more as a tin mine. […] I would like
you to examine the situation carefully and you will see that in terms
of advertising revenue we are doing worse than the Giornale delle
Puglie and one and a half million behind the Corriere della Sera.44
The Mussolini family enterprise was struggling to make ends meet in

autumn 1922. Funding for Il Popolo d’Italia came from various sources
both before and after the March on Rome. Giorgio Fabre has demon-
strated that some of this funding came in the form of irregular pay-
ments from the Banca commerciale italiana (BCI) through its managing
director Giuseppe Toeplitz.45 Toeplitz came from a Polish Jewish family
but he had been baptized over 30 years earlier, in 1890. His son
Ludovico had been in Fiume with D’Annunzio. (He would go on to be
part of the Italian film industry in the 1930s). Giuseppe Toeplitz was
also an old friend of Margherita Sarfatti, who continued to exercise an
influence over Mussolini. His other connection to Mussolini was
through Aldo Finzi, soon to be Mussolini’s right-hand man at the
Ministry of the Interior, until the backlash following the Matteotti
murder. On the basis of the Banca commerciale archives, which have
been made available recently Fabre has demonstrated that Toeplitz
made generous payments to Morgagni in 1918 and again in 1921 for

advertising space in Il Popolo d’Italia. Indeed in 1918 the Banca commer-
ciale had twice as much advertising space in the pages of Il Popolo
d’Italia as did Ansaldo, the steel company. Extensive advertising in a
radical newspaper with a low circulation was hardly a strategic necessity
for an issuing bank.46 Just before the 1921 elections, Toeplitz made a
further payment to Morgagni of 200,000 lire. The line of Fabre’s argu-
ment is that Toeplitz’s Banca commerciale financed, or considered
financing, the fledgling Fascist movement and then moved closer to
Mussolini and in particular to his newspaper.47 That said, the Banca
commerciale was also hedging its bets by making payments to other
newspapers, including Critica sociale, the newspaper run by Treves and
Turati, as well as to publishers such as Bemporad in Florence. Fabre has
tracked down four substantial payments to Arnaldo Mussolini, made
after Morgagni’s departure from Il Popolo d’Italia for the Agenzia Stefani
in 1923. These took place on 26 January 1924 (500,000 lire), 9 January
1925 (250,000 lire), 27 October 1925 (250,000 lire) and 22 February
1928 (500,000 lire). Arnaldo Mussolini supplied signed receipts in
each case. This would equate to irregular payments in the region of
€2.5 million over a four-year period in today’s terms, and suggests large-
scale corruption sustaining the Mussolini family business, confirming
long-standing allegations about the secret funding of Mussolini once he
had abandoned Socialism. Of course, such ‘generosity’ was not a form
of altruism.48 Supply of capital implies an expected return.
Donato Barbone, writing in a later issue of the journal which pub-
lished Fabre’s article, argues that the matter is more complicated than
it at first appears and that in fact the levels of corruption were far
higher, but by no means confined to the Mussolini family interests.49
He points out that the document cited by Fabre to support his thesis
concerning Banca commerciale funding of Fascism is in fact not a Banca
commerciale document at all, but one from a shadowy organization
called the Ufficio tecnico di propaganda nazionale (UTPN). This body was
set up in late 1917, after the military defeat at Caporetto, by a ‘cross-
party group of patriots’ based in Milan. Contributors gave up to 3000
lire per month and the list of contributors included businesses and
banks such as Pirelli, Marelli, the Banca commerciale italiana, Credito
italiano, and the Banca italiana di sconto. The executive committee of
UTPN was chaired by Eliseo Antonio Porro, and the direct funding
activities of the organization involved welfare for war-wounded and
bereaved families, educational activities (teaching demobbed soldiers
how to read) and subsidies for publications including Il Giornale del
contadino. Indirectly UTPN funded other organizations. It issued a

liberal-conservative manifesto in 1919 at the beginning of the biennio
rosso, according to which it strove:
To protect the people against all forms of social violence, pointing

them towards principles of class co-operation and illustrating the
threat inherent in every movement given to hysterical and dema-
gogic behaviour. […] A drawing closer together and cordial under-
standing between the various elements of production must be
achieved very quickly in a systematic and lasting way, before it is
too late, for the protection of industry, agriculture and Italian
business.50
It may be no coincidence if this sounds like a harbinger of corpora-

tivism, although it would be a gross simplification to ascribe cor-
porativism only to the interests of big business. Certainly the Banca
commerciale italiana had already been paying over the odds for advertis-
ing space in Il Popolo d’Italia in 1918, but Barbone argues that Toeplitz’s
payments to Mussolini’s newspaper need to be seen in the context of
the UTPN manifesto. The UTPN may have been prepared to put up
with outbursts of hysteria and demagogic behaviour if such outbursts
were to lead to social harmony in the longer term.
Rather than seeing Margherita Sarfatti as the intermediary between
the financier and the duce, as Fabre had argued, Barbone suggests that
it was in fact Aldo Finzi, Mussolini’s phone-tapper, who was the effec-
tive connection. Finzi’s fall from grace in June 1924, after the discovery
of Matteotti’s body, was a blow to the BCI, which was followed up
rapidly by two payments to Arnaldo Mussolini in Milan for the benefit
of Il Popolo d’Italia, as there was no longer a direct line to the duce
through the Ministero dell’Interno.
Still, the Banca commerciale italiana continued to hedge its bets:
Mussolini looked vulnerable in the early summer of 1924. At the end
of April 1924 Italo Balbo had set up Il Corriere padano in Ferrara. His
editor Nello Quilici took a relatively-independent line on news report-
ing and on editorial policy.51 During the Matteotti crisis, on 19 June
1924, the Banca commerciale paid 50,000 lire to Balbo. Three weeks
later, on 8 July, he received another 100,000 lire. Thereafter he received
300,000 lire a year until 1930. During this time he became undersecre-
tary at Ministero dell’Economia nazionale (late October 1925) before
moving on to the Ministero dell’Aeronautica, where he was promoted
to Minister in November 1929. As well as the obvious benefits to a
bank of having an influential friend in the Economia nazionale, the

Banca commerciale developed financial interests (Consorzio aereo
italiano) in aviation business too, in 1927.
Toeplitz, however, continued to fund Mussolini’s paper and his
regime after the fall of Finzi and the Matteotti crisis, as part of a strat-
egy of patronage. Barbone has cracked a police cypher of transcribed
phone taps. These reveal that Finzi’s eventual replacement as interme-
diary between the financier and the dictator was none other than the
Chief of Police himself, Arturo Bocchini, who took up his post in 1926.
This informal but now documented connection between high finance
and Mussolini press interests began before the Fascists achieved power
and it intensified over the 20 years from 1922 to 1943. It is of a piece
with the corrupting practices of police informers and direct censorship
and is another manifestation of the Fascist mentalité which seems to
have been accepted as commonsense at the time. The vast majority of
the Italian population was unaware of such chicanery.
Paolo Murialdi, however, in his seminal accounts of Italian journal-
ism under Fascism, argues for a significant distinction between capital
(i.e., ownership) and control.52 Mussolini’s need to consolidate his
power led quickly to processes of accommodation and negotiation
with a range of social forces wider than those representing capital.
Principal among these were the Church and the monarchy. The
Church and the newspapers within its sphere of influence were less
concerned about an authoritarian government than by the fear of a
communist revolution, and where necessary the Church took steps to
replace editors or close down titles altogether in the interests of main-
taining good relations with Mussolini. Luigi Sturzo is an exemplary
casualty of this process. By February 1929, when the Lateran Pacts were
signed, all remaining Catholic titles were staunch supporters of the
Fascist government. The established liberal newspapers, on the other
hand had national and international standing and their suppression
would have implied a strategy of high risk; threatening Italy’s interna-
tional reputation. Characteristically this high-risk strategy was the line
proposed by Roberto Farinacci and the other Intransigents of the First
Hour. Mussolini instead decided to distance himself from the extrem-
ists and to appeal to the middle ground. The strategy was to fascistize
Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa rather than close them down. In
some cases, this process involved the active collaboration of prominent
capitalists: the removal of Alfredo Frassati as director of La Stampa was
not fully effected until Giovanni Agnelli bought a majority stake in the
newspaper in 1926. The newspaper was suspended for six weeks,
during which time, Frassati, the majority shareholder, was pressured

into selling. Agnelli assumed financial control in October 1926 and La
Stampa returned to the news-stands in late November, directed by
Andrea Torre. By this point Luigi Albertini had long been removed
from Il Corriere della Sera, and replaced as editor first by Pietro Croci
(Albertini’s own recommendation) and then by Ugo Ojetti (Mussolini’s
choice). Mussolini, however, indulged the Crespo brothers, owners of Il
Corriere della Sera, to some degree, by agreeing to their choice of Rome
editor (Aldo Valori) rather than his own nomination (Roberto Forges
Davanzati). Il Corriere della Sera experienced no significant drop in
sales, so Mussolini felt sufficiently confident to remove Ojetti, and
replace him with the harder-line Maffio Maffii, who had worked in the
Ufficio Stampa. This pattern of hostile takeover and fascistization
affected the less prominent newspaper titles too, at times degenerating
into rivalries between different factions within the Fascist movement,
such as the cases of Il Resto del Carlino in Bologna and Il Mattino in
Naples.
The Agenzia Stefani
Mussolini’s instincts for placing trusted collaborators in positions of

power and influence and for media savvy found a unique realization in
the person of Manlio Morgagni, his man at the Agenzia Stefani.
Morgagni, from Forlì, had a long association with Mussolini, having
written for and managed Il Popolo d’Italia and been present at Piazza
San Sepolcro on 23 March 1919 for the birth of the fasci di combatti-
mento. His most important managerial function with Il Popolo d’Italia
was to raise funds, mostly through persuading businessmen to buy
advertising space. The Mussolini brothers had come to rely on his
financial acumen.53 Alone among the duce’s inner circle, Morgagni
killed himself on the night of 25 July 1943 when he learned of
Mussolini’s arrest. In August 1924 Morgagni had founded a monthly
magazine La Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia along with Arnaldo
Mussolini.54 Three and a half years later (January 1928) he founded
Natura. In 1930 he published L’agenzia Stefani nella vita nazionale, a
monograph which set out his historic mission as journalist and news
manager. In his view, as set out in 1930, Italian newspapers had for too
long been forced to rely on foreign news agencies for international
news. International news supply was dominated by Reuters in Britain,
Havas in France and Wolff in Germany, a smaller agency. In 1870 they
had established a cartel that divided up national and regional markets.
Wolff’s sphere of influence did not extend beyond Europe unlike

Reuters and Havas which could exploit the relative advantages of their
native languages being understood in the far-flung British and French
empires.
The Agenzia Stefani had been set up as a family business in 1853 in
the shadow of these giants and in 1861 managed to establish links
with Havas, giving the Stefani access to reports from French correspon-
dents around the world. With the advantages of access to fresh news
came the disadvantage of a French political interpretation of this news.
This political point had also exercised Francesco Crispi, and when he
came to power he set about reforming the arrangement by making the
Stefani more dependent upon the Italian government and therefore not
simply a cypher for French interests. Crispi had sought to bring
the Stefani closer to German and Austrian news sources. Late in 1923
negotiations were underway between Mussolini (through Federzoni)
and the owners of the Agenzia Stefani, Gustavo Nesti and Giovanni
Cappelletto. The outcome of these negotiations was that Morgagni was
elected to the position of managing director. He set about making the
agency more efficient and responsive to the needs of the Fascist state.
His first important initiative was the radio-telegraphic service for stock
exchange rates. The purpose of this service was to make sure that stock
exchange rates no longer arrived from foreign sources but through ‘the
only national agency, collected exclusively by reporters of Italian
origin and sentiments’.55 The Stefani radio receivers in Milan and Rome
would receive news of the stocks moments after close of business on
the various markets and would then prepare a bulletin giving the
closing prices for the main Stock Exchanges and the Italian banks, to
be distributed at 8am each working day. Shortly afterwards this was
supplemented by a daily bulletin on cereal prices abroad, giving the
prices from Chicago, Winnipeg, Liverpool, and Buenos Aires. At a time
when Mussolini was mounting his ‘battle for the wheat’ at home,
Morgagni explained the Stefani strategy in terms of the national
interest:
In the past the Italian businessman, deprived of genuine and reli-

able information from abroad, either had to trust a foreign mediator
who bundled prices to him or he had to wait until the following day
to read the prices in the newspapers. Thus our farmers were always
uncertain about prices and in their uncertainty they would decide
whether or not to sell their produce not on the basis of the needs of
international markets but on the basis of the foreign mediator’s
interests. The new Stefani services have put an end to this damaging
situation.56
To this was added in 1928 an economic bulletin, edited at Head

Office in Milan, and issued twice a day. Alongside the business news
the Stefani also provided a general telegraphic service which carried all
official and semi-official news, home news and political, business and
general interest stories from abroad. This linked to an internal tele-
graphic service which by the end of the 1920s worked around the
clock. There was also a special foreign service which reported on world
politics ‘as viewed from an Italian [i.e., Fascist] perspective’.
In November 1928 the Agenzia Stefani began its Radio Stefani service,
again from Milan, on long and short wave. This service received the dis-
patches of its Italian correspondents in the major European and
American cities. These were edited in Milan and transmitted by tele-
phone or telegraph to the regional and provincial offices in Italy, which
in turn supplied information to the press. According to Morgagni in
this way all Italian newspapers, even the most modest of them could
‘finally compete on an equal footing with the big national and foreign
titles’.57 This service was supplemented by the capacity to send images
down a wire which gave all provincial and local newspapers the oppor-
tunity to publish photographs of people and events from around
Europe and America in a matter of hours.
The agency expanded its operations considerably between the mid
and the late 1920s, opening new offices and moving to larger premises
in major cities. This expansion came at a cost. A profit of 64,953 lire in
1925 became a loss of 91,676 lire by 30 June 1927. The state stepped in
to bail the agency out with taxpayers’ money. Romano Canosa has
cited a letter to Morgagni from the Press Office of the Foreign Ministry
dated 21 August 1929:
Mr President, allow me to point out to you that according to a new

budget provision, the monthly subsidy of 31,750 lire laid down for
the ‘Special Stefani service’ has recently been raised to 60,750 lire per
month. This sum should be allocated in the following way: 31,750
lire remain assigned to the Rome, Trieste and Munich offices. 29,000
lire will be devolved to new offices to be set up in Vienna, Bucharest,
Prague, Tirana, Athens and Belgrade. 4,000 lire per month will be
allocated to the offices in Vienna, Bucharest, 1,000 lire each to Tirana
and to Athens, and 2,500 to Belgrade, to cover salaries. […] The Head
of Government has specified that the following people are to be
employed in the various offices: Dott. Mario Villa in Vienna;

Mr Mario Marchini in Bucharest; Mr Roberto Suster in Prague;
Comm. Enrico Ceresole in Athens who will also be secretary of the
local branch of the PNF and correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia;
Mr Solari Bozzi in Belgrade, where he is already correspondent for
Il Giornale d’Italia.58
Therefore by the late 1920s Mussolini maintained a substantial

control over the press agency which provided the news to all news-
papers published in the kingdom. Italian newspapers were obliged to
take their news stories and images from the Agenzia Stefani and the
Istituto Luce, and with greater frequency as the years went by, to repro-
duce Stefani text and images without editorial comment.
State, church and censorship
When courting the Catholic Church, shortly before the signing of the
Lateran Pacts (1929), the interests of the Fascist censors extended
beyond politics to the moral sphere. In 1928 when Lando Ferretti
replaced Giovanni Capasso Torre at the Press Office, still located in the
headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, he sent out the following
circular to all prefects:
I think it is only right to draw to your attention certain illustrated

publications where the female nude constitutes the sole dubious
attraction for young male readers. It would be well immediately to
recall the owners of these publications to a more dignified under-
standing of their journalistic mission and then to proceed with due
rigour.59
Moral as opposed to political censorship intensified after 1929, and

extended its brief from glossy magazines to radio, theatre and cinema
in an unremitting campaign to promote patriotism and a bland enthu-
siasm for family values. This went down well with the middle classes
and with the Catholic hierarchy. Bosworth argues that:
The Church authorities judged Nazism before and after 1939 an

ungodly movement. It is fairer, however, to see Pius [XII] and the
hierarchy over whom he presided as fellow travellers or outright
sympathizers with Mussolini and Fascism. In what they perceived as
this wicked world, the Vatican liked most of what they saw in
Fascism and, should the truth be known, preferred it probably to

liberal democracy and certainly to socialism and communism. All in
all, the Church’s wartime stance towards the dictatorship was not
very different from that prevailing among businessmen and
landowners, who thought that Fascism, despite its eccentricities,
was fine for them until it became obvious that it was going to lose
its battles on every front.
This account would be no less true of Pius XI. Throughout the ‘years
of consensus’, Church and Fascist state tended to co-exist very happily,
to the chagrin of the likes of Emilio Settimelli, Fascist writer of the
First Hour and Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher and educational
reformer of the regime.60 In their different ways the theatrical anarchist
Settimelli and the cerebral reformer Gentile represented the extremes
which had been attracted to Mussolini’s charisma from the early days
of Fascism.61 They both found their attempts to separate Church and
state undermined, especially by the ambassador to the Vatican, Cesare
Maria de Vecchi. Fascist patience with Settimelli would finally be
exhausted by late 1938 when he was sent to confino to break his spirit,
itself a form of preventive censorship. Well before that, Gentile had
been censored by the Church: all his works were placed on the Index
of Prohibited Books in 1934.
3
Giovinezza: Education for the
Ethical State
Mussolini’s appointment of Giovanni Gentile in winter 1922 as his first

Minister for Public Instruction (istruzione pubblica) was to have the effect
of beginning a comprehensive but uneven reform of the Italian school
system which would continue up to the collapse of the regime itself and
one which Mussolini would describe as ‘the most Fascist of all his poli-
cies’. Educational reform is also the initiative in which we find the first
uses of censorship as a tool of cultural policy, with far-reaching conse-
quences for the publishing industry, textbook writers, teachers, pupils
and their families. This chapter will deal especially with this ‘most
Fascist’ of reforms and it will seek to articulate Gentile’s vision of the
State as Educator (lo Stato educatore), to examine details of its implemen-
tation, its revision and tacit abandonment in the light of competing
influences, and to take stock of the economic and cultural consequences,
the pedagogic shortcomings and the generally negative effects of Fascist
educational reform. With the latter in mind, it is a sobering thought that
Italian boys born in the spring and summer of 1922 had their education
framed in a model designed to produce the new Italian man (l’uomo
nuovo), and that they reached their eighteenth birthdays just in time to
march off to a disastrous war from which many of them would not
return, and during which Gentile himself would be assassinated.
The need for reform
The Casati Law (13 November 1859, no. 3725) had broken new ground
in the nineteenth century for public policy on education by enshrining
in law three fundamental principles: (1) the state’s right to replace the
Church as the main provider of teaching, (2) compulsory schooling to a
minimum of the first two years of the scuola elementare, and (3) free
48
Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State 49
public education for all (to be funded by local tax-payers with a sub-
vention from central government in some cases). The Casati law had also
introduced teacher-training colleges and the bringing together of schools
administration into a single ministry, that of Istruzione Pubblica. The
needs of the newly-unified Italian state were stark. In the first elections
(1861), less than 2% of the population of 25,750,000 had the right to
vote, since to qualify for the vote one needed to be male, literate, aged
over 25 and paying more than 40 lire per annum in taxes. The illiteracy
rate in 1861 for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was 87%.1
The Casati law set up different models of school and different routes
through the education system. To reproduce the elite there was the
route through the scuola elementare (ages 6 to 9/10, with separate
schools for boys and girls), and the ginnasio (ages 10 to 15) followed by
the liceo classico (ages 16 to 18). The two-year junior cycle of the scuola
elementare (the biennio inferiore) was obligatory and free to all, and
funded by local authorities (comuni). As there was no national pay-scale
for teachers, levels of remuneration depended on the economic
strength (and often geographical location) of the comune. Teachers in
rural areas were paid less than their counterparts in towns and cities.
According to Casati, there was to be a ginnasio in all principal towns in
the provinces, again funded by the comune. There was to be one liceo
classico per province, funded by the state. The real innovation of the
Casati law was the instituting of the istruzione secondaria tecnica,
designed to produce public servants and businessmen, thus stimulating
the economic sectors. Pupils taking this route passed from the scuola
elementare to technical schools (scuole tecniche) whose programme
lasted three years, funded jointly by comune and the state, and on to
technical institutes (istituti tecnici), also with a three-year cycle and
part-funded by the state. In all cases it was the responsibility of the
local authorities to build and maintain school premises.
The expectations raised by this liberal initiative however were soon
disappointed. The state did not so much replace the Church as the
provider of education as develop state schools in parallel to private
schools, with both institutions questioning implicitly the other’s legit-
imacy. The state backed off open confrontation. The principle of com-
pulsory education was never given any teeth and illiteracy figures,
while they did drop, continued to be high by European standards right
into the next century, which indicates that the principle was largely
ignored in the reality of Italian life, especially in rural areas where the
seasonal rhythms of the year held more sway than legislators in distant
Turin, or Florence, or Rome.
Illiteracy statistics in Italy from 1861 to 1931
Year Male % Female % Total %
1861 7,889,238 72.0 9,110,463 84.0 16,999,701 78.0

1871 9,031,836 67.04 10,521 78.94 19,553,792 72.96
1881 8,706,125 61.03 956 73.51 19,141,157 67.26
1901 8,259,704 51.13 10,435 60.82 18,186,353 56.0
1911 7,244,648 42.8 32 50.5 16,107,173 46.7
1921 6,375,645 33.4 9,926,649 38.3 13,888,556 35.8
1931 3,014,736 17.0 8,862,525 24.0 7,458,909 21.0
Source: Giovanni Genovesi, Storia della scuola in Italia dal Settecento a oggi, revised edition
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004 [1998]), p. 246
Most seriously of all, there was too little investment in education.

There was little incentive to attract people of talent to the teaching
profession.2 It remained the case in late 1922 when the Fascists took
power that the country had high levels of illiteracy. The figures of
33.4% male and 38.3% female illiteracy in 1922 mask far higher figures
in the South, and the cohesive effect of education on national life was
at best marginal. State education was free but the unit of resource was
very low in state schools and education in Italy was patently not fit for
purpose. It was failing to meet the needs of the economy or civil
society.
Moreover, the Southern economy depended on an inefficient agri-
cultural sector which had little interest in innovation, the develop-
ment of skills or the creation of regular employment. So there was a
substantial population of men who were employed seasonally as
unskilled labourers or braccianti. This suited the absentee landlords in
the great latifondi in the South as oversupply and competition for the
few jobs available depressed earnings. Social unrest was avoided most
of the time by the conservatively-framed charitable welfare networks
of the Catholic Church and because every year a large mass of
unskilled and semi-skilled young men – often the most enterprising –
left Italy to emigrate in search of a better life.3 Their remittances
helped to keep their families from starvation. The small industrial
base located in the North in the Turin–Milan–Genoa triangle did need
a trained workforce, but schools and universities produced few young
people with appropriate skills in science and technology or a sense of
enterprise. Instead Italy’s universities produced more graduates, espe-
cially in law and the humanities, than the backward economy could
accommodate.
School buildings and resources were rudimentary, especially in

impoverished rural areas. Elementary schooling was free, but the prin-
ciple of universal free education was undermined by the requirement
that all pupils should provide their own books. This requirement was a
serious financial imposition for poorer families and the high price of
schoolbooks did little to promote the popularity of school attendance.
It was a state of affairs satirized not just in the pages of Il Becco giallo in
the 1920s but familiar from Carlo Collodi’s story of Pinocchio, where
Geppetto has to sell the coat off his back to buy schoolbooks for his
adopted son, the literal blockhead (testa di legno).4
Furthermore the idea of a commonly-spoken standard Italian lan-
guage was a fiction. Standard Italian was something derived from
literary texts written centuries earlier and it had achieved limited pene-
tration outside the literate middle and upper classes. Even there,
regional and local dialectal identities predominated to the extent that
people from different parts of the kingdom often had genuine diffi-
culties understanding one another. Six decades after unification there
was only a weak sense of a shared Italian identity.5
But there were other, more specifically Fascist reasons why schools
reform was desirable and necessary. Mussolini had come to power in a
bloodless coup d’etat. In order to retain that power he needed to legit-
imize his authority with the masses. He had to establish the power of
the new state by identifying himself with the state and getting his
message delivered daily at every parish pump. The tussle for legitimacy
in Italy between Church and state which had taken place since 1859
on a variety of levels continued to be most evident in relation to the
education of the young. Private schools (i.e., religious ones) were pro-
tected zealously from state influence. State schools were far from
models of good practice, and control of both was going to be necessary
to ensure that a new generation could be moulded so as to achieve a
Fascist consensus. Mussolini had himself been a schoolmaster and
understood the moral and political influence an effective teacher could
exercise over pupils: pupils saw much more of their teachers than they
did of their priests. Schools would be the key to a long-term survival
strategy for the regime and the creation of a new order on the basis of
radical renewal and the cult of youth (giovinezza).
The choice of Gentile
It is in this context that Giovanni Gentile assumed the responsibility

for education (istruzione pubblica) in Mussolini’s first government,
replacing the gentleman philosopher Benedetto Croce who had held

the office in the last Liberal government, headed by Luigi Facta.
Gentile remains a controversial figure, not least in the manner of his
death in 1944. Assassination is the fate of very few philosophers. The
collapse of Italy’s First Republic in the early 1990s and subsequent revi-
sions of the history of the Resistance have led to a profusion of books
on Gentile in recent years, in Italy, and to a smaller extent in North
America. He has become a contested figure. Gabriele Turi’s meticu-
lously-researched critical biography, which was the first of these books,
offers a balanced account on which I have drawn for information in
the following pages.6 A. James Gregor’s short political biography has a
polemical edge which goes with the grain of revisionist history pro-
duced in Italy by historians associated with the journal Nuova storia
contemporanea, whose editor Francesco Perfetti has produced another
biography which, like Gregor’s, is more laudatory and polemical than
critical or sceptical.7
Mussolini’s choice of Gentile for the ministry in 1922 was shrewd.
He had retained some ministers from the Facta government, such as
Luigi Siciliani at Antiquities and Fine Arts, but Croce, while not hostile
in 1922, was too far away from Fascism, too much part of the liberal
establishment, and too wealthy to be interested in government patron-
age. Co-option of Gentile was part of Mussolini’s strategy to win a par-
liamentary majority. Gentile could deliver the support of the Partito
popolare. Indeed before accepting the post Gentile sought and received
Mussolini’s assurance on the introduction of state examinations, a
policy advocated by the popolari but opposed in principle by the
Fascists at their plenary meeting in Naples months earlier.8 Mussolini
was content to compromise on that in order to gain a broader base of
support in parliament. Croce sent Gentile a telegram of congratulation
describing his long-time collaborator as ‘the right man in the right
place’ but making no reference to the political complexion of the gov-
ernment Gentile was about to join. Croce continued to pay Gentile as
joint editor of La Critica until late 1923. Other friends and associates
were more cautions and concerned. Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, who
had deep reservations about Fascism but who nonetheless would soon
chair Gentile’s first Central Commission for reform of schoolbooks,
wrote to the new Minister:
Your unstained name is now alongside the name of preachers of

violence, architects of mayhem, imitators of the Communists in
their methods of political struggle. Let us hope that your presence in
the government will moderate the anti-liberal reaction which may

await the country.9
Even Gentile’s own brother expressed similar concerns, but within

months these concerns appear to have evaporated as the new minister
began to use his influence for the material benefit of his siblings and
his own family. His professorial salary at the Scuola normale in Pisa
almost doubled in the 30 months between May 1921 and December
1923 as his influence grew, and he began to take a financial interest in
the publishing industry. Mussolini had evidently judged his man
wisely.
Croce and Gentile were both philosophers who worked in the tradi-
tion of German Idealism and had been joint editors of Croce’s journal
La Critica for over two decades, but by 1922 they were moving in dif-
ferent directions. Croce gave a cautious welcome to Mussolini’s
leading a coalition government, and putting an end to the biennio
rosso, but when Gentile published his Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals
after the Congress of Fascist Culture in March 1925, Croce responded
with his counter manifesto within weeks.10 After that, they never
communicated with one another again. According to Gentile’s
Actualism, a variant of the anti-Realist tradition, as it had developed
in the second, blood-stained decade of the century, reality was not to
be identified with an independently-existing external world, as com-
monsense and realist philosophy would have it. Instead reality,
including the world ‘external’ to the individual was the product of
consciousness – ‘the production of a series of willed collective moral
choices’.11 Individual lives gained meaning only by participation in
the collective life through which alone they could achieve fullness
in the shared transcendental consciousness which was made manifest
in the culture, history and traditions of the Italian people. In political
terms it followed that Italians, in order to raise themselves up from
the backward state in which their country languished, needed to ‘give
themselves over to a sense of selfless mission – a sense that they were
responsible for the world in which they chose to live’.12 Implanting
this sense of mission in the hearts and minds of the rising generation
in order to bring about the ethical state was the ultimate purpose of
education in Gentile’s charismatic view.
Gentile’s Idealism however did not cause him to disdain the material
advantages of his new position, although it would be wrong to suggest
that he was motivated only by self-interest. He seems to have been
driven by a messianic belief in the power of the Will to change the
world and by all accounts he worked long hours to bring this about. In
1920 he had written that there must be ‘a substantial interior transfor-
mation capable of redirecting and disciplining all the energies that the
Great War had revealed, in order to make Italy capable of a vast pro-
ductive undertaking, social pacification, and reorganization of the
state’.13 He took up his post as minister with the intention of forging a
new sense of Italian identity out of the carnage of the trenches and
consequent cultural disorientation by seeking to continue the process
of Risorgimento after the parenthesis of failed liberal democracy.
In order to do that he began to draw up plans for the education in
reformed licei and universities of a new elite destined for future leader-
ship. For the rest of society his plan was to create a disciplined secular
state to which the individual was devoted to the point of willingly
making the ultimate sacrifice.
Gentile had been considering these problems for some time. He
had published a pamphlet in 1919 called Il problema scolastico del
dopoguerra [The problem of the post-war school system]. It was made up
of short essays published between 1917 and 1919. In his analysis,
some of the main practical problems to be addressed were economic
ones. Recruitment and retention of good staff were both difficult.
Teachers’ salaries continued to be low, especially in rural areas, which
meant either that male teachers had to take on additional private
tutoring or they left teaching altogether for other, more respected,
professions. Either way, the rewards structure was inadequate for
returning heroes from the trenches. Those who remained and the
women who replaced them did not and could not possess ‘the spir-
ited originality of thought or the iron strength of character which are
the highest intellectual and moral endowments of humanity and
should be the core of the school that moulds the higher culture of
the country’.14 His proposed solutions were to put more resource into
teachers’ salaries and pensions, to remove women from key posts in
schools and to put war heroes into the classrooms as teacher-role
models for the new generation, fighting illiteracy and low aspiration
in the spirit of the trenches.
A programme of work
Gentile set about his programme of reform with alacrity, enthusiasm,

and missionary zeal, concentrating on the key issues of human
resources, management structures, methods of evaluation and costs of
physical resources, especially teaching and learning resources. He sur-
rounded himself with a small and dedicated team, and for his
18 months as minister he worked in his office 11 hours a day.15
Achievement of his programme was facilitated by almost complete
independence from parliamentary scrutiny and a refusal to consult
teachers’ representative organizations. Instead a torrent of ministerial
circulars couched in the language of military discourse began to rain
down on the teaching profession. A communication of 25 November
1922 gives an indication of the tone. Schools must be:
Quick to inculcate and practise respect for discipline, law and order
with enlightened obedience as well as cordial devotion to state
authority.16
In order to make schools ‘a true mirror of the renewed national con-

sciousness (coscienza)’ the minister called for ‘acceptance and scrupu-
lous obedience to the new order which must begin to bed itself down
in the schools if we are to see its consolidation in the country at large’.
For that reason ‘any action which disturbs the smooth running of the
teaching provision or which insinuates a lack of confidence (sfiducia)
or indiscipline in relation to the authority of the state will be swiftly
and severely punished’.
In another of his ministerial circulars, sent out under the title
‘Dovere degli insegnanti’ (‘Duty of Teachers’) on 23 May 1923 Gentile
explained that rather than sending out notices (avvertimenti) he was
delivering orders (consegne). Principals were required ‘to respect as
sacred the orders they receive, with military devotion, with swift,
absolute and unconditional obedience’. They were expected to instil
the new spirit of the nation in the teaching body (corpo insegnante). In
line with this policy Gentile had approved a decree law which assigned
to secondary schools in important towns and cities teachers who had
been decorated with the gold medal for military bravery.17 Circulars
from his undersecretary Dario Lupi instructed primary schools to estab-
lish gardens of remembrance to commemorate those fallen in the
Great War and for those described as ‘Fascist martyrs’, thus eliding in
the minds of young children the Great War and the Fascists’ four-year
armed struggle to overthrow the democratic Italian state. These mea-
sures were put in place at the same time as permission to replace the
Crucifix alongside the portrait of the king in school classrooms, repeal-
ing a provision of the Casati law. The Vatican’s approval for the latter
was easily extended to the former in the public imagination, whether
or not such approval could be assumed.
A week after his circular to school principals on their duty, Gentile

officially joined the PNF with an open letter to Mussolini (31 May
1923) in which he wrote that his participation in government had
persuaded him that:
The liberalism as I understand it and as it was understood by the

men of the glorious Historic Right (Destra storica) who led Italy since
the Risorgimento, the liberalism of the freedom of the law and thus
of the strong state and the state conceived as an ethical reality, is no
longer represented by today’s Italian liberals who are opposed to
you, but by you yourself.18
Earlier he had turned down the offer of honorary membership, made

by Michele Bianchi, one of the quadrumviri, on the grounds that he had
done nothing to deserve it. He had now become a born-again Fascist. His
protégés, as well as his family, were already seeing the benefits of his
position. Giuseppe Saitta was named a cavaliere in December 1922,
Ernesto Codignola won the concorso for the chair of Pedagogy at Messina
in February 1923 and Adolfo Omodeo was appointed to the chair of
Church History at Naples in June 1923, to the outrage of the selection
panel which had failed to reach an unambiguous recommendation. To
answer Omodeo’s evident concerns about his appointment in such
shady circumstances Gentile wrote to him:
You and I have obligations to scholarship and to the country, and

we can’t hold ourselves back for love of the quiet life, getting
embroiled in the petty squabbles of those imbeciles.
Gentile was being true to his principle of creating an elite. Italian

universities had been producing too many graduates in the wrong dis-
ciplines. Therefore new admissions policies were required and he
needed his men in place to drive through the reforms.
That principle also extended to school structures. Gentile’s reforms
increased the duration of primary schooling (scuola elementare) from four
to five years. The old technical schools were abolished and replaced by a
scuola complementare with a three-year cycle giving a broad academic
education. There was no continuation route to university from these
complementary schools. Children destined for the technical institutes
had to enter them at the age of 11 which meant that the istituti tecnici
were compelled to introduce junior classes, in exchange for losing their
higher ones which went to make up new scientific colleges (licei
scientifici) which catered for those aged 15 to 18. The progression route
from these licei was to science and engineering faculties in the univers-
ities. Those university courses were not generally open to pupils from the
technical institutes although pupils from these were eligible to apply to
business and economics faculties.19 The elite ginnasio and liceo classico
remained as they had been, but were reduced in number. They were
joined by a liceo for girls. The scuole normali were renamed istituti magis-
trali and allocated an extra year of tuition at the end of the cycle.
Gentile’s overarching strategy was to create an elite state-school system
on a humanist model, with rigorous standards and public funding. He
had less interest in the rest of the school population.
Gentile’s ministerial ordinance of programmes of study for elemen-
tary schools (11 November 1923) instructed teachers to keep their own
knowledge and culture up to date, drawing not on anthologies (man-
ualetti) but on the ‘living sources of true culture’, which he went on to
specify as the following:
The popular and living tradition, perennial educator of the people,

which still savours the word of the Fathers; and great literature which
has given, in every generation, wonderful works of poetry, of faith
and of science, accessible to the humble, because they are great.20
State examinations were introduced with the twin aims of providing

a more objective evaluation so as to raise standards and of gaining for
the state a measure of control over the network of private schools by
bringing curricula into line. Examinations had been a long-standing
concern for Gentile and once in power the Fascists were content to
drop their opposition especially when the benefits for control and reg-
ulation became apparent. Nonetheless the most pressing practical
problem remained a lack of money in the education system. This lack
of resource influenced Gentile’s first ministerial steps.
Reform and censorship
In support of the proposal for reform, once he was in office, Gentile argued
unsuccessfully in 1923 for the introduction of a nominal school fee, to
replace free education. Monica Galfré has cited an internal memorandum
of the Ministero dell’Istruzione Pubblica:
If the government were to propose a fee, in order to respond to urgent

necessities in the school sector, such as rural school buildings, the
setting up of nursery schools (asili d’infanzia) and the pensions of

primary-school teachers, in the current state of affairs it would find
that the publishers have already taken for themselves what families
can afford to pay.21
Gentile’s hostility towards the publishing sector on this point and at

this time was wholly consistent with his social philosophy in that the
financial self interest of publishing houses was in conflict with his con-
ception of the interests of the state. The state needed to control educa-
tion in order to mould young minds. The area of common ground
between different schools in the regions was the need for textbooks to
support the curriculum, and so the school-textbook market was a lucra-
tive one for publishers, as pupils were required to supply their own
books. Therefore, to Gentile, the publishing sector needed reform as
well, as part of his programme.
After four months of preparation, the programme was given legisla-
tive expression by decree law no. 737 of 11 March 1923, known as the
Norme per l’adozione dei libri di testo nelle scuole elementari e popolari pub-
bliche e private (Regulations for the adoption of textbooks in public and
private primary schools). This provision required publishers to submit
schoolbooks to special regional commissions for approval. Given the
timescale for the school year 1923–24, it was decided that a single
central commission would fulfil the function in the first year of the
law’s operation. In fact a central commission continued to hold sway
after 1923 and there was never any effective devolution of the powers
to the regions. That was a significant aspect of the reform because up
to 1923 very many of the textbooks in use had very limited circulation.
In lots of cases books were written by local teachers and printed for
them in the manner of a cottage industry. Giuseppe Lombardo Radice,
who chaired the first Central Commission (1923–24), later described its
work as the ‘purging of didactic literature’.22 This model of reform
however had obvious authoritarian consequences.
Ten days before the law was announced Gentile had sent out a min-
isterial circular to all school principals and schools inspectors requiring
all teachers to complete a short questionnaire giving details of the text-
book used by each class which they taught. These signed question-
naires were to be checked by principals and sent by the end of the
month to the Ministry for Public Instruction, making sure that ‘no
book escapes this investigation’.23 The details required included
specification of author, title, publisher and price as well as an indica-
tion of how long the book had been in use for each respective class,
who had proposed its adoption, where it was bought by pupils and
whether the teacher intended using it in the following year. The
purpose of the questionnaire was to provide an evidence base for the
Central Commission’s deliberations, and the objective of the Central
Commission was to establish an ‘official list of approved textbooks’.
This was referred to explicitly in rubric 1 of the decree law and it is the
first example of legislated censorship in Fascist Italy. Publishers and
authors intending to bring forward new books were required to submit
personal details along with five printed copies (either published or in
proof) and a fee of 75 lire for books intended for the first two years of
the primary cycle, and 100 lire for all others. This provision had a pre-
dictable effect of self-censorship, especially for the smaller publishing
houses in the provinces.
The Central Commission was made up of teachers, men and women
of letters and senior civil servants. The commissioners included
Giuseppe Prezzolini, former editor of La Voce and enthusiast of
Mussolini’s leadership style ten years before the March on Rome. Over
a period of 14 months the commissioners dealt with textbooks for
History, Geography, Grammar and Mathematics as well as readers.
The commission’s first report, concerning Geography textbooks, was
published in June 1923. It approved a select list of textbooks and
rejected all the others. The tone of the review is consistent with the
following judgement:
Leaving aside the various books rich in gross historical errors, what
strikes one most piteously is the lack of moral seriousness in many
authors, their absence of spiritual direction, their inability to rise
above a pale repetition of anecdotes, biographies, stories and
dates.24
The review considered new books and also books which had been in
circulation for several decades with a view to recommending improve-
ments in order to make the material more stimulating for children.
The review was rigorous and robust. Of 459 anthologies (readers) sub-
mitted Lombardo Radice rejected 222, dividing the remaining 237
into five (subsequently four) categories and classifying 32 of them as
praiseworthy for their artistic and pedagogical value. Textbooks for
Mathematics and Religion were judged uniformly pedantic, on the
one hand too dense but on the other full of gaps and likely to bore
most children. Most were held to be written in deplorably poor
Italian, and rejected on that basis. A small number of books were
classed as being appropriate for libraries of teacher-training colleges

but not for the classroom. Some titles were approved on a transitional
basis with mandatory recommendations for improvement, and the
sure prospect of a review 12 months later.
Implicit in the programme of the reviewers was an aversion to
Positivism and to any form of social Realism as well as an outright
opposition to stories of orphans and children abandoned and left to
make their own way in the world.25 Such sentimental stories were not
compatible with the formation of the disciplined and ethical state. An
outcome of the review, perhaps not entirely consistent with these prin-
ciples, was the re-launching of De Amicis’ sentimental novel Cuore as
an approved text for elementary schools.
Although economic conditions had improved, Pietro Fedele, who
replaced Gentile’s immediate successor Alessandro Casati, in 1926
was still caught between government policy and the perennial
problem of a limited budget. Decree law no. 209 of 7 January 1926
imposed a price freeze on schoolbooks for three years, even though
the price of paper continued to rise as did labour costs owing to
inflation. The price control was an obvious attempt to protect the
prosperity of the middle classes in the light of Fascist monetary
policy, i.e., the Quota 90 revaluation of the lira. For Fedele the ques-
tion of school texts went hand in hand with the structural reform of
rural life, Gentile’s educational equivalent of bonifica integrale to
‘reawaken in Italians the rural spirit’. 26 Fedele, sceptical of Gentile’s
elitism, performed the familiar argument in parliament that rural
schools displayed ‘the spirit of the trenches’, where local teachers,
with exemplary Fascist zeal overcame the problems of a paucity of
resources by teaching with a very limited number of textbooks. This,
he claimed, was proving ‘successful in both pedagogic and economic
terms’. Fedele offered no metric to measure the pedagogic success,
and while literacy rates did improve, the improvement was not dra-
matic: the war was not being won. The economic argument however
linked neatly to the need to modernize the building stock of rural
schools and provide funds for teachers’ salaries and pensions. Less
money spent on books could mean more resource for building
programmes and welfare. Reports from the South (Aquila, Bari,
Cagliari, Campobasso, Cosenza, Palermo and Potenza), where illiter-
acy remained ‘an open wound’, supported the contention that poor
school attendance was rooted in the cost of schoolbooks. Fedele
argued for a state textbook on the grounds that money saved could
be ploughed back into improving education. In the view of the
senior inspector of schools Alessandro Marcucci (who had been

appointed by Gentile) ‘it would give us at least 20 million lire per
year’. Fedele faced understandable opposition from spokesmen close
to the publishing lobby such as Franco Ciarlantini and concerted
action by publishing houses in the face of discounts and price
freezes. Mondadori, the largest publisher in Milan, called for a com-
mission to review the textbook industry, with equal representation
from the publishing sector. Bemporad, the largest publisher in
Florence, wanted the whole idea dropped.
Gentile’s decree in 1923 had established that elementary schools
public and private could not adopt textbooks other than those which
appeared on the officially-approved lists. This was a powerful political
weapon. The first report of the commission included comments on the
merits of every book surveyed. Publishers could request an explanation
in cases where their book had been rejected. There was a provision to
appeal a decision and in theory they were free to amend their text and
resubmit. The high cost, however, of submitting a text for scrutiny (75
lire for books intended for the two junior classes and 100 lire for all
others) without any guarantee of success before the next commission,
was such as to make publishers prudent, and to internalize the process
of censorship.
Of the history and geography textbooks approved, 15 were published
by Bemporad in Florence.27 Among those I bimbi d’Italia si chiaman
Balilla was singled out for praise as a volume which should be found
‘in the library of every little Italian boy and girl’. Six of the volumes
approved were published by Mondadori in Milan. In the later review
carried out by the Romano Commission, Fascist criteria became more
explicit, and chairman Michele Romano noted that many books sub-
mitted for consideration lacked ‘Fascist spirit’. He continued:
We must instil a passion for everything that is heroic and for all the
typically virile qualities (virtù) such as faithfulness, courage, work,
perseverance, lack of self interest and probity as well as the cult of
our forefathers and respect for authority and the hierarchy, without
neglecting the gentle qualities which form the civilized basis of
human goodness and generosity.28
Fascist ideology became more explicit in the content of schoolbooks

with each successive review. For publishers, especially the smaller ones
and those without strong Fascist credentials, whose books were not
included on the lists, the outlook was bleak.
Consequences of the Gentile reform
Gentile held office for just 18 months. He was replaced briefly by

Alessandro Casati, a descendent of Gabrio Casati the nineteenth-
century educational reformer, in the reshuffle after the elections in
1924. Pietro Fedele took over from him in early 1925, as part of
Mussolini’s seizure of dictatorial powers. Fedele held office for twice as
long as Gentile. He continued the centralizing process which had been
ushered in by the Reform Bill of 1923, but moved the focus from
grooming an elite class, to putting the Fascist stamp on the school
system. Under his leadership there was a further reduction in the
number of prescribed books, and eventually the more drastic step of
establishing an approved list of about 20 titles to which the state would
buy the rights in order to raise 40,000,000 lire so as to be able to finance
public education. The state thus came to exercise effective economic
control over private publishing houses and so to regulate the market
and to impose a de facto censorship on publishing for the schools sector,
long before 1934, the year traditionally seen as the beginning of censor-
ship in Fascist Italy, in the wake of Nazi book-burnings.
A law of August 1928 ushered in the state textbook, the logical conse-
quences of Fedele’s policy, with effect from January 1929. Lombardo
Radice, chairman of Gentile’s first commission greeted this develop-
ment with dismay, as having a deleterious effect on the learning experi-
ence in Italy’s schools and little to do with the inspiration of Gentile’s
quixotic Reform Bill. The new law required further revisions of practi-
cally every textbook in circulation, at considerable expense on the part
of publishing houses. Publishers active in the schools sector were up in
arms. As a direct result of the libro di stato their warehouses were sud-
denly crammed with unwanted books. Franco Ciarlantini, president of
the publishers’ association and close friend of Arnaldo Mussolini, esti-
mated the loss in sales to be at least 48 million lire for the sector as a
whole, judging by the cover price, not to mention a further 15 million
on redundant typographical plant. This gives a graphic illustration of
ideological censorship’s influence on the market.29
Fedele’s successor, Giuseppe Belluzzo, having been minister for the
national economy, understood the commercial implications of this
ideological bravado and was ready to compromise. He requested from
the new president of the commission, Alessandro Melchiori, a list of
50% of the textbooks for history, geography, law and economics which
were likely to be approved once appropriate revisions had been made,
so that he could ensure a reasonable distribution of the spoils between
the large publishing houses. Thus Bemporad received a letter from the
ministry in May 1928 explaining that Domenico Giannitrapani’s Albo
geografico e letture di geografia would be approved if the following
changes were made: The sentence ‘Not all of Italy forms part of the
Kingdom of Italy’ should not be followed by ‘There are parts which are
still subject to foreign powers’ but by the alternative sentence ‘The
island of Corsica while geographically Italian belongs to France’.30
The publishing industry in Italy was backward and in most cases it
was not in a position to gear up to the effective nationalization which
Fascism imposed on it with the introduction of the state textbook. The
policy of a national textbook had the direct effect of driving at least 33
small publishing houses out of business, but it appears to have been a
failure in terms of projected sales on the ‘open’ market. The theory had
been that forced adoption of an approved textbook would rationalize
production, raise standards and sell copies to every child in the
country. Yet sales of new books actually fell. The ministry responded
by cutting the price of the books by 50% to the dismay of the publish-
ers who were still left in the market and of booksellers with stock
on their shelves. The publishers’ association lobbied the minister, in
1931–32 to carry out an inspection to ascertain that every boy and girl
in the state had their own copy of the textbook. Mondadori even peti-
tioned for a ban on the sale of second-hand books.31
The introduction of the libro di stato had profound implications for
the publishing industry. A letter to Mussolini from the publishing
house Ceschina of Milan, former publisher of Il Popolo d’Italia, gives a
vivid indication of the problems for publishers cut out of that market:
With the setting in train of provisions relative to the adoption of

the libro di stato, the state accorded exclusive rights for the printing
and sale of the textbook to a group of thirty three publishing houses
(out of a total of about 300 which had their own school texts in
their warehouses and were therefore damaged by the reform). Thus
it came about that this group has a monopoly on the printing and
sale of the libro di stato, making an annual profit of five million lire.
Apart from the fact that since 1929 no other publisher can benefit
from this market, the Ceschina publishing house makes the observa-
tion that the publishers in this group, sure of a income guaranteed
to them, feel free to enter other markets at competitive rates and
offering discounts to booksellers such as to make impossible the
lives of other publishers, which do not have the cushion of the
school textbook. To make matters worse, the retailers – who are
always short of funds – are obliged to pay for the libro di stato in
cash, with the result that they find it difficult to meet their obliga-
tions to other publishers.32
Ceschina was outside the charmed circle and was requesting a sub-
vention from Mussolini, which it duly received. It is important to
remember however that the libro dello stato initiative applied only to
primary schools (scuole elementari). Post-primary education presented a
much smaller and more disparate market, but it was a market which
continued to offer some opportunities to publishers, although, as the
Ceschina letter makes clear, those without a contract for the libro di
stato were at a distinct disadvantage. After the 1923 legislation, the
number of titles increased very significantly for the scuole medie:33
Year No. of book titles % of book market
1923 490 8.06

1925 860 14.0
1927 1001 15.3
This was a market in which because of the different types of secondary

schools, even for the most popular books, print runs of more than
200,000 made no economic sense. While there were about four million
primary-school pupils, there were only about 300,000 in secondary
education, and these were concentrated mainly in urban areas. The
secondary-school market was therefore much more like the university
sector. But the market did allow a survival strategy for the smaller pub-
lishing houses, such as Vallardi and Carabba, which had been squeezed
out of the primary-schools market by Bemporad and Mondadori, on the
basis of decisions made by the Commissioni centrali. The literary and
humanist emphasis of Gentile’s reforms led to success in the secondary-
schools market for anthologies which combined literature with history
and politics.34 There is an irony here as Gentile himself favoured and
promoted editions of complete texts (testo integrale) but the market
response to his reforms was driven by the efficiencies which anthologies
represented. A rise in the number of anthologies for the scuole medie led
to wrangling over copyright. Galfré cites the example of Gentile’s son
Federico wanting to anthologize some of Carducci’s poems and being
granted grudgingly six pages by Zanichelli who held the copyright and
who had offered initially just three pages, the legal minimum.35
Publishers entered into competition for the services of known
authors whose names would provide endorsement for the anthologies
and thus secure market share. Grazia Deledda, future Nobel laureate,
made an anti-Communist narrative contribution to rural values in
1930.36 The four main Florentine publishing houses, Bemporad,
Sansoni, Le Monnier and Vallecchi, came increasingly under Gentile’s
personal influence, especially in the 1930s, and Bemporad’s strategy in
relation to his authors is indicative of the degree to which the success-
ful publishing houses had internalized the process of censorship. In a
letter of 1927 Bemporad explained to Arpalice Cuman Pertile, one of
his most prolific authors:
My firm has to insist to its authors that there is the closest harmony
possible between our books and the ethos of Italian schools, in rela-
tion to the curriculum and to ministerial directives […] between
books and the practice of the Catholic Church […] between books
and the national ideals: independence, pride, and Italian autonomy;
between books and the lifestyle promoted by Fascism, between
books and the legislation which Fascism has put into effect in Italy
in terms of the constitution, the administration and the unions;
between books and the general directives for the physical health
of the young, directives which Fascism wants to follow and see
followed and see widely propagated.37
In response Cuman Pertile suggested small revisions to one of her

books, such as placing a picture of Mussolini alongside ones of the king
and an image of the crucifix. Bemporad was not satisfied that this
would be seen as sufficiently Fascist to protect his investment in a new
edition and therefore demanded far more extensive revisions. With
these measures in place and this mindset embedded, the regime could
claim disingenuously that it was not seeking to influence the market,
and that when small publishers went to the wall they did so because
they were not supplying what their customers demanded.
Discussion of the market however would be incomplete without
some consideration of the retail sector. There were clear differences
between the interests of publishers and booksellers. The latter did not
have the same exposure to risk or production cost, but they stood to
lose out to direct selling and to bulk discounts for schools and public
bodies. Competition between publishers for the market in the scuole
medie pushed them in the direction of printing and distributing inspec-
tion copies to teachers. This was of course a commercial risk which put
bulk-buying power in the hands of teachers. Publishers therefore had
to compete in terms of both quality and value, which allowed for price
wars and removed all remaining small players from the market. It also
drove down the unit cost of the royalty rates for authors.38 Effective
nationalization did not succeed in resolving the sectors’ problem of
discounting books. In autumn 1930 the booksellers of Naples reported
angrily that some schools in the province continued the practice of
subsidized selling of books to pupils, on the (probably reasonable)
pretext that the schools were meeting the needs of poor families by
their actions. The minister repeated his ban on the practice which,
after almost eight years of this consistent message, indicates limited
success for the policy’s implementation. Monica Galfré argues convinc-
ingly that the material problem of discounts and local arrangements
with publishing houses lies at the heart of the libro di stato debate,
rather than the legislation or Gentile’s Actualism.
In one way or another, teachers remained a cause for concern in the
eyes of the regime. It was reassuring for the state to have a list of
approved textbooks. This represented a state-directed horizon of expec-
tation for teachers and pupils, but it also left enough of an element of
choice at teachers’ discretion to worry both government and the pub-
lishing industry. That was particularly true of the scuole medie. At the
end of December 1928 the minister Belluzzo sent out a circular to
headteachers requesting a list of the textbooks used in secondary
schools. One month later and just after the law on state textbooks for
primary schools came into force, Belluzzo sent out a second circular
indicating that secondary-school teachers also had an obligation to
adopt textbooks which conformed to the ethos and values of the
Fascist state. This was a new and more subtle approach than the legisla-
tive route. Teachers were now required to act as censors, by bringing
the power of the customer to bear on the publishing industry. The free
market was thus harnessed to Fascist will.39
A ministerial circular of May 1930 warned that:
The adherence of the textbook to the spirit and action of the Fascist
regime must consist in more than just pompous phrases. They must
interpret their subject in a way which responds to our new culture
which is intimately and passionately Italian in character.
This directive had largely been anticipated by the publishers and it

worked across the curriculum, most obviously in the humanities where
the work of writers such as D’Annunzio and Oriani replaced writers
from the wider European canon, such as Balzac. The fascistization of
the textbook extended to the sciences and to languages as well. Further
reforms in 1933 removed Rousseau and Croce from the philosophy

curriculum. Schools were required to terminate their subscriptions to
Croce’s journal La Critica, which he had founded along with Gentile
three decades earlier. This move was again consistent with the regime’s
strategy of imposing economic sanctions on its enemies, where these
had the potential to be effective. These blacklists were issued with
increasing frequency and breadth of coverage from 1929 onwards.40
‘Consensus’ and the marginalization of Gentile
Gentile had come from humble origins in Sicily. In December 1932 he

acquired a majority stake in Sansoni and became chairman of the
board at Le Monnier, installing his family in positions of power and
creating a dominant publishing interest in Florence with two well-
respected brands and extensive market penetration, especially in the
universities. In 1933 he took a significant interest in Bemporad along
with Armando Paoletti and Vito Benedetto Orzalesi, driving Enrico
Bemporad out of his family business in 1934. The centres of schools
publishing were Milan (Mondadori), Turin (Paravia, Sei), Bologna
(Zanichelli), Abruzzo (Carabba) and Sicily (Principato and Sandron).
After 1929 these publishers sought to build up good relations and curry
favour with the regime through self-censorship and the marketing of
blatant propaganda. The results were publications such as Paravia’s
Italian Pioneers and Martyrs in East Africa (1936).
Gentile himself however began to withdraw from public political life
into the more rarefied atmosphere of the Accademia d’Italia and his edi-
torship of the Enciclopedia italiana. The fact that he engaged known
anti-Fascists as contributors to the latter has been taken by his post-
humous supporters as an indication of his independence of mind and
his distancing himself from Fascism. The latter contention might even
be sustained were it not for his subsequent activities in the Repubblica
sociale italiana. It is nonetheless true that a distance did open up
between his educational reforms and the policy of the regime in the
1930s. One main reason for this is also related to a form of censorship.
On 11 February 1929 Mussolini signed the Lateran Pacts with the
Vatican, taking by surprise even members of his own government who
had been unaware of the negotiations which had been underway for
some years. It was not a surprise to Gentile. As a convinced secularist,
he had been entrusted by Mussolini with responsibility for negotiating
with Father Tacchi Venturi. His earlier pronouncements on the role of
the Church had not won much favour with the Catholic hierarchy. In
his first significant act on becoming minister in 1922 he stressed the

power of the state to control schools by revoking the provision which
allowed pupils to be absent from school for a religious festival which
was not recognized by the state. Apparently backtracking, in a minister-
ial communication of 26 December 1922 he had announced his inten-
tion to make religious education ‘the principal foundation of public
education and the whole moral restoration of the Italian spirit’. But this
pragmatic adoption of religion for reasons of state was an ambiguous
compromise and it did not go far enough to please the Vatican. In an
interview published ten days later (La Tribuna, 5 January 1923) Gentile
explained that by making religious education obligatory, in the manner
of the Casati Law in the previous century, ‘Italian children should be
taught the Catholic religion in the same way as they should be taught
the language of the Italian writers’.41 Gentile’s concern however was not
in Catholic terms with the children’s immortal souls but with their
sense of discipline and culture. To forge a strong state Catholicism was
preferable to any form of Protestantism because:
Leaving to the individual complete freedom of conscience and

allowing everyone to come up with his own credo, offers much less
force of cohesion (forza di fusione) or reduction to unity of the think-
ing spirit.42
This preference was consistent with confessional policy throughout

the ventennio. Giorgio Rochat in his history of the small Protestant
communities under Fascism has argued that their treatment:
Demonstrates just how precarious religious liberty was, when it had

to depend of the personal whims of prefects and their capacity to
resist the influence of the local Catholic hierarchy, without any con-
crete opportunity for the evangelicals to be protected by the laws of
the land or have recourse to the central authorities.43
Gentile’s strategy corresponded to Mussolini’s in seeking a rap-

prochement with the Catholic Church in order to consolidate power.
His interview in Tribuna was sufficient to win him some praise in the
pages of L’Osservatore romano and Civiltà cattolica where his words
were interpreted in Catholic terms. The editor wrote that the minister
Gentile deserves ‘the sincere approval of the majority of Italians, that
is to say the Catholics, although their beliefs are far from the theories
of the philosopher’.
These public utterances accompanied private dialogue between

Gentile and the Vatican, authorized by Mussolini, originally with the
intention of undermining the Partito popolare and yielding Catholic
consensus for the new order. Under pressure from the Vatican, Gentile
instructed the Central Commission for school textbooks to permit the
Church freedom in selection of the appropriate teaching materials for
religious education. Gentile and Tacchi Venturi were in regular contact
from 1923 onwards, through which Gentile was permitted to consult
Giordano Bruno’s papers in the secret archive of the Inquisition. Two
years later the papers were published in the Giornale critico della filosofia
italiana, edited by Monsignor Enrico Caruso.44
The public war of words continued however between the Catholics
and the Actualists, Gentile’s philosophical disciples. Padre Agostino
Gemelli in Milan launched an attack on Gentile in the pages of
La Civiltà cattolica at the time of the signing of the Lateran Pacts,
criticizing the bringing into schools of works by Bruno, Spinoza,
Kant, Hegel, Rosmini and the other heretical philosophers intro-
duced by the 1923 reforms, adding pithily that ‘no philosophical
system negates Christian values as much as Idealism, even though
it may use our very words’. 45 This attack provoked a swift reply
from Gentile in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, defending
his philosophy from the charges of heresy. But by 1929, as the libro
di stato was introduced, Catholics were gaining ground against
Gentile’s Actualism, and threatening to put his works on the Index
of Prohibited Books. The Fascist consensus began to shift away from
Gentile. When the conservative monarchist and quadrumvir, Cesare
Maria De Vecchi, became Minister for National Education in January
1935, after having spent five years as ambassador to the Vatican,
he brought to his new post a personal commitment to compro-
mise between Fascism and the Church, and an antipathy to Gentile
and his educational reforms. The tide had turned against Gentile
definitively: the previous year, all of his writings had been placed on
the Index. De Vecchi was thoroughly unpopular with the teaching
profession, and regarded by Gentile’s circle as an ignoramus, but
given Mussolini’s imperial ambitions in early 1935 it is not difficult
to see why he wanted a philistine hard-liner in charge of his
Ministry for National Education. 46 He was replaced by Giuseppe
Bottai at the end of 1936 who set about drafting a Carta della scuola
or Schools’ Charter, to undo most of Gentile’s reforms. Italy’s entry
into the war in 1940 frustrated attempts at implementing Bottai’s
charter.
Hearts, minds and bodies
The introduction of the state textbook (libro di stato) in 1928, repre-

sented a U-turn on the proposals for reform which had been brought
forward by Gentile and by Lombardo Radice. Their original project
had been to appoint an expert commission, made up in part of teach-
ers and educationalists, to advise the government on the choice of
appropriate textbooks, in order to provide the basis for a spiritual
renewal of Italian youth, where teaching and learning would become
a stimulating experience rather than rote-based tedium. This reform,
however, paved the way for far greater state control, and for the sce-
nario which manifested itself in 1928 when the state rejected the tra-
ditional, liberal element of a teacher’s judgement by imposing an
approved set of textbooks. In the view of Anna Ascenzi and Roberto
Sani, Gentile’s Idealist proposal became the Wooden Horse through
which the Fascist regime was able to impose, in the name of the
state, its conception of the school textbook as an instrument of ideo-
logical and political propaganda.47 To give a brief example, the fol-
lowing is Grazia Deledda, writing in 1930, for the 12-year olds of the
terza elementare. The Communists, she wrote are people who ‘do not
understand other people’s rights, won by sacrifice’. On the other
hand, they don’t really mean what they say and hard work could
improve them: ‘continual contact with nature, with the dawn,
sunsets and sun-drenched noontides […] makes them good, although
they don’t at times want to appear so’.48
Despite his later opposition, the values upheld by Lombardo
Radice and his successor Giovanni Vidari, of nationalism, the cult of
the Fatherland, the exaltation of the Great War as a further step in
the process begun by the Risorgimento, the sniping at democracy and
the general social conservatism, all played their part in the forging
of commonsense-values in the everyday life of the regime. The
cumulative effect of Gentile’s reforms was to reduce the status of
scientific and technical education at school and university in a
short-sighted and traditionalist attempt to promote education in the
humanities in order to mould a new ruling class. Literature, history
and philosophy, previously the domain of the liceo were extended to
the istituti magistrali and the istituti scientifici. Even fewer pupils went
on to read science and engineering at the universities at a time when
the university population actually doubled. Therefore many more
humanities graduates emerged on to the labour market as teachers,
lawyers, journalists and especially as civil servants.
Breakdown of university students by faculty, 1913–14 to 1940–41
1913–14 1920–21 1926–27 1930–31 1936–37 1940–41
Law 9,382 9,766 8,871 10,073 14,097 20,937

Economics 1,379 7,212 5,886 8,285 13,008 23,011
Languages & 1,908 3,586 2,501 2,709 7,756 15,779
Literature
Teacher training 282 941 1,070 1,456 6,229 13,800
Medicine 5,342 10,208 8,865 9,991 13,829 13,781
Engineering 6,332 12,362 6,567 4,290 4,472 9,331
Science 1,325 4,030 2,906 2,269 3,347 8,840
Pharmacy 1,080 2,350 3,228 2,734 2,266 2,567
Agricultural 547 1,391 1,027 1,130 1,382 2,533
science
Applied 0 0 152 121 127 450
chemistry
Others 449 1,393 1,791 3,204 4,999 16,029
Total 28,026 53,239 42,864 46,262 71,512 127,058
Source: ISTAT, Statistica dell’istruzione superiore nell’anno accademico 1945–46 (Rome, 1948).49
Gentile’s reforms were more traditionally Liberal than Fascist in

any meaningful sense. Bottai quipped at a meeting with teachers in
November 1938 that it could be described as ‘the most Fascist of
reforms’ only because chronologically it was the first one to take place.50
Mussolini had been impressed by the speed with which Gentile carried
out his project, but he had no interest in producing a ruling class of
young men versed in the Humanities. Instead Mussolini wanted to
recruit teachers to the cause, and to produce a population of young war-
riors and their wives who would give their unreflecting devotion to the
state. In the realization of the ethical state and the daily functioning of
the regime, Mussolini’s ‘most Fascist of reforms’ was meant to change
hearts and minds. In some ways the policy succeeded.
Many teachers took very seriously their role of monitoring and
reporting behaviour and attitudes which were unconventional or
politically incorrect. Those who joined the PNF – and many did –
saw it as their duty to root out from the profession colleagues who
displayed a lack of commitment to the ideals of the ethical state. In
December 1933, a male primary school teacher in Perugia, Raffaele
went to ask a female colleague in another classroom a routine ques-
tion about work. 51 He noticed, on the wall behind her chair, and
beside the enormous portrait of the duce, a small postcard depicting
a small boy. He asked his colleague who the little boy was.
According to the police report she replied: ‘Don’t you see? It’s Benito
Mussolini as a boy’. To which Raffaele joked: ‘So he’s always had
that delinquent look about him!’ His colleague was not amused. She
reported him to the carabinieri and Raffaele was arrested. Despite
decoration for valour in the Great War, and the prefect’s consequent
recommendation for leniency, the matter was referred to Bocchini,
who, after his daily consultation with Mussolini, ordered that
Raffaele be sent to confino.
The Opera nazionale Balilla or ONB, was established in 1926 as a
politicized version of the Boy Scouts, to provide paramilitary instruc-
tion and male bonding in military ceremonies and rituals, as part of
boyhood experience. Mussolini’s infamous slogan, libro e moschetto,
fascista perfetto (A book and a rifle make the perfect Fascist) made its
way into school life in 1928 when the running of many rural schools
was given over to the ONB. Some of their activities can be viewed on
the LUCE newsreels which are now online as part of the Istituto’s
archive.52 A parallel Party-controlled network, the fasci giovanili di
combattimento was set up in 1930, with a similar mission, but aimed at
the working classes and rural youth, and the two networks existed in a
spirit of rivalry until 1937 when they were merged into the GIL, the
Gioventù italiana del Littorio, which was managed by the PNF.
Rates of illiteracy did decline under Fascism, in common with the
rest of the developed world, but the decline was spread unevenly
throughout the peninsula, with persistent peaks in the rural south,
where in 1936 after more than a decade of Fascist improvements,
21% of brides could not sign their names on the marriage register.53
The raising of educational aspiration among working-class women was
not a high priority of Fascism’s programme.
Employment rates doubled in the public sector during the 1930s.
This was good news for the middle classes whose position was consoli-
dated in terms of wealth and educational opportunity. Many of these
new public sector jobs were in education. Educational reform was cre-
ating additional posts for which university degrees were required, but
in 1931–32 it is estimated that only 3% of university students came
from working-class backgrounds in contrast to 5% 20 years earlier,
before the First World War.54 Virtually none of these were women.
Alongside those figures however it should be noted by in 1935–36,
17.4% of university students were female, as opposed to less than 4%
in 1914.55 The real beneficiaries of Fascist educational policies appear
therefore to have been the daughters of the middle classes, whose
reading tastes, as we shall see in a later chapter, caused further prob-

lems for the Fascist censors. Many of these young women gravitated
towards jobs as teachers, usually science teachers, as under the Fascist
laws women were prevented from teaching history, philosophy, Italian
and Latin, while the Catholic Church had its own dogmatic reserva-
tions about their teaching religion.
Certainly, young female teachers, especially those entering the pro-
fession having themselves been educated in Italian schools after 1922,
appear to have been the most zealous when it came to reporting exam-
ples of unorthodoxy.56 Their reports could have profound effects on
the lives of both older colleagues and children or their families. Even
occasional passers-by could be in trouble if they got on the wrong side
of the young maestra. On the morning of 22 October 1939, in the little
village of Cedegolo in the hills around Brescia, a young maestra was
taking her class for an orderly walk. The children, dressed in their
Balilla and figli di lupa uniforms were singing suitably wholesome
Fascist songs which they had learned from listening to the radio. An
elderly man, observing the scene, was reported to the police by the
outraged maestra, for suggesting to a group of little girls from her class
that they should sing Bandiera rossa instead of the song they were
singing. Just in case they were unfamiliar with the tune he began
singing it for them. Police investigations revealed that the man was
married, unemployed and living in dire poverty. He was sent to confino
in a remote part of the province of Catanzaro.57
Disrespectful boys could find their behaviour reported to the prefect or
even have their homework sent to the local PNF boss. On 5 December
1933, in a town near Perugia, the maestra asked her class if they knew
who had founded the Opera nazionale Balilla. Twelve-year old Gustavo,
whose father was a member of the PNF, replied in an insolent tone: ‘That
blackguard (beccamorto) Benito Mussolini!’ The carabiniere report noted
that Gustavo had enjoyed the benefits of being a member of the ONB for
five years, but that he was arrogant, astute, deceitful and not fond of his
studies. Having established that his family was above suspicion of anti-
Fascist sentiment, the prefect concluded that the boy must be tainted
with a moral defect, with the implication that he represented a danger to
moral development of other children: a cancer to be removed. Gustavo,
aged 12, was sent to a reformatory for insulting the duce.
Fascism had taken less of a hold among university staff. Towards the
end of 1931 university professors were required to take an oath of
loyalty.58 Gentile conceived of this oath as a means of providing a public
repudiation for those who had signed Croce’s anti-Fascist manifesto and
who now wished to hold on to their university posts. It was intended as

a humiliation and an extension of the oath which he had imposed on
teachers in his 1923 reforms. The university oath, published in the
Gazzetta ufficiale on 8 October 1931 read:
I swear to be faithful to the king, to his royal successors and to the

Fascist regime, to observe loyally the Statute and the other laws of the
state, to carry out the office of lecturer and to discharge all my other
academic duties with the aim of producing subjects who are diligent,
honest, and devoted to the country and to the Fascist regime. I swear
that I do not and that I will not belong to associations or parties
whose activities are incompatible with my office.59
More than simply a humiliation, any academic who took the oath
in bad faith knew he could be setting himself up to be pilloried as a
hypocrite and forced out of his position anyway. The academics
were bound in golden chains. Losing one’s job in those circum-
stances would have meant emigration, financial ruin and conse-
quent family break-up or a morally-corrupting compromise with the
ethical state.
The oath, however, was not accepted without protest. Pope Pius XI
in his encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno of 19 June 1931 had criticized a
similar oath of loyalty to the PNF which was being used as a weapon
against Azione cattolica. Agostino Gemelli, rettore of the Sacro Cuore in
Milan negotiated a dispensation for staff at his university, a step repro-
bated by the pope who saw the dangers of breaking ranks. Pius XI took
the unusual step of issuing an anonymous criticism of the oath on the
front page of the Osservatore romano, arguing that the words ‘Fascist
regime’ ought to be replaced by ‘government of the state’.60
Croce was opposed to the imposition of the oath as one more Fascist
attack on liberty, but he recognized that as a senator of private means
he had no moral authority to advise men to give up their livelihoods
for the sake of principle. In any case he took the view that it was pre-
ferable for sceptics to remain within the university system in order to
keep alive some spirit of anti-Fascist liberty of thought, for the benefit
of the students and the future of Italy. He passed this advice on in
private communications. Unlike Pius XI, he did not have access to
media of wide circulation. Togliatti’s line of reasoning differed from
Croce’s but it resulted in the same advice: he instructed the relatively
few Communist academics to take the oath as a meaningless gesture in
order to further the interests of the party and the anti-Fascist cause.
A total of 12 professors refused to take the oath. Gentile had reason to

feel vindicated in that initiative at least.
Gentile’s school reforms, intended to confer status and prestige on
the humanities had the direct and probably unintended effect of con-
signing the future of Italian science and technology teaching to the
daughters of middle class families, many of whom appear to have cher-
ished the ideals of the ethical state. In most cases this appears to have
had a deadening effect on the pupils’ educational experience, even if
though did create true believers among the ranks of the teaching pro-
fession right up to the point in 1941 when it began to dawn on the
Italian population at large that Fascist rhetoric and propaganda were
not sufficient to win the war. Aurelio Lepre has cited coffee talk involv-
ing another maestra, in Sardinia on 9 November 1940, reported by an
ambulant OVRA spy:
The victory is within our grasp. It’s ours for the taking. The Duce’s
words were holy words, announcing our going to war. And he was
so manly! Our motto is: we will win, and we will. This man is truly
led by God […] he is truly the man whom Italy needed.61
But while doubtless there were true believers among the teaching
profession, the experience of Fascist schooling probably had less in
common with Gentile’s vision of active learning than with the tedious
and authoritarian experience conveyed by Federico Fellini in Amarcord.
In political terms the most important side effect of Gentile’s reform
was the promotion of censorship as a tool which could be used to distort
the market. It was used adroitly to create apparently free market condi-
tions in which publishers, booksellers and writers had to internalize cen-
sorship in order to remain in a market that made them dependent on
state subsidy at the personal whim of the duce, and in which readers in
school and in society at large were fed a daily ration of censored infor-
mation and interpretation manipulated by ideology masquerading as
commonsense. That model, however, presupposes a passive, uncritical
readership in order to achieve its aims. That was not always the case: in
April 1939, a 12-year old boy in Macerata, Lucio, handed in his home-
work essay on the subject of ‘Our duce’. He appears not to have believed
Grazia Deledda. The essay gave a vivid description of Mussolini’s
Socialist youth, but then continued:
Rich now, forgetting the battles in defence of the proletariat, with

vile manoeuvres he has become the plutocratic Dictator of this
Italy of nearly 44 million people, where more than 40 million are

forced to live a miserable, poverty-stricken existence while the rest
live in abundance, on the hog’s back under the fluttering flags: the
ridiculous farce of imperial Italy dying of hunger.62
In disgust, the maestra, ‘widow of one of the province’s first Fascists,

sister of a volunteer in Spain and another one in East Africa’ and a true
believer in Fascist values, confiscated the child’s exercise book and sent
it to the secretary of the local Fascist federation in Macerata. He paid a
visit to the school, accompanied by the commander of the local cara-
binieri, and they questioned the maestra and Lucio separately. It tran-
spired that Lucio’s mother, a widow, had been befriended by Fulgo, a
middle-aged builder’s labourer, and that Fulgo was taking a hand in
the boy’s education at home. Arrested by the federation secretary,
Fulgo confirmed that he had explained Italian politics to Lucio, from
the viewpoint of an unemployed Communist who had been sentenced
for desertion in 1918, amnestied in 1922, and later sent to confino in
Ustica from 1926 to 1933. He was condemned to another four years in
confino by Mussolini for corrupting young Lucio. Released in August
1943, he died in action as one of the partisan leaders in the province of
Macerata.63
4
Journalism as Mission
Journalism occupied a special place in the life of the Fascist regime.

Next to educating the rising generations, journalism seemed to repre-
sent the most effective means to mould consensus and consolidate
power. That said, throughout the first decade in power the Fascist
conception of journalism rarely strayed beyond the print media,
despite the opportunities for mass communication presented by radio
and cinematic news-reel technologies. Mussolini understood how to
run a newspaper and he surrounded himself with newspaper men,
promoting former journalists and press officers to positions of great
power within his government. Some fell from grace spectacularly:
Cesare Rossi was kidnapped by covert security forces in Marseilles
and brought back to Italy so that he could be sent to confino,
Galeazzo Ciano died before a firing squad, on the orders of his father-
in-law at Christmas 1941. Alessandro Pavolini, ex-Minister for
Popular Culture, who signed Ciano’s death warrant, died himself
with his duce at Dongo. The only one of the duce’s associates to take
his own life when Mussolini lost power in 1943 was Manlio
Morgagni, head of the Agenzia Stefani and a former editor of Il Popolo
d’Italia. Mostly, however, the story of journalism under the regime
has less to do with obsessive loyalty and violent death, and more to
do with money, rivalries, censorship, protectionism, resistance to
innovation, resentments and frustrations.
Inspiring loyalty
On 10 October 1928, the directors of about 70 daily newspapers, all of

them male, were summoned to Palazzo Chigi in order to hear a speech
from Mussolini which has come to be known as ‘Il giornalismo come
77
missione’ or Journalism as Mission.1 In it Mussolini set out to reject crit-

icism that he was muzzling a free press, and to articulate his views con-
cerning the mission of the Fascist journalist. The address reiterated that
the draconian legislation of January 1925 was fundamental to the
direction of a Fascist press, which had the duty to be a force in the
service of the regime. Applying this principle, it followed that the press
was to censor out stories and interpretations which were damaging to
the regime and to promote ones which were useful to furthering Fascist
aims and objectives:
In Italy, unlike in other countries, rather than being a profession or

a trade, journalism becomes a mission of great importance and deli-
cacy, because in the contemporary era, [second in significance] after
the schools which teach the next generation, it is journalism which
circulates among the masses and carries out its work of informing
and sensitizing (informazione e formazione).2
In a neat piece of sophistry, the duce went on to argue that the

Italian press under Fascism had more freedom than any other
national press because in other countries newspapers got their
orders from ‘plutocratic groups’, parties and individuals, and were
driven by sales figures to publish scandal and salacious news stories.
Echoing a confessional turn of phrase in a characteristically blas-
phemous manner, Italian journalism, on the other hand, he argued,
had perfect freedom because it served just one cause and one
regime.
Departing from quasi religious discourse, and in order to preserve the
illusion of diversity, he used the famous musical simile of setting the
tone:
I consider Fascist Italian journalism to be like an orchestra. You tune

to a common pitch. This note is not given by the government
through its Press Offices […]. It is the pitch which Fascist journalism
sets for itself. It knows how to serve the regime. It does not need to
await daily orders. […] But within this common pitch there is a
diversity which avoids cacophony and instead produces full and
divine harmony.3
Thus, for example, provincial newspapers were to avoid world news

in a rational division of labour, which left foreign news to the dailies
with national circulation. But all were to unite to create and maintain
Journalism as Mission 79
an atmosphere of consensus. The regime’s war against adjectives stems

from this speech too. Mussolini warned, in matters of style, that:
Six years of the deeds of the Fascist Revolution are greater than any
word, and certainly greater than a profusion of words. Nouns render
adjectives superfluous.4
Even more unhelpful to the regime than traditional journalistic dis-

course, he warned, was excessive space given over to cronaca nera, or
sensational news, aimed at boosting sales rather than promoting a pos-
itive image of Fascist Italy. Fascist newspapers were to be discreet and
balanced, giving no hostages to fortune which opponents abroad
might use against the regime. On the other hand, matters of opinion
in art, science and philosophy were to be open to vigorous debate,
where party membership was no guarantee of being in the right.
By the time he made this speech in late 1928, opposition newspapers
had been suppressed and the old liberal titles such as Il Corriere della
Sera and La Stampa had been placed in the hands of editors sympa-
thetic to the regime. Mussolini had his own direct daily-newspaper
interest in the form of Il Popolo d’Italia, edited by his brother in Milan,
and the brothers spoke on the telephone most evenings about news
stories for the following day. Mussolini also had a less direct interest in
a Roman daily, Il Tevere, which he founded in December 1924. It was
edited by Telesio Interlandi, with whom he had regular, unminuted
meetings. Mussolini produced anonymous pieces for Il Tevere, and it
would be fair to regard it as a vehicle for ideas and debates which were
regarded as too radical or polemical for the mainstream press under
Fascism.5
The purpose of the October 1928 speech was to motivate the leaders in
the Italian press. His audience was well aware that behind the words of
encouragement and occasional reproach, there lurked polemic with
Giuseppe Bottai who had criticized the Italian print media in his Critica
fascista for being grey and uninspiring. They were also aware that the
threat of sanctions had not gone away and that it hung over any attempt
to boost sales at the expense of discipline and the good reputation of the
regime. It is an unusual conception of a free press.
From Press Office to independent ministry
‘Journalism as Mission’ was delivered within weeks of a shake up at

the Press Office. Lando Ferretti, sports journalist and Fascist of the
First Hour, replaced Capasso Torre in September 1928. Unlike his aris-
tocratic predecessor, Ferretti had no hesitation in transforming the
Ufficio stampa into a propaganda machine, on the model of the Ufficio
propaganda of the PNF, in which he had worked previously. His
instincts were more demotic and his tone with editors and prefects was
more strident than that of Capasso Torre. The following, for example,
is a telegram to the High Commissioner of Naples, 5 June 1929 sent at
13.30:
It is quite appropriate that Il Mezzogiorno of Naples should publish a

lengthy item on the eruption of Vesuvius. But it is not right that the
eruption itself should take up two columns, under the cinemato-
graphic title ‘Fire Magic’. That is journalistic licence which I pray
Your Excellency to mute in line with the instructions issued from
this office yesterday.
Ferretti6
In 1931 he persuaded Mussolini to institute a propaganda section in

the Ufficio stampa, to sit alongside the existing sections for the Italian
and foreign press. The Press Office had therefore expanded its role from
its original monitoring of the domestic press, under Rossi, and the
foreign press, under Capasso Torre. The function of the propaganda
section would be to spread ideas of Italianità and Romanità in the run up
to the Decennale, the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. In spite
of this forward planning, however, Ferretti was replaced in December
1931, after three years in post, by Gaetano Polverelli, another former
editor of Il Popolo d’Italia and a political animal to his finger-tips.
Polverelli was a committed Fascist who, as Minister for Popular
Culture, would later vote against Grandi’s motion to the Gran Consiglio
in July 1943, which brought the regime to an end, and would follow
Mussolini to the RSI. He took over the role of press secretary in the same
month that Starace was appointed secretary of the PNF, in another
instance of Mussolini’s periodic changing of the guard. Polverelli imme-
diately set about browbeating newspaper editors and proprietors, so that
they would appoint reliable Fascists to important positions within their
enterprises. He encouraged a process of myth making in relation to the
duce and to the image of Italy which the regime wanted to present to its
people and to the world.
Ferretti and Polverelli had moved the focus of the Ufficio stampa from
monitoring and preventive censorship to propaganda and productive
censorship, shaping the news agenda. Both Cannistraro and Guerri cite
a circular from Ferretti, issued in 1931, which sums up the role set out
for newspapers in Fascist Italy at this point: ‘Newspapers must be
organs of propaganda for Italianità and the regime’.7 The means to
achieve this end were to be on the one hand a myth making of the
person of Mussolini as both an elite political leader and as super-
contadino and on the other consistent and uncritical praise of Italy and
her government’s actions, occasionally accompanied by denigration of
foreign governments. This treatment of Italian affairs extended to
Mussolini’s obsession with filtering out cronaca nera. Polverelli wrote a
very detailed document in 1931 (‘Rinnovare il tipo di giornale’), setting
out official communications policy, when he took up his new post:
One must reproduce regularly the salient ideas expressed by the

Duce in his most recent speeches […] make the front page uniform
with titles on seven columns […] improve the pagination technique
[…] promote an ardent passion for Italian and Fascist identity,
which should shine from every issue of the newspaper […] you must
check the news and the articles from the national and Fascist point
of view, asking yourselves the question, are these publications
helpful or unhelpful to Italy and to the Regime? […] you must illus-
trate periodically the institutions, the projects and the initiatives of
the Regime […] guide the paper towards optimism, confidence and
faith in the future. Get rid of alarmist, catastrophic and depressing
news […] you must present social welfare programmes only in terms
of their organizational side without dwelling on sentiment so as not
to give out abroad the impression of grave poverty, which does not
exist here […] it is a serious error to publish in newspapers pho-
tographs of socialists, communists, etc. It’s time to have done with
articles on old poverty-stricken Italy, divided and discordant […]
You must bring together all news in the foreign papers which relates
to the Regime and to Fascism, as well as news on the spread of
Fascism throughout the world […] you must publicize all news
which refers to notable acts of Fascists. Fascist women must be phys-
ically healthy so as to become mothers of healthy children, accord-
ing to the ‘rules for life’ set out by the Duce; so there must be an
end to images of female figures which are artificially thin or mascu-
line as they represent the type of barren woman of decadent western
society. […] Court reports must be checked for political soundness,
cutting anything that might damage the credit or interests of the
nation […] Photographs of Italian events and panoramas must
always be examined for their political effect, so if it is a photograph
of a crowd, shoot the photographs with blank spaces, if the story is

about new roads, or an area of monuments, etc., leave out the ones
which do not give a good impression of order, of activity, of traffic,
etc […] Do not publish articles, poems or titles in dialect. The
encouragement of dialect literature runs counter to the spiritual and
political directives of the Regime which are resolutely unitary.
Regionalism and dialects are the residue of centuries of the division
and servitude of the old Italy […] You should no longer use the
expression ‘the Mezzogiorno’ […] nor talk about the family of the
Duce […] you should take a constructive interest in artists and
professionals, important forces for the Nation.8
In May 1933 Joseph Goebbels visited Italy’s cultural institutions and

imparted his experience of even greater centralization in Germany. Just
over three months later, in August 1933 Polverelli was replaced by the
duce’s son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, recently recalled from his tour of
duty in China, along with his wife and first-born, Mussolini’s first
grandchild. Ciano belonged to a younger generation, and was son of a
Fascist of the First Hour, rather than being one himself. He had edu-
cated, conservative middle-class tastes and had some experience of
journalism. Furthermore he had diplomatic training and a far less
heavy-handed approach to dealing with editors and journalists. Ciano
expanded the Press Office assigning seven journalists to collect from
and distribute news to the prefects in Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin,
Bologna, Naples and Palermo.
Ciano formalized the preventive censorship implicitly put in train by
Ferretti and Polverelli, by requiring publishers and printers to submit
to their local prefect three copies of every text, design or picture which
they intended to publish or otherwise distribute. The prefect was to
keep one copy and forward the others to the Ufficio stampa and to the
Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza, in the Ministry of the Interior.
The copy held locally was to be examined by an official from the pre-
fecture and one from the Pubblica sicurezza. Material which was consid-
ered politically suspect was to be referred immediately to the Ufficio
stampa for a judgement. Material which gave offence to morals or
public decency (including information on birth control) was to be
referred to the Pubblica sicurezza.
Prefects were also to make rulings on language policy, something
well outside the brief normally associated with the security forces.
There was understandable confusion among the prefects in relation to
local newspapers and their use of regional Italian and of dialect. In
response to their various requests for clarifications Ciano issued the

following document on 10 August 1934:
The principle has not been applied consistently, according to which

‘dialect literature runs counter to the spiritual and political direc-
tives of the Regime, which are resolutely unitary, since regionalism
and the dialects which are its principal expression are the residue of
centuries of division and servitude’. Indeed in some regions the cri-
teria have been applied so loosely that not only have newspapers
escaped sequestration even though they print articles and poems in
dialect, they have not even been reported to this Office. In other
regions the criteria have been applied more rigidly and it is natural
that we hear rumours of discontent from these latter when it comes
to light that some folklore displays take place as usual, such as the
San Giovanni song contest in Rome and the Piedigrotta in Naples,
while others do not such as the Conca d’oro in Palermo. You must
take account of the dialect productions which form the repertory of
the different companies. The Press Office issues the following
definitive clarifications which may fix the criteria to be observed,
uniformly and unequivocally. These criteria are: (1) Suppress dialect
newspapers and magazines, forbid articles, dialogues and poems in
dialect, any publication which flouts this is to be sequestered, the
director to receive a warning and to lose his licence for a subsequent
infraction; (2) Refuse permission for new publications, unless they
be reproductions of the work of old authors which have entered
into the national literature; (3) Allow dialect song competitions only
where these are established and traditional.9
Directives of this kind became both more frequent and more

consistent as the 1930s progressed.
In September 1934 the Press Office was transformed into an Under-
secretariat for Press and Propaganda. Ciano had persuaded Mussolini to
increase his budget in order to take on more staff and to move from
the Viminale, headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, just south of
Stazione Termini, to a more prestigious location on the Via Veneto.10
This enhancement of the press officer’s brief corresponded with both
Ciano’s personal ambition and with developments in Mussolini’s
foreign policy which would soon lead to the invasion of Ethiopia and
the imposition of sanctions by the League of Nations.
Despite Mussolini’s protestations in his speech on journalism as
mission about not issuing order to the press, the veline – instructions to
the press duplicated on carbon paper – became an aspect of daily life

for Italian newspaper men under Polverelli’s time in charge. Before that
there had been occasional requests to the press, going back to spring
1924, during Rossi’s tenure, which it would not have been wise for the
press to ignore, on pain of sequestration: but these were not systematic
orders as such. Gastone Silvano Spinetti, who worked in the Ufficio
stampa for many years, published a memoir in De Felice’s journal Storia
contemporanea in 1971, detailing how the process of daily press
briefings worked in practice:
Around 1pm he [Mussolini] handed over to the press officer all the
communications he had received which he wanted to see carried in
the press, along with his modifications, abbreviations and instruc-
tions for editors. Some communications instead went into his bin.
When the press officer got back to his desk we had to get out as
quickly as possible the communications edited by Mussolini and his
instructions for the Agenzia Stefani and the evening newspapers. As we
could not use the cyclostyle duplicator because it took too long, the
communications had to be typed on a single typewriter using multi-
ple sheets of carbon paper (veline) which were distributed to waiting
journalists. Important news was communicated to journalists in their
daily briefing with the head of the Press Office, or by telephone to
the editors if it was urgent. ‘Reserved’ (riservato) communications for
individual newspapers were conveyed by word of mouth.11
This meeting would have followed a morning of news gathering by

Mussolini himself which began at about 6am with his reading of the
newspapers and his daily briefing with Bocchini, his Chief of Police.
Spinetti added that Mussolini, ever the schoolmaster, used to circle in
red anything which the Ufficio stampa had missed and send a note back
to them as a reprimand. Thousands of the veline have survived in state
and newspaper archives. After years of relative neglect, a significant body
of these veline has now been published, the most comprehensive collec-
tion appearing in Nicola Tranfaglia’s exemplary anthology, La stampa del
regime.12 It would be easy to cite examples of apparently ridiculous orders
to the press, such as instructions not to report on bad weather, for fear of
damaging the tourist trade. But the sheer size of the archive indicates the
importance of the daily orders to the functioning of the news media in
Fascist Italy and an attentive reading of the recurring and emerging
themes tells us a great deal about the preoccupations of the regime and
the limits of what could and could not be written.13
A close reading of the veline demonstrates many of the contradic-

tions inherent in trying to manage an entire national press while at the
same time trying to maintain the illusion of diversity and freedom for
the benefit of the domestic and foreign readership.14 Many of the veline
are not explicitly acts of censorship, prima facie at least, and ones from
the early 1930s take up the concerns set out in Journalism as Mission.
For example, there are directives on style such as:
Headlines: With some notable exceptions journalists seem to be inca-

pable of composing headlines which both draw the reader’s attention
and give a precise indication of the article’s content. Furthermore,
pagination leaves a lot to be desired. Some newspapers confine the
most important items of news to remote corners of the page, and set
them out in tiny characters. This must improve (16 February 1932).
On one level this sort of instruction could be read as part of a desire

to give a professional gloss to the Italian news media in order to engage
its audience and to attract new readers. Implicit in the rebuke, how-
ever, is the message that editors could not distinguish between impor-
tant and banal news stories. In other words: the censor’s message about
what should and should not be said. The following month there were
instructions about photographs:
Photographs of recruits should be the expression of the new spirit

with which conscripts report for military service (18 March 1932).
Given that this was a regime approaching the end of its tenth year
in power, reference to ‘the new spirit’ is significant. Three years after
the Wall Street Crash and with the world economy in recession, news
management involved agenda setting which foregrounded sacrifice,
civic duty and national pride. Images of fresh-faced young men in
uniform are the flip side of unemployment and falling standards of
living. An order of 15 months later, however, indicates that image
management can be a complicated task:
In order to avoid uniformity in the newspapers from now on the

Press Office will distribute different photographs to illustrate news
stories (22 June 1933).
All of these stylistic instructions are inflections of the principle set

out in the instruction that ‘all news must be considered with a political
eye and with Fascist sensitivity, and must be examined thoroughly

before publication’ (23 July 1932). Another stylistic refrain which runs
through the veline from the very early ones up to summer 1943 is the
injunction not to exaggerate, elaborated very frequently as an attack
on the use of adjectives, referring back to Mussolini’s 1928 speech. The
campaign against unfascist adjectives is probably in the background of
an admonition such as:
Il Mattino has been reprimanded for modifying an official communiqué

(12 July 1932).
Editors were warned that press releases from the Agenzia Stefani, espe-
cially the words of the duce, were to be published without modifica-
tion, almost as holy writ, and often without editorial comment. Again,
an awareness of contradiction is apparent in the instructions:
Count Ciano advised everyone [in his press briefing] not to repro-
duce uncritically the editorials from Il Popolo d’Italia, on the grounds
that they are not all written by the Head of Government himself. He
added that before publishing them editors must examine them care-
fully to be certain that they are really the work of the master (se
veramente c’è la mano). When it was objected that this is not always
an easy task and is liable to error, Count Ciano said that in case of
doubts, newspapers should consult him. He then said that not all
newspapers should carry each editorial at the same time so as not to
give the impression that the Italian press was subject to government
command (27 January 1934).
Such moments of cynical self-awareness abound in the veline.

As with Mussolini’s 1928 speech to newspaper directors, style over-
laps with substance in the recommended treatment of cronaca nera,
the sorts of story which keep the popular press in business. One of
Ciano’s first telegrams to editors as press officer dealt with crime
stories and reads as follows: ‘It is a deplorable anachronism in this
Fascist Regime for newspapers to dedicate entire columns to such
futile matters (18 September 1933)’.15 He was repeating a familiar
theme from the veline:
The newspapers are reminded of what has been said in relation to

cronaca nera; stories must be limited to ten lines which a headline
which does not exceed one column (20 February 1933).
What was at issue here in this tension between newspaper editors

and the Press Office was conflict over two different orders of economic
imperative. On the one hand, newspapermen knew that a menu of
crime, sex and scandal sells newspapers and keeps their profits healthy.
On the other, the government knew (though it was usually careful not
to articulate the fact explicitly) that Italy’s economy, poor in natural
resources, was dependent to a significant degree on the income from
foreign tourists. The impression of order was good for the national
interest. Therefore newspapers were expected to sacrifice their own
financial interest for the greater good.
Reading the veline it sometimes appears that the power relationship of
the Press Office (and its later incarnations) over the newspaper editors
resembles the one between an occasionally despairing teacher and his
wayward pupils, passing down the chain of command Mussolini’s
red-pen corrections. An admonition from February 1935 illustrates
this nicely, turning on the ambiguity inherent in the word consiglio,
meaning both ‘council’ and ‘counsel’:
Count Ciano has praised Lavoro fascista for a little piece on falling
birth rates, ‘Un vuoto incolmabile’ [A void which cannot be filled].
But he has deplored Il Corriere della Sera which halfway down a note
on the demographic crisis, entitled ‘Il modo di morire’ [The way
to die] printed a story relating to the convocation of the Council
of Ministers. The placing of two titles ‘The Way to Die’ and ‘The
Counsel/Council of Ministers’ one above the other, a short distance
apart, is not opportune (8 February 1935).
The regime was very sensitive to humour and irony at its expense.
Mussolini’s own family newspaper was not immune to criticism from
the Press Office:
Il Popolo d’Italia has been criticized for having written Via Mussolini
instead of Viva Mussolini (27 May 1932).16
Likewise, hints of satire were dealt with in the veline, in this case
when the country was at war:
Absolute prohibition on publishing the advertisement for the firm

Luigi Peschiera of Bologna (Borgo Panigale), which includes the
caption ‘Our products are always right’. The advertisement may be
published if the strap line is changed (2 September 1940).
The concern was that the commonly-known expression ‘The Duce is

always right’ (Il Duce ha sempre ragione), coined by Leo Longanesi, was
being appropriated to a different context and thereby showing a lack of
respect.
The issues here were ones of image management and popular
mythology. According to Tranfaglia and Bruno Maida the veline reveal
the basic principles by which newspapers were expected to live. They
should give the impression of order and moderation to all things
regarding Mussolini and the dictatorship; reinforce the myth that
Fascism arose as a patriotic reaction to violence and red subversion;
and speak as little as possible about opponents so as not to encourage
the young to take an interest in them. Relations with the Church could
be good, provided that the pope avoided criticizing the dictatorship.17
These principles are upheld broadly in the veline, with the odd confu-
sion and contradiction. So, for example, on 9 May 1932 newspapers
were instructed to give ample space to Bottai’s speech at Ferrara, but
less than three weeks later editors found themselves being told to avoid
articles in praise of members of the Fascist hierarchy, with the excep-
tion of the duce himself.
The summer before the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome,
with an economy in crisis, the instructions to the press were preoc-
cupied with popular Fascist interpretations of recent history:
The big newspapers are invited to invoke the 30–31 July 1922 to
demonstrate once again how the March on Rome was a counter-
blow to dangerous and widespread subversive activity (25 July 1932),
and
The big newspapers are invited to write political articles on the

period July–August 1921, stressing the outbreak of red forces in that
period, the impotence of the Liberal state, that the political strike
was broken by Fascism and that the March on Rome was a response
to the subversive action of July–August (30 July 1932).
In addition to these tendentious demands on the press in the inter-

ests of propaganda – which are still to be found in segments of the
Italian media – there are also examples of media manipulation which
amount to censorship. For example, newspapers were forbidden to
mention ‘Il Mezzogiorno’ (the south) on the grounds that ‘this word
represents an example of terminology which relates to the divisions of
the old Italy which no longer has any reason for existing’ (6 February
1933). Later there were more explicit examples of press censorship as
the Undersecretariat was further enhanced into first a Ministry for Press
and Propaganda (June 1935) and finally a Ministry for Popular Culture
(May 1937):
So as not to foment a spirit of litigation in those who have an inter-

est in proceedings you are requested not to publish sentences of the
Council of State if these are unfavourable to the Minister for War
(1 January 1938).
In publishing articles on our war avoid reminding readers of
alleged errors on the part of our military commanders (18 June
1938).
By summer 1938, Dino Alfieri was minister for Popular Culture,

having replaced Ciano as Minister for Press and Propaganda in summer
1936 while the latter was flying in bombing raids over Ethiopia. The
transformation, under Ciano, of the Undersecretariat into a fully-
fledged Ministry for Press and Propaganda in June 1935 brought the
government press officer into the cabinet as a minister. The ministry
was given enhanced responsibilities which would eventually extend to
books, film, theatre, tourism, and very belatedly, radio.
Throughout the 1930s, under Polverelli, Ciano, Alfieri and finally
under Alessandro Pavolini (appointed minister for Popular Culture in
October 1939 when Alfieri was sent to Berlin as ambassador) there was
a consistent emphasis on the rhetoric of self-sufficiency in order to
show in their best light the economic policies pursued by the regime in
order to escape from the international recession. Newspapers were
instructed repeatedly not to draw attention to inflation. Instead there
were instructions to promote stories concerning subsidized travel (e.g.,
the treni popolari) and the setting up of IRI, the State holding company.
When Mussolini abruptly abandoned the quota 90 policy on the
exchange rate in October 1934, devaluing the lira by 40% in order
to stimulate exports and increase tourism, the Italian press was ordered
not to comment. This policy shift is reflected in invitations to the
press to go easy on countries with which the Italian government was
engaged in trade negotiations, including the Soviet Union. In the later
1930s, on the other hand, newspapers were instructed to write about
salary increases and falling unemployment. The more aggressive
foreign policies of intervention in Ethiopia and in Spain were also mir-
rored by instructions to the press.
Running in parallel with these events is an interesting development in

the instructions to the media concerning coverage of Germany. In
January 1933 the instruction was to confine reporting of German news to
the cronaca sections, which is to say, to provide no political comment.18
But two months later:
It is recommended to newspapers that they give great prominence

to the German election results, with titles over six or seven columns
on the front page and editorial comment which stresses the end of
the Weimar Republic and the birth of Fascist Germany (6 March
1933).
Within days there were explicit instructions to avoid coverage of

the persecution of Jews in Germany. These were repeated on an
almost daily basis for the rest of March 1933. In July 1933 Italian
newspapers were prohibited from publishing news of Nazi policy and
implementation of sterilization.
While there were certainly concerns in Italy over the Anschluss, not
least because of the Alpine border, the instructions to the press
throughout 1934 were consistent with the following:
Count Ciano has recommended absolute reserve concerning

everything pertaining to Germany. All news concerning executions,
internal divisions among the Nazis etc is false and must not be repro-
duced. The stories are put out by enemies of Germany based in
Prague and Brussels. These [spreaders of rumour] are also our
enemies. We may have differences with Germany, some of them
quite serious ones, but we have the same enemies. You must never
quote the Weltbuhe, the underground newspaper of German exiles.
Especially you must not mention the conflict between the Reichswehr
and the Hitler Militia because that conflict could remind readers of
an unhappy period for Italy in which there was the possibility of a
similar conflict (28 December 1934).
Reporting of German news moved in line with the development of

Italy’s foreign policy throughout the 1930s and up to the declaration
of war in June 1940.
By 1940 the country was well prepared for war journalism because
this had appeared in the Italian press from the mid-1930s leading up to
the invasion of Ethiopia. From summer 1934 onwards, newspapers
were being instructed, sometimes daily, to prepare the country for war
in the choice of images of troops and arms and a steady stream of

articles instilling a military spirit.
Policy and inconsistency
Fascistization of the old liberal newspaper titles was a successful strat-

egy which served to manipulate the political agenda and to establish
the tone of commonsense, at least among a majority of the newspaper-
reading public, although this was a tiny minority of the population in
Fascist Italy. As a strategy it still left substantial discretion to newspa-
pers and journalists despite the tight legislative framework for Italian
journalism introduced by means of Royal Decree Law no. 2307 on
31 December 1925. Article 1 of this law provided for the appointment
of a director-in-charge (direttore responsabile) as opposed to a managing
editor (gerente). Article 7 stipulated that membership of the profes-
sional register (albo professionale dei giornalisti) was to be a legal require-
ment for all journalists. This was not implemented immediately but
hung over the heads of journalists for two years as a threat. The albo
itself however was formally constituted on 26 February 1928, by means
of Royal Decree Law no. 384. Up to this point more informal methods
were used as sanctions against journalists who were not sufficiently
trustworthy and reliable. These sanctions ranged from being permitted
to write and publish, but not to sign pieces in their own names, to a
period of imprisonment or in confino.19 (Giovanni Ansaldo in fact expe-
rienced all three, being permitted to write without seeing his name in
print once he had been ‘rehabilitated’ after a stretch in jail followed by
confino). From 26 February 1928 all journalists had to be enrolled on
one of three lists: professionisti, praticanti or pubblicisti.
This had the immediate effect of making life difficult for known
anti-Fascists because the prefects had the legal means by which to
deprive them of their livelihood. But as PNF membership was not a
necessary requirement for joining the albo professionale, it allowed the
regime to present itself as something other than a closed state. Those
to be excluded were anyone ‘who had engaged in activities which
were in conflict with the national interest’, in the opinion of the local
prefect. It remained in force for the next 20 years, with the result that
in theory writers and journalists with anti-Fascist convictions either
had to leave Italy or had to compromise and negotiate with the
regime. Compromise and negotiation took various forms and rela-
tively few writers and journalists did actually leave Italy, as compared
to the exodus from Nazi Germany. The cases of Mario Soldati and
Alberto Moravia are good examples of how the policy and legislation
affected individuals.
There is a very substantial file on Soldati in the archives of the polit-
ical police.20 Soldati (1906–99) had studied History of Art under
Lionello Venturi in Turin and after graduating he travelled to New
York in 1929, at the invitation of Giuseppe Prezzolini, to work at
the Casa Italiana, Columbia University. In America he married an
American and the couple had a child but the relationship was not an
enduring one. Back in Italy in the 1930s, he wrote an account of his
time in America, America primo amore and various pieces of literary and
filmic journalism as well as making a number of movies, including a
propaganda film, Italia, shot in Ethiopia in 1936 and later, Piccolo
mondo antico (1941). Soldati was under surveillance soon after
his return from the USA. A police informer, in a report filed on
14 November 1932, described him as making frequent criticisms of
the regime. Four months later, another informer report reads:
Nobody can explain the regular trips which Mario Soldati of Cines
makes to North America. His wife is American, but they are not well
off and he earns no more than one million lire per month. Soldati’s
most recent trip took place about two months ago and he spent no
more than a fortnight in America. Everybody wonders where Soldati
gets the money from for these journeys, and we all know that his
political ideas are far from being Fascist.
Nonetheless, in 1934 Soldati tried to join the PNF. Police informer

139 (Francesco Salvi) reported on 19 November 1934:
About six months ago, Mario Soldati asked a Fascist journalist, a

certain Leo Bomba, to help him get Party membership. He gave
Bomba his application form so that Bomba would present it to the
Federation and act as Soldati’s guarantor. A few days later Soldati
turned up again asking Bomba to cut corners, not to bother check-
ing up with the police (Questura) so that Soldati could have his
membership card as quickly as possible. All this haste and Soldati’s
general attitude and demeanour caused Bomba to have suspicions,
and Soldati’s form remained in his pocket, rather than going before
the Federation. Shortly afterwards Soldati disappeared from circula-
tion and no-one has heard anything of him since. Bomba believes
that he may be living in Milan, but he is not sure. […] I am looking
for more precise information to convey to you.
Two weeks later (1 December 1934) Salvi reported that Soldati was
believed to be in London, working for London Film, among whose major
shareholders was his friend Ludovico Toeplitz, son of Mussolini’s
banker. By this point, another informer had implicated Soldati in a
Paris-based Giustizia e Libertà plot to assassinate Mussolini.
An undated police report on Soldati (but from late December 1934)
gives a general description of him, and continues:
He is someone notorious for his opposition to the regime, but he is

able to cover his tracks. His character is impulsive and irascible. For
this reason he lives apart from his American wife. He is a friend of
the known anti-Fascists Giulio Einaudi, Dr Giulio Carlo Argan and
Dr Mario Bonfantini. The Divisione affari generali e riservati, letter
no. 441.021756 of 27 July 1934, directed the prefect of Turin to
keep a close watch on all of them because they are politically
suspect. He is particularly close to Mario Bonfantini, to the point of
being invited to accompany him to Ponza, to visit his brother
Corrado who was in confino for political reasons. It should be noted
that Mario Bonfantini is a notorious anti-Fascist, member of the G &
L group who had contacts at Paris with the fuorusciti Carlo Rosselli
and Prof. Lionello Venturi.
Soldati was interrogated by the Questura in Rome about an accu-
sation brought against Bonfantini in relation to an unknown person
suspected of planning an attempt on the life of His Excellence the
Head of Government. Informer 139 [Salvi] has cited Soldati several
times as someone of an anti-Fascist tendency, from his days at Cines.
[…] After the month of August Soldati returned to Turin and he has
gone to ground. He needs to be found.
Within a matter of days Soldati had been tracked down to Carconio

di Orta San Giulio and the questore of Rome sent a highly confidential
memo (riservatissima personale) to the questore of Novara, with a copy to
the Ministry of the Interior (DAGR section 1 and the political police),
requesting:
Very close surveillance of him in order to know what he is doing

and with whom he is associating, and the monitoring of all post
addressed to him.21
During this time Soldati was writing America, primo amore, working
mostly at the Bonfantini home. The questore of Novara duly informed
the authorities in Rome that Soldati was consorting with the Bonfantini
brothers (Corrado had just been released from confino) and there was
nothing remarkable in his mail. By April 1935 Soldati was in Rome,
living at the home of Emilio Cecchi, and – according to spies – in a rela-
tionship with Cecchi’s daughter. Soldati’s mail was still under scrutiny.
His chances of getting a party card did not appear strong.
After the summer of 1935, and back in Turin, Soldati applied to join
the albo professionale dei giornalisti. Eugenio Bertuetti, president of the
regional committee of the albo wrote to the prefect of Turin for guid-
ance, on 19 September 1935. The prefect consulted the political police
and indicated that ‘it was not appropriate to admit Dr Mario Soldati
into the albo as he was not a member of the PNF’. Soldati, however,
tried another tack and wrote directly to Ciano at the Ministry for Press
and Propaganda, about a film-making project in the colonies. Ciano
agreed to Soldati’s request, apparently without reference to the police
or the party, undermining hierarchies of command and control. This
left the questore of Turin in a quandary, so on 7 February 1936 he wrote
to the political police:
Since it has come to the attention of this office that in the last few
months the Ministry for Press and Propaganda has conferred on
Dr Mario Soldati various responsibilities of a cinematographic char-
acter, may I ask you to carry out further investigations on Soldati’s
political activities, so as to confirm your earlier instruction.
There was no change in relation to his request for membership of the

albo, but the African trip went ahead, and was reported on by the
carabinieri in Asmara:
The subversive Soldati (not Soldato) Mario, son of Umberto and of

Bargilli Barbara, born 17-2-1906 at Turin, arrived in this colony on
5 June 1936 with a group of nineteen, made up of drivers, operators
and film technicians, headed by the well-known director Camerini, of
Rome. They made a patriotic film called Italia on behalf of the Ministry
for Press and Propaganda, staying for a fortnight in various parts of
Eritrea including Afalbà, Saganeiti, Corbaria, Decameré and Uogherti.
When the work was finished the company returned to Rome in several
smaller groups. Soldati left on 14 July aboard the Conte Verde, sailing for
Brindisi from where he was expected to continue to Rome.
Soldati continued to travel abroad. A trip to Paris in summer 1938

was reported on directly by Vicenzo Bellavia (fiduciario 353, leader of
the Paris spy-ring from 1930 to late 1938), by Pitigrilli (the novelist
Dino Segre), and indirectly by Giacomo Antonio Antonini (‘Giacomo’).
He continued to work, but he was not admitted to either the party or
the albo. Bellavia’s report to Bocchini (24 June 1938) gives an indica-
tion as to why this anomaly should have persisted:
Recently Dr Mario Soldati, 32, writer-journalist from Turin, has

visited this city. He is well known in our film world because in addi-
tion to having been artistic director for various films, he is friendly
with many directors, artists and producers, and, what is more, he
often has occasion to frequent Vittorio’s circle [i.e., Mussolini’s son].
This Soldati, although he has not carried out concrete activities
against Fascism, has never had any sympathy for the regime. Indeed
he has shown himself to be hostile to it, and he is in constant
contact with young litterati who are known anti-Fascists.22
It is a measure of the regime’s ambivalence to culture and creativity

that anti-Fascist writers and journalists could find themselves at home
in the circles of Ciano or Vittorio Mussolini.
Especially interesting is the case of Alberto Moravia. Like Soldati, he
had also spent some time in New York at the Casa Italiana, after the
publication of his first novel, Gli Indifferenti, in 1929. Gli Indifferenti
could not seriously be described as a Fascist novel, but it was one of
very few Italian novels between the wars which achieved international
recognition. The regime was keen to be associated with that success,
and Moravia was mentioned as a rising star in the first edition of the
Enciclopedia Treccani. As a first cousin of Carlo Rosselli however, and
someone known to frequent anti-Fascists, Moravia was under surveil-
lance on his return from the United States. An anonymous informer
working for the Ministry for Press and Propaganda submitted a long
report on 24 January 1934 in relation to Oggi for which Moravia was an
occasional contributor:
I enclose two reports concerning the magazine Oggi: the first is from
the same informer who drew attention to the shady activities of the
contributors to that magazine and the second is by a person in
whom I have full trust. He is well embedded among the journalists
of the capital. […]
In politics Moravia has never shown clear and precise ideas. He is
neither a Fascist nor an anti-Fascist. Instead he has no will-power, a
menefreghista, animated by that same sense of indifference which
Moravia shows in every respect, including morality. […]
From what I can glean so far, the contributors to Oggi are not
individuals who can be trusted as reliable in political terms, but
neither is there anything to suggest that they intend to use the
magazine in ways contrary to the directives of the regime. Such a
judgement would seem premature. One has the impression rather
that we are dealing with a group of young men intent on notoriety
without any well-defined programme.
Nonetheless further investigations will be carried out, with appro-
priate vigilance, so as to identify any developments.23
Of the two enclosed reports, the first draws attention to Moravia’s

presumed Jewishness; four and a half years before the Race Laws. The
second describes him in the following terms:
Alberto Moravia is a writer in the school of Benedetto Croce, and it

is said that he is highly regarded by the well-known anti-Fascist
philosopher, on the basis of shared sympathies. He is considered a
mediocre writer. The only work of note which he has produced is
Gli Indifferenti. Moravia – in politics – is not an admirer of the
regime. Moravia travels and often visits Turin. He is a social-climber,
much given to intrigue. But he is not held to possess special gifts.
His character is mysterious and treacherous.
The following year Ermanno Amicucci, director of La Gazzetta del

Popolo informed Moravia in writing that his articles were no longer
welcome at the Gazzetta. Moravia wrote to Ciano on 26 March 1935
arguing that the fact he was not a member of the PNF was not moti-
vated by dissident political views and that in fact he admired the
regime, especially in relation to its cultural policy. The letter is a
study in ambiguity and is open to several interpretations.24 The typed
copy of the letter is annotated ‘he can write’, also ambiguous, but
probably intended as ‘permit him to write’. In the summer of 1935
when it was announced that Ciano would be stepping down as
minister in order to fly warplanes in Africa, Moravia wrote to him
congratulating him on the example he was setting, and asking for
permission to spend some months in Eritrea in order to write a book
about Italians at war in Africa. He also received another letter from
Amicucci telling him again that his articles were not welcome in La
Gazzetta del Popolo. He spent the winter in the United States, where
he gave five lectures on the Italian novel (on Manzoni, Nievo, Verga,
Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio) at the Casa Italiana (where he was a
guest), at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, at Vassar College and at

Smith College. Back in Italy, he wrote to the minister, Dino Alfieri,
on 9 July 1936, for permission to resume writing for La Gazzetta del
Popolo in order to be able to convey his impressions of America.
Permission appears to have been granted.
In common with Jewish writers and journalists, Moravia’s problems
began in earnest in July 1938 with the coming into force of the Race
Laws. Amicucci received a directive from the Ministry of Popular
Culture, successor to the Ministry for Press and Propaganda, on 18 July
ordering him to suspend Moravia’s collaboration on La Gazzetta del
Popolo. Moravia responded with a letter to the duce, on 28 July 1938,
arguing that as his mother was not Jewish then he was not Jewish, and
should be permitted to get on with his professional activities.
In April 1941, Moravia had a meeting with Gherardo Casini, Director
General for the Italian press, one of the DGs within the Minculpop, the
original remit of the Press Office in fact. Moravia prepared a promemoria
which he sent to Casini later that day:
As we agreed during our interview of today, until further notice,

I will write for newspapers and magazines using a pseudonym.
But I must point out to you that before this decision was reached
I had sent to the magazine Letteratura a short story in my own
name. Immediately after our discussion I telegraphed the director
so that he could suspend the publication of the story. But he
replied that it was impossible because the magazine was already
typeset and printed. He said he had received no orders on my
account and that he stood to lose thousands of lire if the issue did
not appear. The magazine comes out just four times per year. For
those reasons he sees himself having to publish the story in my
name. I must inform you of this because, as you can see, it is
something over which neither I nor the director of the magazine
have any control.
Moravia also wrote to the new director of La Gazzetta del Popolo,

Eugenio Bertuetti, who in turn wrote to Casini for confirmation.
Moravia, with characteristic irony, began writing under a pseudonym,
PSEUDO.
On 8 September 1941, Alessandro Pavolini, the minister for Popular
Culture since 1939, sent a telegram to all prefects ordering them to
instruct directors of newspapers and magazines to cease publishing
the writings of Alberto Moravia. Bertuetti again wrote to Casini for
clarification (10 September 1941). There was considerable confusion in

publishing circles about what was permitted and what was not. The
director of Tempo, Alberto Mondadori, wrote to Casini asking whether
he could publish a Moravia novella in the author’s name or whether
he had to use a pseudonym (22 September 1941). Casini replied a week
later that Moravia’s work was now banned, with or without a pseudo-
nym. But a month later, 31 October 1941 Casini wrote to Bertuetti
stating that Moravia could write for La Gazzetta del Popolo so long as he
used a pseudonym. What had changed in the intervening few weeks
was that Moravia’s brother, Lieutenant Gastone Pincherle, had died in
battle at Tobruk. A note prepared for the duce on 25 October 1941 by
Pavolini reads as follows:
The writer Alberto Moravia and his family under the law are con-
sidered to be of the Italian race. Indeed recently Moravia lost in
combat, at Tobruk, his brother Lieutenant Gastone Pincherle.
Given this circumstance and Moravia’s recent betrothal (to a
woman of the Italian race) which places economic responsibil-
ities on him, it is worth considering whether the absolute ban on
Moravia’s works should remain in force or whether he should
be permitted to write for a limited number of newspapers under
a pseudonym (as he used to do for La Gazzetta del Popolo),
while continuing to check attentively the substance of the pieces
themselves.
The publications indicated in the margin are La Gazzetta del Popolo

and Oggi. The duce agreed, and Moravia resumed his journalism as well
as publication of short stories.
Given this confused mechanism of control and sanction, which
fostered caution and uncertainty, selective agenda setting, and self-
censorship, one may wonder what was the real role of the journalist
under Fascism. The careers of Soldati and Moravia seem distinctly out
of tune with Mussolini’s vision articulated in October 1928.
War, empire and the media
Until shortly before the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the principal

goal of Mussolini’s media strategy had been to present Italy as a
country improved by muscular, virile Fascism, which had defeated a
perceived Communist threat and reawakened the nation from the
torpor of the Liberal era, delivering low crime rates, social justice and
efficient services. This was a picture of Italy for both domestic and
foreign consumption. The image was carefully managed in the press,
while the potential of the new technology of radio remained largely
untapped. Ciano’s arrival at the Press Office, and its transformation
into first an Undersecretariat and then a Ministry ran almost in parallel
with a shift in the image of the country which Mussolini sought to
present to the public. Indicative of the first stirrings of this shift is an
order to the press from 10 March 1934:
La Stampa wrote again about Mussolini’s ‘policy of peace’.

Everybody loves peace and wants it, but it is not appropriate to
become sentimental (sdilinquirsi) and to repeat continually ‘peace,
peace’.25
Mussolini’s policy was beginning to change.

Wars sell newspapers and increase media audiences. The Ethiopian
war was no exception. It gave rise to a concerted and sustained propa-
ganda effort in Italy but it also compounded further the confusions
inherent in Fascist policies on media and censorship. It ushered in
postal censorship for soldiers in the field. A censors’ office was set up in
East Africa for in-coming and out-going air mail. The equivalent office
was set up in Naples for the mail boats. These offices, of course, were
under military control. No less attention was paid to newspaper cover-
age of the war, both domestic and foreign, but here the line of control
was more complex.26 There are transcripts of American and French
radio broadcasts in the Italian state archives which indicate the success
of Mussolini’s media and censorship strategy in Eritrea which led him
to transfer it to Ethiopia.27 Mussolini took a personal interest in colo-
nial censorship, sending out telegrams in his own name. One of these
(22 December 1935), addressed to the High Commissioner (i.e.,
Badoglio) in Asmara, clarifies the distinctions between postal and
media censorship:
It is understood that censorship of news within correspondence is

the business of the military authorities. For everything that con-
cerns the complex organization of press services and support for the
Italian and foreign press corps I beg Your Excellency to avail of the
East African Press Office, which has been set up expressly, on my
orders, to carry out such duties. That office, which operates within
the wider frame of reference of the Ministero Stampa e Propaganda is
at your disposition.28
Turf wars between different branches of government and the

military continued to dog Fascist communications policies. Little over
a week later, Mussolini sent Badoglio a longer telegram:
The foreign press is dominated by news coming from special envoys

who are on the Abyssinians’ side. To neutralize their action we must
make sure that the foreign correspondents in Eritrea are enabled to
expand their work. It would be appropriate to provide them with
more information, facilitate visits and allow them to have direct
access to the front, where there are no countervailing reasons. Even
the censorship service, while it must remain inflexible as far as con-
cerns news which would help the enemy, should allow the foreign
journalists a greater freedom of action. Otherwise we will not be
able to counter this incessant bombardment of criticism from our
adversaries.29
At the conclusion of the Ethiopian war, in May 1936 the following

instruction was issued to the Press Office in Asmara (Eritrea) by Dino
Alfieri, by now Minister for Press and Propaganda:
The duce has ordered that this office transfer as a matter of urgency
to Addis Ababa where it must organize its services in such as way as
to help and support the various members of the national and
foreign press corps. It is most desirable that foreign journalists
should file reports on the new life of Addis Ababa and on the new
dispensation in its various aspects. I await confirmation of this
transfer.30
This represented a transplanting of Polverelli’s 1931 principles on

renewal of journalists’ mission from Italy to colonial soil. Alfieri sought
to centralize yet further governmental control over the Italian print
media by insisting on the suppression of all ministerial Press Offices
and routing all governmental press releases through his ministry. This
enhanced level of control, however, led to some farcical situations:
Yesterday a group of journalists including Malgeri, Cappaletto,

Gayda, Guglielmotti etc, criticized this ministry harshly for issuing
orders to newspapers that they should publish a commemorative
article with the title ‘Bandiere al vento’ [‘Flags in the wind’] on the
Ethiopian war. The result was that the following day every Italian
newspaper had the same headline on the front page.31
There was a real and persistent tension here. Mussolini wanted total
control of the domestic press, but also wanted each newspaper to
maintain something of its own identity.
Mission accomplished?
In theory then, the mission of the journalist was clear and unambiguous
in Fascist Italy after 1925. Domestic and foreign journalists were licensed
by the state. They reported news. Their Italian editors, also licensed by the
state, filtered this news and provided comment for the edification of the
Italian masses. Italian newspaper owners knew they ran the daily financial
risk of sequestration and knowledge of this risk led them to influence edi-
torial policy in their own financial interest. Foreign newspapers were less
of a threat to Fascist hegemony because most were written in languages
which the majority of Italians were unable to understand. None the less,
stories relating to Italian affairs in the foreign press were monitored very
closely by Italian embassies and consulates abroad and there are plenty of
examples of foreign newspapers being sequestered at port of entry.
Therefore, the theory ran, the state controlled the news and could
mould public opinion at will. So dissent and scepticism about the news
agenda should have been eliminated progressively by a combination of
censorship, propaganda and media control.
At the height of the summer and on the eve of war, 8–10 August
1939 the Ministry for Popular Culture held a conference in Venice on
the function of the press media, attracting among the delegates
Marinetti and Goebbels. The conference report elaborated on the
mission of the journalist:
The journalist is an active collaborator of the regime. He has the

specific task of acting as the daily intermediary between the regime
and the masses, illustrating all the action which takes place in the
different fields. In the democratic countries the journalist is the pro-
fessional of the pen; for us he is the bearer of a faith, the soldier of
an ideal. When the democratic press takes us to task, accusing the
journalism of totalitarian countries of being in the service of the
state, it doesn’t realize that it is formulating the gravest accusation
against itself, because it proves that it is in the service of obscure
and secret forces.32
The statement reiterated yet again the official line which had been
set out by Mussolini over a decade earlier, developed by Bottai in the
pages of Critica fascista and implemented in the transformation of the

Prime Minister’s Press Office first into an Undersecretariat and later
Ministry for Press and Propaganda, and then into a Ministry for
Popular Culture in 1937. It confirms the familiar image of Mussolini as
the ‘senior editor of the regime’, trying to run the country as he had
run his family newspaper, loaded pistols on his desk. Every evening,
until 1931, he spoke to his brother Arnaldo on the telephone about
how the treat the news for the following day in Il Popolo d’Italia. This
habit did not die with Arnaldo, as his son-in-law Ciano would discover:
Mussolini besieged him with telephone calls, giving orders and then
countermanding them. Ciano used to complain that he could get
no rest: his father-in-law/duce would wake him up at six almost
every morning as soon as he received the morning copies, the ink
still wet, of Il Messaggero and Il Popolo di Roma.33
Mussolini’s regime was genuinely obsessed with news reporting and

he expected missionary zeal from his journalists. On the other hand,
newspaper editors were frequently reminded not to exaggerate because
exaggeration undermined credibility.
Considering that the Italian press had been directed to give sympa-
thetic coverage to the Nazis from as early as March 1933, to ignore the
persecution of Jews and even to participate in discrimination from
summer 1938, and to promote hostility to Britain and France, it would
be reasonable to expect that public opinion might be other than is
indicated in a report from 11 February 1940, four months before Italy
entered the Second World War:
The readers of Il Tevere, of which there are shamefully many, have had
a treat today, from what I hear, because the Germanophile newspaper
and its editor Trizzino have really outdone themselves this time!
The author, after having listed on the German model the horrors
of British repression in Ireland, concludes: ‘It is incredible that
England should invoke the solidarity of America when America was
populated by the Irish who were forced to flee their country. And
there is no other Catholic people in the modern period which has
suffered such persecution’.
There were three people in the trattoria who were talking about
Trizzino’s piece, saying that evidently he was not aware of what the
Germans have done and are doing in Austria, Czechoslovakia and
Poland, against civil and peaceable Catholic populations, against the
elderly, women and children; not to mention the unheard of tortures

and persecutions visited on the Jews of the Reich. The putting down
of Irish terrorists, they observed, looks like child’s play when com-
pared with the barbarous acts carried out by the Nazis in recent
years. Everybody is of that view, they added, and only Il Tevere would
be capable of maintaining the contrary, denying evidence and not
seeing what we can all see and what we know from memory.
Another said, this Tevere fails to understand how England can call
on the solidarity of America, the refuge of the Irish, but pretends
that the whole world sides with the Germans when throughout the
world there are millions of Austrians, Bohemians, Moravians, Poles,
Jews and even Germans who have fled Hitler’s terror.
I have reported this conversation since it is a good indication of
public opinion generally in relation to our ally and its political
systems, as well as on a certain publication we find on the news-
stands.34
Il Tevere, we should remember, was Mussolini’s ‘unofficial mouth-

piece’, edited by the man entrusted with control of radio in the RSI
after he had escaped north following his arrest on 25 July 1943. The
response of the Minculpop official is every bit as significant as the
report itself: a handwritten note in red pencil reads ‘Interlandi told not
to exaggerate’. This is one particularly good example of missionary zeal
falling on sceptical ears, but it is far from being an isolated one.
The mission of journalists was reiterated again and again right up to
the death throes of the regime. In a press briefing held by Pavolini on
6 November 1942, editors were warned:
There is a great deal of defeatism in Rome. We see a Quartarella

rising up again (risorgere), in one guise or another. Many people
are either excessively dejected or excessively happy. We see these
things and we note them, because I believe there are Fascists who
are neither beaten down in their courage nor whispering among
themselves. They are serious and they look on things with calm
attention and they continue to believe in Mussolini and in Victory.
That is my attitude and I believe it is yours. (Cheers of approval.
Shouts of ‘Yes’). If any of you are not of that opinion I invite you to
leave now: if not the rest of us will kick you out.35
Not quite the harmony of Mussolini’s orchestra image of the press.

The critical question to address in an evaluation of Fascist press and
media policy is the simple one of whether the mission was successful.
Did it succeed in limiting the horizon of expectation and forging a
nation of true believers in the message of Fascism?
Both Colarizi and Bosworth in their studies of public opinion and
daily life in Fascist Italy have argued that at most Fascist propaganda
made a superficial impression on the popular mentalité, and that
Italians began to disengage from their collective suspension of disbelief
at the end of the 1930s as the regime began seriously to contemplate
war alongside the Nazis.36 This thesis is built on the reports on public
opinion filed by prefects on the basis of informers’ reports and the cen-
sorship of wartime correspondence. Below the surface of bellicose
racism and popular piety, it was a sense of family and pride in one’s
team which continued to guide the unconscious actions of most
Italians. On balance, this is probably true.
The widespread reaction of jubilation which met radio reports of
Mussolini’s arrest in July 1943 suggest that the anthropological revolu-
tion was merely skin-deep. Aside altogether from debate about years of
consensus, there was a fundamental flaw in Mussolini’s view of the
journalist’s mission: Rates of literacy in Italy continued to lag well
behind the rest of the western world, despite over a decade of Fascist
educational reform. Therefore, the penetration of newspapers into the
national consciousness remained limited and had far less of an impact
than other factors such as the Church, schools, workplace culture,
popular entertainment, traditional distrust of central authority, radio
and film.
5
The Duce’s Image
If Fascism sought to bring about a fundamental change in Italian

culture as an ‘anthropological revolution’ to use Emilio Gentile’s term,
then a study of the censor’s part in the programme cannot afford to
concentrate on the printed words, in a semi-literate society, to the
exclusion of spoken words and of fixed and moving images. Indeed,
regardless of speculation about intentions, empirical study of media
artefacts produced in the time of Fascism can reveal a great deal about
the workings of censorship and propaganda. Earlier chapters have
explored how legislation, security policy, education reform and control
of the print media contributed to the aims of totalitarianism and the
reality of daily life. The following pages will look instead at the ways in
which Fascism attempted to negotiate the public sphere so as to set the
boundaries on the Italian people’s horizons of expectation, implanting
models to be emulated and censoring out models to be rejected, on the
basis of sounds, images and symbols.
The Istituto LUCE
The early Italian film industry had been successful, innovative and
highly regarded. It was all but destroyed in the First World War and
the regime showed no early signs of coming to its rescue. The origins
of Italian documentary and propaganda film-making under Fascism,
on the other hand, are a different matter. In 1923 Ferdinando Cortese,
a film-maker from Milan, set up a small company called the Ente
nazionale per la cinematografia istruttiva ed educativa.1 His intention was
to make short films to promote industry and tourism. He approached
the PNF for accreditation and for permission to make a documentary
film to celebrate the first anniversary of the March on Rome. His
105
request for monopoly rights on film-making for the regime received a

frosty response from the party, but it attracted the interest and atten-
tion of Luigi Freddi, at that time director of the Ufficio propaganda of
the PNF. The Istituto Luce was established in September 1924, probably
as an acronym for L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, which brought
together various small companies. In 1925 Mussolini ordered his min-
istries to use the Istituto Luce as source of all official images for pro-
paganda purposes, and the Ministry for Public Instruction was given
the task of developing a programme to bring films into schools. Two
years later a photographic service was put in place with the remit of
providing coverage of daily life under Fascism for the benefit of the
daily newspapers and illustrated periodicals. It complemented eight
sections, dedicated to tourism, agriculture, industry, religion, culture,
the armed forces, social care and foreign affairs.
Decree law no. 1985 of 5 November 1925 brought the Istituto Luce
under direct governmental control. Giacomo Paulucci de’ Calboli was
appointed president and Luciano De Feo became director. A further
decree law, no. 1000 of 5 April 1926 made it mandatory for all cinemas
in the jurisdiction to screen Istituto Luce shorts as part of each film pro-
gramme. Failure to do so could lead to temporary closure of the cinema
or withdrawal of the licence to operate. Royal Decree Law no. 122 of
24 January 1929 reorganized the Istituto Luce to take account of the
introduction of the talkies. The head of the Prime Minister’s Press
Office joined the board by means of this provision, which was a first
attempt to bring together the print and other media, excluding radio,
which would lead eventually to the Ministry for Popular Culture.
The first Luce films showed Mussolini visiting PNF federations, mil-
itary reviews and crowds in Rome, Milan and Bologna, with occasional
cameo parts for the king and one or two gerarchi. There were also
numerous shorts of religious festivals and sports events such as football
matches and cycle races. In the course of 1925 three propaganda films
were made on the ruralism theme: La battaglia del grano, La foresta fonte
di ricchezza and Vita nuova.2
These short propaganda films, promoting positive messages about
life under Fascism, found a far wider daily audience than newspapers,
and resources were made available by both state and church to bring
cinema into every corner of the kingdom. In that way, the population,
even in the remotest of rural communities was brought face to
face with the duce in a real example of taking the ruler to the masses.
Although there were important precedents for propaganda film-making
in Russia and in the United States, Italy was blazing a trail in western
The Duce’s Image 107
Europe. Italy pioneered the propaganda film as an interactive experi-

ence: at the cinema, when the duce’s image appeared on the screen
during Istituto Luce newsreels the public stood as a mark of respect, and
in order to comply with a law passed in 1927 which made it obligatory
to do so. This could happen half a dozen times in the course of a news-
reel which provided the Luce editors with interesting challenges in
terms of managing audience participation. It became part of the ritual
of daily life under Fascism, almost on a par with standing at Mass for
the elevation of the Host. Approved stills from Luce newsreels would be
distributed to newspapers, to be carried on front pages of newspapers
and magazines in a conscious attempt at multi-media co-ordination.
Veline from the Press Office would advise on the types of shot to be
printed in newspapers, and the types to be avoided, especially in the
1930s when the regime woke up to the huge potential of the media.
The Duce’s body
The peril of trail blazing is that it is those coming behind who really
learn from one’s mistakes. The quantity of images produced by the
Istituto Luce was enormous. Its quality, for the most part, was indifferent.
There was no very sophisticated theory at work on the role or mission of
the documentary photographer or cameraman. Their job was to capture
images of the reality they were observing and they did not have the
benefit of elaborate mise en scene or retakes. It is unlikely anyone had the
nerve to ask the duce to do a second take before his adoring masses. The
press instructions were rudimentary: avoid shots of Mussolini with other
gerarchi, plenty of pictures of crowds, and advice on the following lines:
La Stampa and Il Piccolo di Trieste published horrible photographs of

the duce signing the Italo-Russian agreement. If you do not have
good photographs it is better not to publish any at all […] News-
papers publishing photographs of ceremonies held yesterday and
today must not reproduce shots of the duce on his own. Show
instead pictures of crowds. (6 September 1933).3
Paulucci de' Calboli, acknowledging the limited sophistication of

early Istituto Luce films, compared, implicitly, to the work of Leni
Riefenstahl in Germany, reflected that:
To achieve a good result one would have needed the requisite train-
ing, formation of groups, massed crowds, etc, all available to the
director, and put in place in the best weather conditions, in the best
light at the right time. We didn’t have that and we couldn’t have
it. You can only have a real and proper piece of direction in a
documentary if you are not dealing with a real-time event.4
The Luce films of Mussolini addressing the masses in the Veneto and
Calabria in the late 1930s, with the repetition of panning shots featur-
ing cheering crowds and serried ranks of soldiers show that the Italian
film-makers had learned something from Riefenstahl.
One of the iconic poses of Mussolini from the late 1920s onwards is
a still, and it frames him on horseback, almost as an equestrian statue,
recalling classical Roman sculpture and the figure of the Renaissance
condottiero. There are numerous variations on this theme, including a
later one in colour on the front page of the periodical Tempo, with
the caption Guerra! (‘War!’). Sergio Luzzatto has drawn attention to the
ambiguity in this image, and the tension between revolution and
restoration. Mussolini mounted a horse just as he might clamber
aboard an airplane or get into a racing car or climb onto a threshing
machine, to lead the country forward in the spirit of modernity. On
the other hand, Mussolini on horseback is also Mussolini on a pedestal,
surveying the Italians from a higher vantage point, as he did regularly
from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, as a statue, a monolithic homage
to himself. So the image lends itself to both active and static interpre-
tations. By 1940, with Italy about to enter a war of tanks, submarines
and aircraft, Luce images of Mussolini on horseback had begun to
alienate Italian cinema audiences.5
Up until that point, however, Mussolini had demonstrated an
instinctive grasp of charisma, the telling image and the photo oppor-
tunity. The relatively sober pictures of him in the period immediately
after the seizure of power were probably calculated to reassure the
middle classes that their new leader was a responsible statesman, virile,
bareheaded and clean-shaven in contrast to the greybeards of Liberal
Italy. This image gave way to a succession of different characters and
poses, especially after the celebrations for the Decennale in 1932, most
of them captured by photographers from the Istituto Luce. Erving
Goffman’s psychological account of the gesture, rediscovered thanks to
the work of Judith Butler and other theorists of performativity, demon-
strates that symbolic effectiveness is a function of the credibility of per-
formance, and that the surface appearance triumphs over the sincerity
of the actor making the gesture.6 Historians of the duce’s image have
made a convincing case for Mussolini’s having been a consummate
character actor, who spent hours almost every day in the public gaze,
quite probably reliant on narcotic substances in order to keep going.7
Although, objectively speaking, Mussolini’s own physique never came
anywhere close to the Fascist ideal of youth and virility, he made an
heroic effort to transform his body into a symbol of the new Italy:
He began having himself photographed naked to the waist, chest

out and stomach in, harvesting or threshing on the hottest days of
the battle for the wheat; or in immaculate sports gear on the ski
slopes of Terminillo, or bolt upright on his favourite white horse, or
intent of fencing in the classic uniform of the swordsman.8
In an interview with an American journalist in 1937 Mussolini

claimed that he had made of his body a motor which was constantly
under surveillance and control and which ran with absolute regular-
ity.9 His corporeal sense of leadership is reminiscent of the traditional
symbolism of kingship. He was not the king of course, but beside the
uninspiring little figure of Victor Emanuel III, Mussolini seemed more
than a mere king, the man who would deliver the empire to the Italian
masses, and become the incarnation of the Nietzschean Superman.
Michel Foucault has argued for a conception of the imperial leader in
the post-revolutionary state:
The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic charac-

ter probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction
of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarch-
ical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. He is the individual
who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail,
however minute, can escape.10
Where Foucault’s account of the Napoleonic character gains some

piquancy in relation to Mussolini, is in the Fascist hall of mirrors: the
duce was the object of the nation’s gaze – in the flesh, in newspapers, in
newsreels, at school, at work, scowling out from signed portraits in
people’s homes – and at the same time he was observer in chief, scruti-
nizing intercepted letters and telephone calls and reading monthly
reports on public opinion filed by his prefects on the basis of inform-
ers’ testimony.
As the incarnation of the leader in a structure of power, the body of
the duce, and the people’s relationship with it, was grafted on to pre-
existing traditions which were part of western culture long before
Mussolini was born. Luisa Passerini has argued that the mythological
construction of the hero’s death and resurrection presented itself in an
impoverished and superficial version in the case of Mussolini. That is
not to diminish the real and present need felt by the Italian masses
immediately after the Great War for a profound regeneration after the
horror of the trenches and the torpor of Liberal Italy, a need addressed
first by D’Annunzio and his Arditi occupying Fiume, and to which
Mussolini and Fascism provided a 20-year response.11 But even if the
authentic need was ultimately frustrated for everyone, the myth was
accepted by many, for a long time. The newsreels are certainly edited
and the message managed, but the cheering crowds really were there.
Likewise, the mythology of the duce’s body outlived the Mussolini who
was executed at Dongo. It underwent a grotesque public ‘punishment’,
as a lifeless cadaver at Piazzale Loreto – a ritual which recalls a pre-
revolutionary tradition of the spectacle of torture alluded to by Foucault
in the book from which the foregoing quotation is taken – and a set of
truly bizarre post-mortem adventures, recounted in Luzzatto’s Il corpo
del duce.12 The duce’s body was still front page news in the Italian press
well over a decade after Mussolini died. According to Luzzatto:
For twenty years after the March on Rome, the body of the duce was
loved, adored by the majority of Italians. The personal charisma of
Mussolini constituted the key to the popular consensus of the
regime. Favoured by the physical and political mediocrity of King
Vittorio Emanuele III, the duce managed to occupy the public scene
as the providential incarnation of power. Not the august sovereign
of the House of Savoy, but the son of a blacksmith from the
Romagnolo dominated the real and imaginary landscape of the
Italians, with the fascination of his presence.13
Mussolini could not have succeeded in incarnating the myth, if it

had not represented an aspiration for Italians. In the Fascist narrative,
the rebirth that followed his severe physical crisis appeared providen-
tial, and Mussolini was the man sent by Providence, as even Pope Pius
XI agreed.
Passerini, in her account of early popular biographies of Mussolini,
including his own war diary and culminating in Margherita Sarfatti’s
Dux (published in English in 1925, in Italian the following year), dis-
cusses his mythic presentation in terms of a narrative of resurrection.
As a soldier in the Carso, he had been wounded, and this fact, on the
suggestion of his own diary, became woven into a narrative texture of
a symbolic death, descent into the Underworld and, in the silence of a

deserted hospital ward, rebirth as the New Man (uomo nuovo).14 The
narrative dwells on Mussolini at death’s door, his body racked by war
wounds, in order to accentuate the ‘miracle’ of his resurrection; a com-
monplace of hagiography, essential to mark the passage from one life
to another, from an old to a new identity. This secular appropriation of
the palingenetic myth was familiar to the Catholic subsoil of Italian
culture and it echoed contemporary, and equally secular versions to be
found in Marinetti and Ungaretti, two writers closely associated with
the future duce.15
Although Istituto Luce shorts began in the mid-1920s, the early
ones did not engage to any extent with this personal mythology,
although they did no doubt promote a national fascination with the
figure of the duce. The hagiographic narrative was conveyed in texts
rather than in images, and Passerini has traced a history of censor-
ship in their presentation in the course of the 1920s. Early accounts
of Mussolini’s life, such as that of Emilio Settimelli (1922), which
stressed the anarchic, picaresque or romantic traits of his early adult-
hood – living practically as a tramp in Switzerland, his voracious
appetite for sexual conquest, etc – were edited out of the official nar-
rative in order to present the duce as a serious, disciplined and coura-
geous leader and statesman.
It is really in the early 1930s, however, that the media were
brought to bear significantly on Polverelli’s myth-making agenda. It
is with the approach of the Decennale that mythology and the media
come together in the projection of a richer mix of Fascist narrative
than the brief report of Mussolini’s visit to this or that town or city.
It marks the beginning of a more sophisticated aesthetic engage-
ment, which has been studied in a number of recent books. Marla
Stone, writing about architecture and Fascism, has contended that
Fascism negotiated a series of compromises in which it did deals to
further the interests of both producers and consumers, for the
purpose of winning legitimacy for the regime. That is certainly true
of the early years after 1922, although the will to compromise
became less evident as the 1930s progressed. By means of a policy of
tolerance of, not to say cynical indifference towards, diverse forms of
artistic expression, the regime had won the participation and the
consent of large swathes of Italian artists and the creative and cul-
tural sectors, as well as the assent of the masses. This strategy led the
way to an official endorsement of Modernism in 1932 – and a long
list of artists and writers with state sinecures or receiving secret sub-
sidies from the Press Office – in marked contrast to aesthetic policy

north of the Alps:
Contemporary celebrities, from Mario Sironi to Giuseppe Terragni to

Enrico Prampolini, lent their formidable talents to the project of
giving Fascism a cultural identity. The adhesion of prominent and
unknown artists, in turn, gave the dictatorship a cultural legitimacy
that further cemented its rule.16
These talents were greatly in evidence in the exhibition to mark the

decennale and in the public artworks and buildings on view in many
urban piazze, as well as Sironi’s daily sketches in the pages of Il Popolo
d’Italia. In her monograph on Mario Sironi, Emily Braun presents his
career as a fascinating case study of the relationship between artistic
freedom and political authoritarianism under Fascism.17 Sironi fash-
ioned the Fascist regime’s image in both high and low-art forms, from
daily propaganda in Il Popolo d’Italia to monumental mural projects.18
In that process his work was defended by progressive critics such as
Bottai, and even by Mussolini himself, as the leading artist of Fascist
identity, and of Mussolini’s effigy as its emblem. Mussolini’s body
became emblematic of the regime and the visible part of a complex
mythology, capable on the one hand of appealing to the Italian popu-
lation so as to create a consensus, and on the other of being a
superficial target for anti-Fascist dissent at home and especially abroad.
Charlie Chaplin’s depiction of the duce in The Great Dictator (1940), for
example, presents him as Benzino Napaloni, a genial buffoon: opera
buffa, rather than as the serious threat to peace and democracy that he
incarnated.
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, in her work on Fascist spectacle and the
body, has argued along the lines of Emilio Gentile’s ‘anthropological
revolution’ thesis, that the regime, rather than being mired in absur-
dity as its detractors asserted, strove to achieve a formal transformation
of Italian society, even if the results were to be mixed. Mussolini con-
ceived of power in artistic, performative terms:
The regime’s historical unfolding took place in accordance with the

creation and elaboration of spectacular practices and rituals, myth-
ical inventions and cultic constructions. Thus, in narrating the
March on Rome, fascism instilled the revolution in its own collec-
tive memory; in invoking the martyrs’ blood, it sanctified its virtu-
ous role in leading Italy’s spiritual rebirth.19
A theatrical example of this conjunction between myth and perfor-

mance is Alessandro Pavolini’s ill-fated 18 BL, staged in Florence on
Sunday 22 April 1934, before an audience of 20,000, five and a half
years before he became Minister for Popular Culture.20 This was an
attempt to bring popular culture to the masses and to excite the pas-
sions of a sports fixture, with a dehumanized narrative of the Fascist
seizure of power. The heroine is not a beautiful Hollywood starlet, but
a battered military truck which makes the ultimate sacrifice in what
ought to have been a dramatic conclusion, had things gone right on
the night. In human terms, the ritual interpretation is consonant with
another one put forward by Mabel Berezin, who has argued that the
use of ritual facilitated the creation of new identities, such as a Fascist
identity, but that in fact ritual actually drew on a fundament of prior
identities:
In fascist Italy, rituals served as expressive popular arenas where

Italian cultural meanings – Catholicism as popular culture and the
cult of motherhood – were appropriated and reinvented.21
The contingency of this assumed identity would become manifest in

the collapse of the regime, when it would be discarded as the real
British and American bombs, rather than the Expressionist fantasy
world of 18 BL, destroyed the regime.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues convincingly that culture played an identity-
defining role for those born too late to have participated in the First
World War and the March on Rome.22 For these young people – Indro
Montanelli’s generation – culture compensated for political activity:
We twenty-year olds feel irremediably parvenus. We are spiritually

equipped to be assault squads, but fate has given us the role of Swiss
Guards of the constituted order.
Montanelli was writing in 1933, by which time the Decennale exhibi-

tion set the official seal on the mythology and imagery of Mussolini as
the great father of the new Italy. The new statute of the PNF, on
Starace’s initiative, decreed that in future DUCE was to be written in
upper-case letters every time the word was used in the newspapers.
Journalists and apologists flocked to provide hagiographic accounts of
Mussolini as soldier, educator and saviour of Italy, successor to Caesar
and to Napoleon, giving rise to one of the first great personality cults
of the twentieth century.
The image of Mussolini’s body, therefore, became a public posses-

sion, a force-field in the collective imagination, a screen onto which
hopes, fears and desires could be projected. Curzio Malaparte, in a
posthumous work, wrote about Mussolini as a character which could
be disassembled from various components such as the soldier, the
statesman, the sportsman, the musician, the thresher, and reassembled
in a sort of an ars combinatoria.23 On that screen, the divergent forces of
opinion in Italy sought to project their positive and negative images of
what it meant to be Italian and Fascist. In the words of Lorenzo
Benadusi:
The human body became […] a politicum, a battlefield, capable of

expressing publicly a series of irreconcilable antinomies: young/old;
black/white; healthy/sick; strong/weak; normal/abnormal; male/female.24
On this ideological battlefield, the images and sounds captured

struggles for conceptions of commonsense in those binary opposi-
tions, and to present a normative view of Italian society, censoring
out what did not fit the ideal, such as aspects of Mussolini’s dissolute
past.
The results which appeared on the nation’s cinema screens provided
a contemporary body of evidence for Walter Benjamin’s classic essay
on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936).25
Following Benjamin’s lead Falasca–Zamponi has argued that:
For a regime that opposed consumption not only in its material

sense but also as a disease of the body – a site of desire – the high
visibility of visual commodities is perplexing. […] In the totalitarian
politics of fascism, there was only one focus of desire, only one
object of pleasure: the regime, anthropomorphically embodied in
the public persona of the Duce, Mussolini. […] Political publicity
exalted the figure of Mussolini as the link between the people and
the nation, the expression of fascist principles. The ‘gendered mass’
was supposed to adhere to the regime and place authority in the
hands of the state through its faith in Mussolini, the superior artist,
the ‘man’. People’s feelings and emotions were channelled toward
worshiping Mussolini. The Duce would then be able to capitalize on
this love and turn the female mass into a virile army whose spiritual
attributes overcame material predispositions. A loving body of
admirers was only conceived as a depersonalized and desensitized
integration of the body politic.26
This is an incisive piece of analysis, even if less direct than Benjamin

in 1936, whose verdict on the newsreel-mediated personality cult was:
‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war’.27
Mussolini cleaved to the visual rhetoric of the trenches, dressing as a
soldier in a never-ending succession of different uniforms, and in that
process establishing the figure of the active soldier as the yardstick for
virility and masculinity, in contrast to the effete bourgeois. The Ministry
for Press and Propaganda addressed aspects of image management in
several of their daily veline to the press. The instructions will also have
gone to the Istituto Luce, and their effect is readily demonstrable from the
subsequent content of newsreels and propaganda films:
For some time now your photographers have been taking pictures of
the Duce on his own which – as you know – does not please him at
all. In order to avoid a telling off, photographs must stick rigorously
to the order, [previously issued] to show the Duce with large crowds,
and never on his own. (13 September 1935)
and
Remember, photographs of the Duce must not be published unless

they have been authorized. (22 November 1936)
Mussolini took an obsessive and narcissistic interest in the pho-

tographs of his body which would be permitted for public display, and
the veline which emanated from his Press Office (and its later forms) as
well as from the PNF secretariat and the Agenzia Stefani were often his
direct instructions.28 He continued to take an active interest in the
presentation of the family newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, to the point of
choosing photographs for the front page, realizing that the propaganda
value of a good picture was much more immediate and potent than a
long article which relatively few would read. His decision to publish
photographs of himself naked to the waist, working in the fields, in
the late 1930s, needs to be read in the context of his ‘anti-bourgeois
campaign’, as an admonition to sedentary city life.
Franzinelli cites an example of Mussolini visiting the theatre and
being brought quickly-developed photographs of his arrival for
approval before the performance had finished, so that the approved
pictures could appear in the newspapers the following morning.29 His
practice was to write Sì or No on the backs of the photograph and to
sign them with a large M. The rejected photographs went into the
archives of the Istituto Luce and form the basis of the collection assem-
bled by Franzinelli and Marino; a collection which is important for cul-
tural historians because it gives practical examples of images which the
regime censored in order to filter out pictures which did not conform
to the mythology of the duce and of Fascist Italy.
There appears to have been a variety of reasons for censorship of the
Luce images. Some of them are obvious enough, and are personal
rather than political: Mussolini bored and about to yawn, beside Hitler
who is intently examining a painting in an art gallery; Mussolini
scratching his groin through cavalry twill, Mussolini resembling a
badly-made version of Michelin-man, disembarking from an airplane.
Franzinelli has made the point that Mussolini always came off worse in
physical comparison with his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, who was
young, slim and handsome with an easy manner, a natural smile
(when not imitating the jutting out chin and scowl of his father-
in-law), and an ability to wear military and civilian clothes with
grace. Mussolini on the other hand tended towards self-parody in his
inability to maintain a dignified bearing in any set of clothes for more
than a few minutes. With characteristically cruel detachment Curzio
Malaparte observed:
His taste for military uniform played tricks on him, one funnier
than the next. When his shoulders were in uniform, his paunch was
in civvies. When his legs were in uniform, his arms were in civvies.
His backside was never either in uniform or in civvies. […]. He never
managed to be all hero at the same time and in the same way. All
hero from head to toe. Either his paunch was sticking out, or it was
his double-chin, or his backside.30
This verdict on Mussolini, corroborating Chaplin’s black-propaganda

version in the Great Dictator (1940), was after the event, published
many years after the deaths of both observer and observed.31
Other bodies
It was the twin themes of racism and empire which yielded some of
the most controversial examples of Fascist image management, and
which are intimately involved with the development of censorship
policy in the 1930s. This is the faultline where the binary oppositions
between black and white bodies, men and women, virile men and
ephebic men, ruler and subjects, Aryans and Others were acted out in
the collective imagination of Fascist Italy. Giorgio Fabre has traced a

shift in Mussolini’s censorship policy to 1934, and has argued that the
new policy was inspired by a photograph of a black man and a white
woman, on the cover of a popular novel, both clearly in the grip of an
amorous passion.32 The regime had already demonstrated its sensitivity
with regard to images of black bodies, when they were associated with
success. Two years earlier, on 8 April 1932, a velina from the Press
Office had taken Il Giornale d’Italia to task for publishing photographs
of the black ballerina Josephine Baker and drawing public attention to
the her gracefulness.33
This was almost certainly the first of the veline to treat specifically of
racism, although the formulation of the instruction makes no explicit
reference to razza (race). The concept of race, however, was very much
on the agenda of the Fascist hierarchy. On a visit to the United States
in 1931 Dino Grandi had spoken in Italian about razza e sangue (race
and blood). He also spoke in English but in less direct terms.34 Shortly
after Hitler’s coming to power in Germany, Polverelli at the Press
Office issued the following rebuke:
The representative of Il Messaggero has received a special admonition

because of the article that his newspaper published under the head-
line ‘Balilla abroad camped at Frascati’ which included the illustra-
tion of a Balilla with flat nose, blubbery lips and curly hair. In other
words, a negro. This is to be ‘strongly reprobated’ because it presents
to Italy the figure of an inferior nation which needs to have recourse
to black boys to provide the model of a Balilla. On the campsite,
among the flower of daring youth (balda giovinezza) there are plenty
of good models for the Italian race. (21 July 1933)
This message about appropriate role models was clear enough.

The conquest of empire was not yet a publicly-stated aim, but racism
was demonstrably implicit in the Fascist world-view, although
that would have been as true of the western democracies at the
time.
Ciano, whether as press officer, undersecretary or minister took a
hard line on newspaper coverage of black Africa.35 In February 1935 he
informed newspaper editors that he would sequester any paper which
published photographs of Abyssinia, unless they were photographs
which showed it to be a backward country populated by beggars and
bandits. He even mused about Il Corriere della Sera being in the pay
of the Abyssinian government because of the photographs it had
published on 14 February 1935. Three months later, the very idea of an

Abyssinian government was questioned:
As regards Abyssinia, make clear in all articles that it is not a state.

It is an agglomeration of tribes, a dictatorship of one tribe over
another: the exploitation of the whole population for the advan-
tage of the ruling tribe. You must never speak either of an
Abyssinian state or an Abyssinian form of civil organization.
(21 May 1935).36
By January 1936 newspapers and magazines were being warned

not to publish photographs which showed closeness between Italian
soldiers and Abyssinians.37
Once empire had been achieved and declared by Mussolini on 9 May
1936, the instructions to the press grew even tougher:
Minister Ciano, after having confirmed the instruction to avoid

polemic in relation to England, ordered an end to the displays of
mushy sentiment which some newspapers have shown regarding
the Abyssinians. These people are our subjects and we must make a
sharp distinction between the race which rules and the race which is
ruled. The Italian race must not have any type of reconciliation with
the black race and must keep intact its strong racial purity. The
minister concluded by giving an informal indication of the views
held by senior members of the regime, on the problem of race.
(26 May 1936).38
The whole imperial campaign had been presented to children in

exciting boy-scout terms, drawing on Emilio Salgari’s novels of
adventure, following troop movements on large maps at school and
singing popular songs such as Faccetta nera. Advertising men natu-
rally took advantage of this wave of free publicity in order to market
products. One of the most emblematic of these advertisements was
for the National Savings Banks (Casse di Risparmio), depicting a young
Balilla and an Abyssinian boy, and promoting a World Savings Day
(31 October 1936). The iconography of this poster is important for
the implicit narrative of race in Fascist Italy. What we see is a direct
binary opposition of clothing and nakedness. The white boy is
wearing a dark-coloured Balilla uniform, with a kerchief reminiscent
of Garibaldi’s red one and with a device on his hat which plays on
the media obsession with the letter ‘M’, the first letter of the duce’s
surname. The familiar ‘libro e moschetto’ are ritually present, re-

minding the audience of the implied ‘fascista perfetto’. The white
boy is generously putting his arm around the half-naked black boy,
and it is the latter, significantly, who is contributing a coin to the
strangely-shaped money box, which may suggest a military helmet,
among other things. The black boy was therefore placing his coin
and his trust in a military machine which had been engaged in rape
and conquest in black Africa for over a year, reducing his country to
the status of a colony. In this case, black nakedness represents power-
lessness in the face of the white boy in the dark (military) uniform,
and the image presents itself to its audience as a manifestation of
commonsense.
The Ministry for Press and Propaganda ordered newspapers and
magazines to refrain from any further publication of the image in a
velina dated 31 October 1936. In a sense the instruction was point-
less, given that the purpose of the advertisement was to promote
something taking place on 31 October 1936 and therefore no-one
was likely to pay for it to be carried in the press after that date. The
velina does suggest, however, an anxiety about the implications for
the Fascist master narrative of the image of two boys embracing. It
might be a stretch of the imagination to read this poster as a gay
text, but the image of the virile male leader does of course bring
with it the negatively-charged feminized male, or the rent boy. The
concept of virility, central to Fascism, raised some interesting issues
of male sexual identity.39 Fascist virility celebrated the male bonding
and homoeroticism of the trenches and the sports fields, while rel-
egating the feminine to a condition of passivity. Fascist theorists of
sexuality had grown up with the theories of Cesare Lombroso on
criminal anthropology and on homosexuality. As Benadusi puts it,
‘in a society where women were cast in a subordinate role in relation
to men, and held to be inferior, sexual passivity was suspect and
considered to be negative behaviour’. 40 A medical authority of the
time, Dr Vito Massarotti, wrote that:
Some homosexuals love to be possessed, to do as women do: these

are the so-called passive ones. Others instead remain male in the act
of sexual union […]. These are the active ones. Often, in a single
individual, we encounter both types, where one is dominant […]. A
man who loves another man passively feels, and thinks of himself as
a woman. This is the most serious form of sexual degeneration, the
lowest on the scale.41
The implication of this for Fascist sexuality appeared to be that

active homosexuality was analogous to active heterosexuality, espe-
cially among young men in a society, dominated by Christian icono-
graphy, which stigmatized the loss of female virginity before marriage.
‘Pedastria passiva’, on the other hand, negated virility, and was there-
fore a matter of shame and opprobrium, although it was not legislated
for explicitly, on the grounds that it did not exist in Fascist Italy.
Detlev Peukert, writing about everyday life in Nazi Germany, suggests
on the question of consensus that:
It is quite clear that the long prison terms in concentration camps

given to alleged professional criminals, so-called ‘asocial’ gypsies
or ‘recidivist’ homosexuals were approved of by wide sections of the
population, including many who criticised the detention and
torture of political opponents of the regime.42
There is good reason to believe that Italian society in the 1930s har-
boured similar prejudices. Certainly it was impossible for writers to
publish texts which had overtly gay themes. Karen Pinkus, who has
also discussed the World Savings Day image, has written a perceptive
chapter on the black body in Italian advertising in the 1930s. Her
conclusion was that the presentation of black bodies in the Italian
media of the 1930s was predominantly as a body without power or
self-control: the negative of the Italian Fascist hero who was both virile
and disciplined. This interpretation is certainly consistent with instruc-
tions to the press and the media from the Ministry for Popular Culture
and its ancestors.
This anxiety over virility and race may explain an otherwise puz-
zling instruction to the press, from the duce himself, not to publish
the official Luce photograph of Mussolini, deliverer of Empire, with
the submissive Ras Sejum and his three fellow Abyssinians, who
were received on 6 February 1937 at Palazzo Venezia. Luzzatto and
Franzinelli have both reproduced photographs of the visit.43 The
official photograph was not a good image in terms of propaganda as
the duce looks less than imperial and the Abyssinians look more than
a little sceptical. Again, the instruction to the press to censor the
image suggests an uneasiness. Franzinelli has offered the further sug-
gestion that Mussolini’s reasoning may have taken into account the
assassination attempt on Field Marshal Graziani at Addis Ababa a
couple of weeks later, as a result of which there were violent Italian
reprisals and the four Ras in the picture were brought back to Italy in
chains and sent into confino. That would be a reason for not having
the image in circulation four weeks after it was taken, but not for cen-
soring it immediately after the visit.
Not all photographs taken of black Africans by Italians in the 1930s
were intended for the press. Some of the most infamous photographs
are those taken by Lidio Cipriani, the Fascists’ anthropologist of
racism.44 His work is an example of the visual anthropologist as
voyeur, using his camera almost as a surgical instrument in order to
objectify the human body, to strip away any thread of dignity and to
deny it human subjectivity. For Cipriani the inferiority of blacks was
not a matter of culture, it was tied to biological conditions, which by
their nature admitted of no improvement. This was the basis of the
‘scientific’ argument against miscegenation.45 His scientific credentials
were used to justify some of the most brutal excesses of racist policy
under Mussolini. Mussolini, however, was not acting in an historical
vacuum when he put in place discriminatory laws for the colonies.46
Royal Decree no. 485, 14 May 1908, set out racist legislation which dis-
criminated against black Africans, e.g., according to article 13, the
death penalty was applied to colonial subjects in cases where penal
servitude (ergastolo) was recommended for Italian subjects and foreign-
ers resident in Italian territory. Furthermore, article 371 set out a
penalty for sexual violence against children of 12 or under, if they were
Italian, but nine or under if they were ‘colonial or assimilated subjects’.
Article 385 established a penalty for introducing girls into prostitution
if the woman ‘prostituted’ was under 21, in the case of Italian or
foreign women, but under 12 in the case of ‘colonial or assimilated
subjects’. The effect would have been to legalize the prostitution of
minors in the colonies. It never became law however: Catholic moral-
ity held sway. Shortly afterwards, Italy annexed part of what is now
Libya, adding to the list of ‘colonial subjects’ not just black Africans
but Arabs, Muslims and Jews, and this complicated the task of law
makers, who appear to have shared assumptions about hierarchies of
‘races’. Laws had been introduced in 1908 and 1909 which prohibited
the cohabitation of colonial staff with ‘indigenous women’ in Eritrea
and Somalia, but Liberal Italy had not been out on a limb: similar legis-
lation was enacted by Britain and Germany around the same time.
Fabre makes the point that:
Public opinion generally came to be influenced by this new colonial

climate, to the point where even publications for children in
1907–08 began to produce articles and stories in which blacks were
described as wild and inferior, or in the case of more ‘evolved’ ones,

capable of being civilized by Europeans.47
This way of creating consensus and manipulating commonsense

continued through the 1930s, in terms of popular songs (e.g., ‘Faccetta
nera’), advertisements and children’s fiction, including the co-opting
of Salgari’s adventure novels, written in an earlier era. Fascist common-
sense also had some deeply-held assumptions on gender roles back
home as well as in the colonies. Instructions to the press read as symp-
toms of this pathology. Polverelli informed the press on 8 February
1933 that:
From now on publication of photographs or drawings of thin

women will lead to immediate sequestration.48
He elaborated on his line of reasoning a week later:
You have been advised to avoid carrying images of donne serpenti (snake
women) who represent the negation of the real woman whose function
is to procreate healthy children. You are therefore invited to write
articles against the fashion of the silhouette [i.e., thin fashion model].
Articles on Hollywood were to be avoided and especially ones

dealing with the weight of American actresses. Newspaper editors were
even invited to find writers who would write stories poking fun at thin
women.49
Gigliola Gori in a recent book on Fascism and the female body has
examined the question of women and sport in Italy, before and during
the ventennio. She has demonstrated that the engagement of women in
some sporting activities did promote and support a degree of gender
emancipation. Nevertheless, the dominant assumption on the adult
female gender role was that set out by Polverelli: her function was the
procreation of healthy children for the duce and his empire. This was
the message for the press and the media to promote:
Il Popolo di Roma has been withdrawn for having published photo-

graphs of naked women on page three while there are photographs
of the pope on the front page. Deputy Polverelli wishes to take this
opportunity to remind you again not to publish photographs
of naked women because they constitute a threat to demography.
(11 July 1933)50
The demographic campaign was never too far from the surface in the
instructions to the press, under both Polverelli and Ciano, and this
extended to banning advertisements for remedies against impotence
and syphilis.
How did these various strands of commonsense and Fascist anxiety
manifest themselves in the media in order to shape the popular
imagination? There is a well-known brief Istituto Luce newsreel of
Mussolini from 1937, at the founding of Aprilia, stripped to the
waist, working in the fields. This short was edited every bit as care-
fully as Nazi newsreel and films – Italian directors had learned in
their turn from Leni Riefenstahl – and in its brevity it contains some
defining images of Italian Fascism. What does this tell us about
Fascism? Firstly, there is the rather portly body of the duce in the
opening section of the newsreel. Here it is half covered, dressed in
white. Mussolini’s attire contrasts with the colours worn by the
other clothed men around him, and this makes the leader stand out
from the crowd. Signs generate their meaning by differences. In this
case, the denotative differences are clear enough. The connotations
of the duce as contadino, in the context of 1937, refer to a contrast
with the comfortable bourgeois. The portrayal of Mussolini also
recalls in cinematographic terms the figure of Maciste, whose inter-
textual memory had appeared at the end of Cabiria (1937). The
newsreel was speaking the language of imperial epic film, and
implicitly recalling Italy’s imperial achievements in black Africa. The
soldier, going back to the Fascists’ myths of origin in the First World
War, was the yardstick against which to measure manliness, and the
leader was the Man amongst men; violent men at that. We see on
the screen the charismatic image of the semi-naked worker in the
fields, the blacksmith’s son, engaged in another violent and almost
sexual act with Nature herself, transforming the soldier’s prowess
into autarky, economic self-sufficiency, reaping the harvest of
15 years of Fascism. This short film demonstrates some of the mag-
netic pull which Mussolini held over many Italian people, and some
foreigners, for the better part of two decades.
But it is a propaganda film: it is artifice, intended to impress, and
needs to be decoded in order to tell the truth, just like a dream. In all
of this presentation of self-image, there are contradictions and prob-
lems. There is the contrast between virile nakedness and pictures of
fully-clothed men. The duce is the great white leader, the only man
who can wear the white breeches, symbol of purity. Yet he can also
appear semi-naked without losing his power. He is an active and virile
nude as opposed to the powerless and undisciplined naked black

Africans. He is first among:
The real males [who] were the muscular and virile men, with vigor-
ous and honed bodies, with a threatening warrior air, strong and
audacious, always ready and dynamic to go into battle or to make a
conquest of a woman. The non-men instead were people of puny
and ephebic constitution, delicate, timid and gentle, with willowy
movements, easily agitated, timorous and tender with the gentle
sex.51
Mussolini’s own almost spectral whiteness is emphasized in the black

and white newsreel, projected in a darkened auditorium, the screen on
which the Italian population projected their collective hopes and fears.
The positive messages of the propaganda film summon up their neg-
atives, that which needs to be censored, and they conjure up another,
darker and more menacing image. The image which, according to
Fabre, inspired a concerted effort at censorship, presents a man in an
expensive suit and a woman in a dressing gown. In terms of gender
roles, this was not a challenge to Fascist common sense. What is a chal-
lenge is the fact that the man is black, and the woman is white. With
the invasion of Abyssinia, Ethiopia and Libya, the Italian imperial
adventure extended to exhuming indigenous corpses, in order to
measure sizes of skulls, so as to develop a taxonomy of black African
racial types. This self-image of virile Italians as European scientists
‘engaged upon important research requiring an optimal data set, over-
rode the sanctity of any local burial rites’ and effectively dehumanized
the colonial subjects.52 Subjects became objects, literally. Italy’s Fascist
imperial geographers were engaged in a discourse of scientific prestige,
normalizing cultural stereotypes for their 1937 report on the state of
the Libyan colony. In this taxonomy of racial types ‘the logic of homo-
geneous racial categories implied the possibility of accurate and com-
parative measurement between races’. This involved races other than
the European ones to which Italian Fascists claimed affinity, and it
meant that the issue of a union involving miscegenation was always
destined to come at the bottom of the hierarchy of races.
The regime feared miscegenation and the implicit breaching of inte-
gral boundaries of social identity. Black Africa had nothing to offer
Fascist Italian (or even European) identity. Instead, it meant voyeurism,
when contemplating black female bodies, or the threat of difference
and transgression in the case of black male bodies. According to
Loredana Polezzi, this threat of otherness was most often played up by

emphasizing ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ traits such as scarification and naked-
ness.53 What Mussolini and Ciano saw in the 1934 bookcover, there-
fore, was not the Fascist stereotype of the black male, but something
much more threatening to social identity. The black male body in the
picture is not encoded as a ‘savage’ or as an oppressed colonial subject.
He is neither scarred nor naked. He is wearing a professional suit, and
clothes encode indicators of education, class, wealth and power.
Sambadù is radically Other because he represents the negation of the
Fascist stereotype of the male black body, the thing which is inconceiv-
able: the black man who has education and wealth. He has stolen
Mussolini’s imperial clothes. What is more, he has stolen the power to
seduce and rape Italian womanhood and the feminized masses, and in
that seduction to debase the national stock, to penetrate the integrity of
the body politic. In short, Sambadù encodes the worst nightmare of the
Mediterranean Master-race.
Racism and the imagination
The cover of Maria Volpi’s novel Sambadù amore negro came to

Mussolini’s attention within days of the Giustizia e Libertà arrests in
Turin.54 On 30 March 1934 Ciano had advised the press on how to
cover the Turin story:
A press release will be sent out concerning the arrest, as part of an

anti-Fascist plot, of twenty people, mostly residing in Turin, of
whom eighteen are Jews. Give the press release a prominent place
on the front page.55
Interlandi’s Il Tevere, Mussolini’s unofficial mouthpiece, did more

than that; it provided extensive and inflammatory editorial comment:
What was the point of the polemic which we have mounted over
the last few weeks and which was so lazily welcomed by the organs
of public opinion? Its point was to establish, with the support of
Jewish documents, that the Jew does not assimilate, because in
assimilation he sees a diminution of his personality and a betrayal
of his race; that the Jew demands a double nationality, even a
double country, in order to remain a productive element, that is to
say to carry out his business and to have beyond the borders a
super-national centre of attraction and propulsion; that not even
the war (and Fascism) has assimilated the Jews to the nation for
which they bore arms: the Jewish press indeed speaks of Jews who
fought among them in the name of foreign countries. All this today
has the dramatic seal of OVRA; and let no-one overlook this role-call
of names, at the risk of being ingenuous, let us remember that the
best of anti-Fascism, past and present is of the Jewish race: from
Treves to Modigliani, from Rosselli to Morgari, the organizers of
subversion were and are of the ‘chosen people’.56
So in spring 1934, in the minds of the two most powerful politicians

in Italy, Mussolini and Ciano, a parallel was being entertained between
blacks and Jews, with neither group belonging to the Fascist vision of
Italy’s future, any more than homosexuals or other minority groups
did. Blacks and Jews were regarded as inferior races.
Until recently, the line put forward by Mussolini himself on the
Jewish question has largely been accepted at face value. According to
this, there was no ‘Jewish problem’ in Italy before Mussolini announced
there was one in a speech at Trieste in the summer of 1938. Why did he
choose Trieste for his only public speech on racist policy? It was not,
after all, on a direct line from Rome to Munich, where he was bound for
peace talks with Hitler and Chamberlain. Trieste, a cosmopolitan port
city, part of the German-speaking world until 20 years earlier, had seen
two waves of Jewish immigrants, firstly from Germany (1936–37), and
then from Austria (after 12 March 1938), both fleeing the Nazis. A
police memorandum from mid-1938 may explain Mussolini’s choice of
venue for his speech:
After the German occupation of Austria the number of Jews in

Trieste increased greatly because of the warm hospitality they
receive in Italy and the help which the Jews of Trieste offer to their
co-religionists. After the publication of racist articles in Il Popolo
d’Italia, also carried in the national newspapers, the Jews formed a
sort of single front and they are often to be seen chattering in their
‘language’. They live in fear of a worse tomorrow. They are studying
ways of saving their capital and smuggling their goods and their
shares abroad. They need to be watched in this regard and they
should be kept under surveillance in their work. Many of them are
commercial travellers, driving around the province, and some
of them are thought to be Communists. For example, there is a
certain Salpeter who is believed to be the link between different
Communist cells in Istria. He is in business with Cavaliere Troiani –
ex-PNF secretary at Grado – and while Troiani is usually to be found

in the shop, Salpeter is out driving around the province. The phe-
nomenon is not new. These Jews in order to achieve their aims
don’t think twice about selling their country and family. They are
all a hybrid people, corrupters of women who try to conquer with
money and flattery.57
Mussolini will have been well aware of the atmosphere of tension in

which his Trieste speech would be received. Renzo De Felice, in later
years, advanced the view that Mussolini adopted racist policies at the
behest of Hitler, and that therefore the Nazis were the ones really
responsible for this aberration in Italy’s history. This is open to ques-
tion. Fabre, following a number of well-researched books which have
appeared in Italy and elsewhere, has argued in a more recent work that
Mussolini’s interest in racist doctrines actually pre-dates 1934 by a
quarter of a century.58 His argument is based on close examination of
Mussolini’s early journalism which demonstrates that Mussolini was
toying with racist theory ten to 15 years before he had even heard of
Hitler, and that 1933, and the subsequent invasion of Ethiopia,
reawakened a strong latent tendency in Mussolini rather than inspiring
a change of heart.59
Fabre has identified Mussolini’s early Nietzschean obsession with
Jews and with the figure of Jesus Christ, the Jew responsible for bring-
ing down the Roman world. Mussolini’s essay ‘Il pangermanismo’,
published in 1910 in the columns of Pagine libere, and later published
as part of Il Trentino veduto da un socialista contains the following:
It is not yet the change of political forms, from republican to

monarchist, which marks the beginning of the decline of Rome, but
the corruption of the dominant races (stirpi), brought about by too
frequent and prolonged contact with the inferior peoples. Nietzsche
in the Genealogy of Morals explains the fall of Roman power with the
overturning of the code of moral values achieved by the Jewish
people, which Gobineau lists among the peoples of ‘Mediterranean
chaos’. Jesus is the archetype (campione) of the inferior race which
defeats the superior one.60
Mussolini had not returned in print explicitly to that theme for

a long time, and his public pronouncements on the debilitating
influence of religion had been moderated by negotiations to conclude
the Lateran Pacts in 1929, but Romanità had become an explicit and
omnipresent cultural value of the regime, and the accusation against

individual Jews of undermining the state became more insistent once
Hitler came to power.
Mussolini’s racist concern about Jews in Italy was evident several
years before 1933, at the time of the Lateran Pacts. Fabre has drawn
attention to archival evidence of a truly bizarre instance of this concern.
The day after negotiation concluded with the Vatican (11 February
1929) on the Lateran Pacts, Mussolini himself, the President of the
Council of Ministers, wrote to the governor of the Banca d’Italia,
Bonaldo Stringher, demanding the immediate sacking of the manager
of the Genoa branch of the bank, on the basis of an anonymous
informer’s report which accused Ugo Del Vecchio of anti-Fascist senti-
ments. Mussolini also pointed out that Del Vecchio was a Jew. Stringher
interviewed Del Vecchio who did not deny his Jewish origins. He did
deny anti-Fascist activity of any kind and added that his second wife
was a Catholic and that he had had his youngest son recently baptized.
Stringher relayed all this information to Mussolini, who telegraphed the
following message to the prefect of Genoa on 1 March:
Check whether it is true that the youngest son of Commendatore

Del Vecchio, manager of the local Banca d’Italia, has been baptized
and identify in which Catholic church the ceremony took place.61
The prefect confirmed that the boy had indeed been baptized at
Palmanova, and so his father was allowed to remain in his post. This
is one of several examples of the Head of Government’s discrimina-
tory interests cited by Fabre, dating from 1929, the year of the
Lateran Pacts.62 One more intimately connected with Mussolini’s
own family at the end of that year was the broken engagement of
Edda Mussolini with Dino Mondolfi, son of a Jewish colonel in the
Italian army. Edda herself relates that her mother Rachele served ham
to the young fiancé, while at the same uncomfortable family meal
Mussolini declared to his prospective son-in-law that ‘The Jews are
my worst enemies’.63
The previous year Mussolini had written an anonymous article,
‘Religione o nazione?’ in Il Popolo di Roma (29–30 November 1928),
questioning the extent of Jewish assimilation into Italian life. This gave
rise to a debate in the pages of the newspaper over the next few weeks,
with several Jewish Fascists proclaiming their loyalty to the Italian
state. On 14 December 1928 Bocchini issued a circular to prefects
asking to be kept informed of the activities of Jews in Italy, in relation
especially but not exclusively to Zionist organizations.64 In ‘Religione e

nazione’ Mussolini wrote:
I want to make clear that I do not wish to begin anti-Semitism,

despite the fact that Semites are among the main protagonists of
anti-Fascism worldwide […] from Treves to Torrès […] I hope instead
that anti-Semitism in Italy does not come to be provoked […] by
Jews living in Italy.
To this thinly-veiled threat, in an anonymous article, he added:
In Italy there is another people which declares itself to be quite

apart from not just our religion but from our nation, our people, our
history and our ideals. Guests, in short, who are to us as oil is to
water; together but unmixed, to use an expression of the late
Margulies, the Florentine rabbi. That is a serious claim.
The reference to ‘our religion’, calculated to allay Vatican senti-

ments, is a very different tone from Mussolini’s writing of 20 years
earlier. But it is clear that religion is only a part of his concerns from
the following:
All Zionists speak of ‘a Jewish people’, of ‘a Jewish race’, of ‘a Jewish

nation’ and ‘Jewish ideals’ without the faintest allusion to religion.
Mussolini closed the debate with another anonymous letter to the

paper on 15 December 1928, overestimating significantly the number
of Jews resident in Italy, and therefore accentuating the ‘threat’ from
an untrustworthy minority, the ‘inferior people’ who had contam-
inated the Roman Empire, whose emulation was Fascism’s cherished
aim. His summer 1938 speech in Trieste returned specifically to those
themes.
Discriminatory laws were introduced on 30 October 1930, (RDL,
no. 1731) and 19 November 1930, (RDL no. 1561) which separated
clearly the Jewish community from the rest of Italian life.65 The political
police appear to have been taking note routinely of fact that a significant
number of suspected anti-Fascists were Jews, or were thought to be
Jews.66 In 1932, with Hitler growing stronger by the day but not yet in
power, Mussolini began to take steps to remove Jews from positions of
power and influence. Among the first of the casualties was Margherita
Sarfatti, who ceased writing for Il Popolo d’Italia in December 1932. This,
however, was not an explicit policy and it was not applied consistently.
Fabre has made the point that most counter-examples, that is to say of
Jews appointed to positions of responsibility, involved cases of financial
advantage to Mussolini’s own business interests. His erstwhile financial
backer, Giuseppe Toeplitz, found himself squeezed out in March 1933, at
Mussolini’s instigation. In public pronouncements he maintained a
benevolent attitude towards Jews and Judaism.67 But his actions spoke
differently. He began to remove Jews from positions of influence.
Margherita Sarfatti did continue to write for Gerarchia, but only until
January 1934. On 30 March 1933, in response to the Nazi boycott of
Jewish shops, he sent the following message to Hitler, via Vittorio
Cerruti, the ambassador in Berlin:
Every regime has not only the right but the duty to remove from
posts of authority any elements which are untrustworthy but this
does not make it necessary, indeed it can be dangerous, to link to
‘race’ (razza), Semitism and Aryanism, what is instead a defence
measure and the development of the revolution.
A few weeks later, on 18 April he commented on Nazi activities that

‘there are many ways of achieving a purge without having to resort to
overt persecution’. Fabre has argued that:
There was a turning point [in Mussolini’s attitude to the Jews],

perhaps confused at first, when he decided that he had to take
action against all Jews in Italy, not just isolated cases. And this set in
motion a truly national and public process of anti-Semitism. We
may suppose that this turning point was around June 1935.68
It is true that there are relatively few directives to the press on this
theme before 1936. There was a ban on reporting the visit of a Jewish
theatrical troupe at the end of March 1934 – the day after the Turin
arrests, as it happens. In any case, the instruction was revoked ten days
later. The bulk of veline on the theme of anti-Semitism dates from the
summer of 1938. Therefore the Race Laws were not being trailed in the
usual way through the mass media, in order to shape the public’s imag-
ination, which suggests that they did not need to be. What still shocks
the observer, three generations later, listening to the live recording of
his words in the Trieste speech are not the words themselves, but the
rapturous cheers of the crowd which greeted the ominous message.69
Nobody should be under the illusion that anti-Semitism came out of
the blue in Italy in 1938. It was not something which the duce needed
to instil in the Italian population as part of his anthropological revolu-
tion. On that September afternoon in Trieste, the duce could still do no
wrong in the eyes of the cheering crowd.
But that judgement needs to be moderated by another observation
which indicates a deep ambivalence on the part of the crowd for the
logical consequences of Fascism’s aesthetic fetishes of power. The fol-
lowing week when Mussolini returned to Verona from negotiations in
Munich, he was treated to a rapturous welcome by the waiting crowds,
relieved that he had averted a war. Unwilling to play the peacemaker
on this occasion, and displeased by this pacifist sentiment amongst the
people he had hoped to recast as warriors, for once, the duce refused to
come to the balcony to embody the familiar iconic pose for his adoring
crowd. With due diligence, the Istituto Luce captured this anti-climactic
return on film.
6
Culture Wars
Mussolini may have always been anxious to cut a dash among intellec-
tuals, writers, artists and scholars but as a politician he tended to take a
pragmatic view of them.1 If they were willing to be pliable – and many
were, to protect their material interests – he made use of their endorse-
ment and traded on their respectability or reputation. Gentile and
Marinetti are good examples of commitment rewarded by state
sinecures. Luigi Pirandello, a far greater international asset, proved less
tractable, but not actually hostile. Others were beyond any form of
compromise, and Fascism dealt with them brutally: Piero Gobetti,
Giacomo Matteotti and the Rosselli brothers all died at the hands of
Fascist henchmen. Antonio Gramsci was released from jail at death’s
door. Only Croce had the intellectual pre-eminence, hereditary wealth
and international reputation which allowed him to maintain an
Olympian disdain for Mussolini’s brand of violent right-wing pop-
ulism. His mail and his movements were closely monitored and his
influence on public opinion was negligible.2
Marinetti in particular had proved useful for stirring up popular
opinion after Piazza San Sepolcro. Once in power Mussolini began very
quickly to distance himself from Futurist rhetoric. He had no interest
in realizing Marinetti’s ambition to establish Futurism as state art.
Indeed he probably had no interest in a state art. He was after power:
culture could wait. Futurists were excluded from the exhibition at the
Venice Biennale of 1924, to Marinetti’s dismay. He heckled and berated
Gentile, who was delivering the opening address, before being bundled
out of the conference hall and into a police van.3 The second phase of
Futurism held a conference of their own at Milan in 1924 where the
movement decided to adapt to the new political realities and to negoti-
ate a position within the Fascist state. The Futurists moved their
132
Culture Wars 133
headquarters from Milan to Piazza Adriana in Rome and lost their orig-
inal, rebellious soul.
Marinetti, Carli and Settimelli had played a marginal part at the
Congress of Fascist Culture in March 1925. The congress was to be
Mussolini’s opportunity to quash the ‘myth’ that Italian intellectuals
were against Fascism. The whole event was stage managed so as to
stifle debate. The official report stated that in the new Fascist Italy:
The ‘failings of centuries’ would be corrected replacing the tradi-

tional values and attitudes of the Italian people with the principles
of the Fascist revolution, and redirecting the spiritual and physical
resources of the Italian people to the service of the state.4
This was Mussolini’s first, and unsuccessful, programme for mass

propaganda. The Futurists played the familiar role as hecklers at the
congress, though they were not arrested on this occasion. The practical
consequences of the congress were firstly plans for the establishment of
an Istituto nazionale fascista della cultura, over which Gentile was
invited to preside, and secondly the publication of Gentile’s Manifesto
of Fascist Intellectuals.
Italian Fascism experienced a number of false starts.5 Mussolini’s first
attempt at setting up a private CEKA ran into the sand after the
Matteotti murder. So he tried again, with more success, in 1926. The
organization of culture fared no differently. Six months after the first
abortive attempt at a programme of mass propaganda, Mussolini set up
the Reale Accademia d’Italia, again with Gentile in charge, a reward for
loyalty now that he was no longer a government minister. This was
only a slight improvement and it had little or no effect on the country
as a whole. The great Treccani encyclopedia project, again directed by
Gentile, did have more value and it produced a tangible result which
Mussolini could point to as a Fascist achievement for the benefit of
national pride.
Following De Felice’s lead of seeing the period 1929–36 as the years
of consensus, Cannistraro argued in his analysis of the mass media
under Fascism that Mussolini’s first decade in power was characterized
by the absence of a cultural policy. This is true up to a point. Com-
paratively there was less of an articulated cultural policy in the 1920s
than there would be in the 1930s. The creative and cultural industries
were largely ignored. The emphasis really was on sport and the organ-
ization of leisure-time activities, rather than high culture. The regime
nonetheless had deeply-held prejudices on cultural questions and these
manifested themselves in various ways, especially with a view to

censoring rather than propagating innovation, as we shall see.
Mussolini’s personal antipathy and lack of patience for the intellec-
tuals is apparent in the diatribe against Benedetto Croce and the
signatories of his anti-Fascist manifesto, published on 1 May 1925 in
response to Gentile’s manifesto:
We men of the Fascist regime are not closed away in an ivory tower,
far removed from contact with the labouring masses. We are in con-
tinuous and direct contact with the people. […]. In the last year we
have carried out the true, unique and profound revolution. We have
buried the old agnostic, paralytic, liberal democratic state […] and
replaced it with the corporative and Fascist state […] which gathers
together, controls, harmonizes and tempers the interests of all the
social classes.6
Prominent intellectuals, such as Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957)

and Don Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959) had already emigrated by this
point. Giuseppe Prezzolini (1882–1982) had made up his mind to go
to America. Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1882–1952) would leave in
1931. It is worth noting that all of them came from different intel-
lectual traditions and they all worked in Florence at the same time.
Salvemini was a socialist from Puglia. Sturzo was a priest and the
former leader of the Partito popolare. Borgese was a progressive
Sicilian Liberal who had studied in Florence and participated in the
avant-garde. Prezzolini, who founded La Voce in Florence in 1908,
had been an interventionist and close to Mussolini before and
during the First World War. Subsequently he had served on Gentile’s
schoolbook commission before parting company with the Fascists,
leaving Italy for good in the mid-1920s. As director of the Casa
Italiana at Columbia University, he played host to Alberto Moravia
and Mario Soldati at formative stages of their careers at the end of
the 1920s and the early 1930s. But the most prominent intellectuals,
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944)
remained in Italy, acting respectively as the two poles of dissent and
conformity with their rival manifestoes.
Writers and politics
Borgese’s novel Rubè (1921) is one of the first novels to deal with
Fascist violence. The hero, Filippo Rubè, a committed interventionist
Culture Wars 135
in 1915 like Borgese himself, wanders around the centre of Milan on

the day of the destruction of the Avanti! offices in April 1919:
The strange, changeful air, peppered with traces of ozone and explo-
sive dust, assaulted his blood. Filippo felt himself squeezed by a
desire for violence, sharp as thirst. This was a beautiful battle, not
like the lugubrious life in the trenches where dangers and death
were present everywhere. And the enemy, usually invisible, was the
Enemy with a capital ‘E’, an abstraction capable of inciting blind
terror but not the pleasure of a hate which can see its object and can
seize it. Here instead were flags, songs, a short race before a crowd of
partisan spectators, the shouts, calling men by name, body to body,
and victory before nightfall, with victors and vanquished going
home for dinner, leaving three or four corpses on the pavement
warmed by the sun.7
Rubè, deeply disillusioned by his wartime and post-war experi-

ences, is killed in a subsequent skirmish at Bologna, where he is an
innocent bystander, and the opposing sides are left to argue over
whether he was a Bolshevik or a Fascist martyr. Borgese’s was not the
Fascist grand narrative of heroic struggle and it is very different from
Marinetti’s account of April 1919 in Milan. The novel remained in
print throughout the 1920s and 1930s, despite Borgese’s ambiva-
lence towards Mussolini’s Italy. The regime had little to fear from a
novel. But when a list was drawn up in the late 1930s of writers
to be banned, predominantly Jewish writers, the Liberal Borgese
would be included as would the Catholic Sturzo and the Socialist
Salvemini.8
In common with the Futurists’ move to the capital, the Società
italiana degli autori transferred from Milan to Rome in 1926, and
Mussolini inaugurated the new headquarters with a speech on the first
of August.9 It was a far less expansive speech than the one to news-
paper editors two years later, reflecting a relative lack of political inter-
est in creative writing, despite the fact that Mussolini did himself
dabble in novels and plays. His opening point was to welcome the
Society of Authors’ recognition of Rome as the capital, and implicit in
that to welcome an end to what he regarded as regional factionalism.
Romanità had not yet emerged as a specific theme of Fascism, but it
was bubbling away below the surface. He reminded the audience that
his government had helped them by legislating for authors’ commis-
sion, something achieved ‘in one month after thirty years of waiting’.
In return for this generous help, he indicated, Italian writers had a

mission:
What then is your task, the task of those who are creators? All
Italian writers have to be the standard-bearers of the new kind of
Italian civilization, at home and especially abroad. It is the job of
writers to spread what we might term a ‘spiritual imperialism’ in
their plays, in their books, in their lectures; to make Italy known
abroad not just for its time-honoured achievements, and not just for
the past, because we must not limit ourselves to the past. You must
produce something new which has the unmistakable sign of our
time, take abroad a knowledge of the new Italy, just as the war did
and the Fascist revolution is doing.10
Superficial even by the duce’s standards for this mode of address, his
message to writers was that he expected them to promote the reputa-
tion of the regime in return for modest material advantage. In due
course this would run to membership of the Accademia d’Italia and
invitations to write entries for the Enciclopedia Treccani.
The speech lacked any reference to how this cultural programme
might be achieved or to questions of style or aesthetics. Mussolini was
not really interested. He wanted to promote propaganda initiatives
such as creating a special committee for the dissemination of books
among the masses, leading to la festa del libro, or the book festival,
although this too met with very limited success in a partially-literate
society.11 Libraries were established at PNF offices, and mobile libraries
were instituted, under the auspices of the Ente nazionale per le bib-
lioteche popolari e scolastiche, in turn part of the Ministero dell’Educazione
nazionale.
Outside of the state’s bureaucratic structures there was aesthetic
debate in the pages of low-circulation periodicals. Curzio Malaparte and
Massimo Bontempelli set up 900 in 1926 as a cosmopolitan, Modernist
forum. Originally it was published in French as a quarterly journal, with
an office in Paris, welcoming the work of contemporary European
writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, among
others. Joyce was even on the editorial committee. It moved to Rome
and became a monthly publication in the course of 1926. The restless
Malaparte soon lost interest and Bontempelli was left to uphold the
standard of stracittà: 900 survived until 1929. Bontempelli was received
into the Accademia. The rival movement, strapaese, clustered around Il
Selvaggio, the literary journal edited by Mino Maccari. Promoting rural
Culture Wars 137
values, it was more likely to find favour with a regime engaged in a

battle for wheat, and despite the occasional telling off from Polverelli,
the journal was granted a monthly subsidy of 2000 lire by the Press
Office on 23 December 1931, which continued until Mussolini’s fall in
July 1943.12 Giuseppe Bottai edited a string of titles, most notably
Critica fascista and latterly Primato, which invited aesthetic debate
throughout the ventennio.
Ironically, the only enduring novel to emerge as an international
success from this first decade of Fascist cultural enthusiasm was a
bleak story of indifference, from a writer on the margins of
Bontempelli’s 900 circle. Alberto Moravia, as a very young man,
achieved international prestige and as Prezzolini’s guest in New York
in 1931, he was a literary ambassador abroad, in the image of
Mussolini’s speech five years earlier. Moravia gave lectures in
America on Manzoni, Verga, Nievo, Fogazzaro and D’Annunzio. Gli
Indifferenti was recognized as something important and new by
Borgese. 13 But it was not exactly what Mussolini and the Fascists
wanted from culture. Unlike Borgese, Moravia would not be
included in the list of banned authors drawn up in late 1938, but he
did have a difficult time with censorship.14
By the time his novel was published, the regime was already using
the November 1926 security legislation, the Testo unico, or Consolida-
tion Act, to ban books, but it was not drawing attention to the fact. In
February 1929 the complete works of Luigi Sturzo were banned by
means of an administrative instruction. The Consolidation Act had
made a specific law unnecessary.15 Staff of the Pubblica Sicurezza were
also carrying out periodic checks of bookshops and bookstalls and
reporting on anything which gave cause for concern, such as Russian
literature, in translation, which was for sale at modest prices. The
police drew from this latter fact the conclusion that the books were
being subsidized by a hostile foreign government. Michele Bianchi,
undersecretary to Mussolini at the Ministry for the Interior issued a
circular, which was taken up and commented on with characteristic
lack of restraint by Interlandi’s La Tribuna:
We recognize the timeliness of the circular, but we want to add that

the surveillance of propaganda literature is not merely a duty. It is a
right of the unitary Fascist regime which cannot ignore with the
indifference and apathy of liberal-democratic regimes the influence
which foreign books, hostile to our civilization and way of thinking,
may have on the spiritual development of our young people.16
It is worth pointing out that Interlandi himself had published trans-

lations of Russian literature.
Bottai was the Fascist hierarch who aspired to be the authoritative
voice of culture. As the first minister for Corporations in 1929, the year
in which Gli Indifferenti was published, he established two different cor-
porations: one for ‘serious art’ and one for spettacolo, what would later
be dubbed ‘popular culture’. Five unions (sindacati) were set up and
linked to the corporation for serious art under the umbrella organiza-
tion of a Confederazione dei professionisti e degli artisti: journalists,
authors and writers, architects and engineers, painters and sculptors,
and musicians. The Confederazione dello spettacolo dealt with opera,
theatre, musical spectacle, variety and light opera, cinema, sport and
bands. This division set out a cleavage between traditional high culture
and popular culture which was to become more pronounced in the
course of the 1930s.17 It was a means to manage culture and to bring
writers and intellectuals into line. Before long university professors
would be required to take an oath of loyalty to the regime.18
Even with these bureaucratic provisions in place, the hierarchs of the
regime were not convinced that they had really won over the hearts
and minds of the intellectuals. Bosworth has described this anxiety
vividly:
Fascism in the 1930s became a sort of relief organization for a slew of

otherwise potentially unemployed intellectuals. By boosting the intel-
lectuals’ self-importance and anchoring the Fascist regime more firmly
to words than to material matters, Mussolini, Bottai and the rest were
deepening the unreality, later to be exposed so dramatically in the war.
They were not so much controlling culture as allowing culture or its
veneer to occupy the centre of Italian life and to become Fascism. The
unreality of this project, impossible wholly to overlook, in turn deep-
ened the dictatorship’s longstanding nervousness, its half-expressed
fear that things were not what they were said to be.19
Relatively few intellectuals had joined the PNF and the more
talented writers and artists continued to work, ignoring as far as poss-
ible, the tentacles of the state. One hierarch lamented from the pages
of Bottai’s journal Critica fascista in 1933:
Even after ten years of Fascist rule the old divide between the new
state and the cultural life of the country has not been overcome.
The latter remains either anti-Fascist, or abstinent and extraneous,
Culture Wars 139
or tepidly and hypocritically friendly, or only partly Fascist. […]

They are in charge of our culture, […] and occupy university chairs,
assume intellectual responsibility, direct our publishing houses and
the organs of public opinion.20
The time had come for more decisive action on culture.

The popular culture side of Bottai’s brief did not remain with the
Ministry for Corporations for long. Bit by bit, elements such as theatre,
variety and cinema were moved to the new Undersecretariat for Press
and Propaganda, in a shifting of the balance of power between min-
istries and recognition of a new conception of cultural policy which
can be dated to between the Decennale in 1932 and the summer of
1933. After a decade of indecision on a direction for the culture of the
regime, where the publishing industry had been shaken up, but the
popular potential of cinema and radio had been missed, Mussolini set
the course for a brave new world. His new cultural message was: ‘Make
something for today, so very modern, and audacious without melan-
choly reminiscences of decorative styles belonging to the past’.21 This
initiative would be led not by Bottai and his ministry but by the
Segretaria particolare del duce and by the Press Office.
From ministry for press and propaganda to Minculpop
Joseph Goebbels, newly installed as Reichsminister for Volksaufklärung

und Propaganda, visited Rome in May 1933, at the beginning of
Polverelli’s last summer in charge of the Press Office. He had talks with
the king, with Mussolini, with Starace, and with Galeazzo Ciano,
recently returned from China. The arrival of the Nazis in power caused
some concern for the Italian Fascists, summed up in a memorandum
by Polverelli:
The problem of organizing propaganda abroad has not yet been

resolved. […] The time has come to centralize these services, not
least because under considerable pressure from national-socialist
propaganda, which is able and efficient, we must defend our
positions to make sure there is no equivocation and to prevent
Mussolinian thought and action being presented under the NAZI
label.22
Ciano replaced Polverelli at the Press Office on 1 August 1933, with a

brief to reform, innovate and centralize. He set up a section with
responsibility for propaganda abroad, working with the Agenzia Stefani

and the Ministry for External Affairs. In early 1934 he carried out a
study of Goebbels’ ministry with a view to a complete restructuring of
the Press Office. Mussolini accepted the recommendations and on
6 September 1934, the Ufficio stampa was abolished, to be replaced by
an Undersecretariat of State for Press and Propaganda, divided into
three direzioni generali, with responsibility for the domestic press, the
foreign press and for propaganda at home and abroad. Ciano became
undersecretary, with delegated powers to sign all decrees, letters and
provisions with regard to press and propaganda, on behalf of his
father-in-law, the duce. His powers widened further in the following
months with the introduction of DGs for Cinematography and
Tourism, as well as an Inspectorate of the Theatre, transferring the rele-
vant powers respectively from the ministries for the Corporations,
National Education and the Interior. On 24 June 1935, to reflect the
expanded brief, the undersecretariat was upgraded to a ministry, and
Ciano became the first minister for Press and Propaganda: the Prime
Minister’s Press Office had become a ministry in its own right. Eleven
years after the Congress on Fascist Culture at Bologna, Mussolini had
the appropriate structure in place to co-ordinate mass propaganda.
The Italian Fascist propaganda machine had much to learn from
German efficiency, as Polverelli’s memorandum had indicated. In terms
of censorship, on the other hand, Mussolini’s methods were more subtle
than Goebbels’ book-burning. On 3 April 1934 he issued a circular,
implementing article 112 of the November 1926 Consolidation Act,
which included the following instruction:
All publishers or printers of all types of publication or design,

including those of a periodic character must present three copies of
each publication to the prefect before putting them out for sale or
effecting their distribution in any other way.23
One copy was intended for Ciano at the Press Office, one was for the
DG for Public Security and the third one was for the prefect, who was
to set up his own Press Office if such did not already exist. The prefec-
tural press offices were to have both police staff and a political adviser.
The function of the office was to screen items proposed for publication.
Once this had been carried out, a recommendation was to be made to
the prefect and he would have the power to authorize publication,
unless there were present ‘elements contrary to the social and eco-
nomic order of the state or damaging to the prestige of the state and
Culture Wars 141
public authority, or offensive to national sentiment’.24 In such cases,

the matter was to be referred to Ciano for a political judgement. The
prefect had the authority to decide in cases of moral questions, relating
to sex, birth control or abortion. In cases of doubt he was refer such
matters to the DG for Public Security rather than to the Press Office.
This was infinitely more subtle than burning books or even seques-
tering them once published. Publishers and printers had to assume the
financial risk of typesetting, printing and binding the work they
intended to publish and then to submit three copies of their finished
product for approval. Refusal of permission to distribute would have
had grave financial consequences, as in the case of the libro di stato.
The process therefore put the onus of preventive censorship onto
printers and publishers. It may not have appeared as radical as smash-
ing up a print shop, as the squadristi were wont to do 15 years earlier,
but the reality of the provision was far more profound for culture
under Fascism. Furthermore, as Fabre has observed, it was achieved
with a special law which permitted the regime to claim, for foreign
consumption, that there was no censorship in Fascist Italy. It was also
quite clearly a panic measure, responding to a momentary crisis
without thinking about the practical consequences: prefects’ offices
would soon be filling up with books which nobody had time to read in
any detail, if at all. Nonetheless, printers and publishers knew they
were being watched: fear was the real point rather than the administra-
tive difficulties it might engender.
Under the provisions of the 1926 Consolidation Act (Testo unico)
prefects still had the power to sequester newspapers, magazines or
any other publications which were politically or morally suspect.
Mussolini’s circular, however, had the effect of limiting their powers
subtly by requiring them to consult the DG for Public Security on
moral questions and the Press Office on political ones. On 24 October
1935, four months after Ciano had become a minister, royal decree
law no. 2040 gave him the authority to order prefects to carry out
sequestrations. Prefects, however, retained the power to sequester pub-
lications on their own initiative too. Royal decree law no. 1834 of
24 September 1936 transferred from the Ministry for the Interior to the
minister for Press and Propaganda the power to nominate press officers
for the prefectures, that is to say, to hand-pick the political advisers
who would work alongside the police. On 11 June 1936 Dino Alfieri
replaced Ciano, who became minister for External Affairs. Alfieri, as
minister issued an important circular on 30 October 1936 which
relaxed the financial risk on printers and publishers by requiring them
to submit proofs for approval rather than the final product. While
welcome risk mitigation for the industry, it gave the regime early
warning of what was likely to be coming off the presses. It was also a
practical move on the part of the regime which had by now found
itself flooded with books to read, requiring a modification of the strat-
egy in order to make it more selective. Alfieri on 18 December 1936
issued another, longer, circular which aimed at building up a precise
and detailed knowledge of everything being published in Italy, not
merely in order to check and revise it, but to direct publishers as to
what was expected of them.25 The lessons learned from the experience
of the libro di stato were being applied across the whole of the publish-
ing sector. Or at least that was the intention.
In March 1937 Starace, outraged that anti-Fascist books were still
available in Italy, asked the minister for Press and Propaganda to pass
over to the Istituto di cultura fascista responsibility for the censorship of
books, possibly having been gingered up by Bottai. Alfieri, replied on
2 April 1937, rejecting Starace’s request on the following grounds:
The task of reviewing everything published in Italy is entrusted

institutionally to my ministry which exercises a second level of vigi-
lance, complementing that of the prefects, who work in their desig-
nated areas. My offices examine about 600 volumes per month and
from September 1936 to February of this year we have read 10,217
volumes. You will understand that these figures require resources
which would not be at the disposition of the Istituto di cultura
fascista. You have pointed out to me that there are some unortho-
dox political books in circulation in Italy. The definition of
unorthodoxy is of course open to question and I would like you to
provide me with some examples which we may examine.26
That is a further example of the turf wars which dogged state-party

relations as well as inter-ministerial relations throughout the ventennio.
The following month, on 27 May 1937 the Ministry for Press and
Propaganda became the Ministry for Popular Culture, or MiCup, its
official abbreviation, with Alfieri as its first minister. Cesari has
reconstructed a list of censorship initiatives undertaken by Minculpop
between then and Alfieri’s replacement in October 1939 by Alessandro
Pavolini.27 In April 1937, the ministry sequestered 14 of the 80 books
notified to it by the prefects. It banned the translation of a French
magazine, Elle et Lui, published by Rizzoli in Milan, on account of its
immoral content, thereby straying into the remit of the DG for Public
Culture Wars 143
Security. The monthly Humana met the same fate, at the request of the
prefect of Florence. A ban was placed on war reports from Spain.
Prefects were instructed not to send in requests for the authorization of
new publications unless they were for newspapers or magazines of
exceptional importance. In June 1937, 668 books sent in by publishers
were examined as were 54 referred by the prefects. Of these, 12 were
sequestered, 28 were authorized and 14 were left pending. Prefects
were instructed to impose a ban on reproduction in the press of the
hammer and sickle device, for whatever reason, even if the intention
was to combat Communism. (This led to the sequestration of a book
with a preface by Bottai, published by Sansoni, Gentile’s publishing
house). In September 1937, the publishers of illustrated papers were
asked to abstain from printing pictures of female athletes, other than
cameo shots of the faces of winners or participants in competitions. In
November, L’eco del mondo was sequestered for having published an
image of a hammer and sickle. With the agreement of the Direzione
generale for cinema, a review was begun of all publications relating to
the film industry, and a number were banned on the grounds that they
were either useless or detrimental from an educational point of view.
In December 1937 it was the turn of entertainment and variety publi-
cations to come under review, i.e., publications intended largely for a
female audience. These were held to be of limited value for the inter-
ests of the nation and publishers were urged to concentrate on themes
of social utility such as family life, maternity, domestic economy, par-
ticipation in Fascist life, sport and anything else consonant with the
new Fascist consciousness.
Alfieri continued to tighten the screw, issuing circulars which required
all printers and publishers to send in lists of their recent publications.
On 17 January 1938 he ordered prefects to convey to him lists of every-
thing published in their provinces in the previous month, presumably in
order to cross-reference the two sources. Data from these lists appear to
have led to the eventual list of ‘writers unwelcome in Italy’. In February
1938 L’illustrazione italiana was sequestered because it had published an
unflattering photograph of the duce. Opere e giorni was sequestered for a
story which offended public morality. In March newspapers were
instructed to reduce their coverage of domestic and foreign cronaca nera,
again. On 12 April 1938 copies of the newspapers Il Popolo di Roma and
Il Lavoro were sequestered for ‘indiscretions relating to the Führer’s visit’.
Prefects were instructed to ban the publication in newspapers of offers of
employment placed by foreign nationals who wished to set up in Italy.28
The DG responsible for the foreign press brought together years of
uncoordinated activity and in March 1938 completed a list of foreign

newspapers and magazines which were to be banned. That list included
The Economist and The Manchester Guardian. In the autumn of 1938 the
prefectural press offices were required to submit to Rome not just the
proofs of books which were in press but also publishers’ catalogues of
new books including those not yet published.
In 1937 Paolo Orano’s book La difesa della razza had ignited an
intense campaign in the papers on the ‘Jewish problem’ which led
directly to Telesio Interlandi’s founding the infamous newspaper
which shared its name with Orano’s book. A race propaganda office
was set up in Minculpop during 1938, headed by an ex-legionario from
Fiume, Alberto Luchini, with the brief to build up a specialist library
for a study of the ‘problems of race’, establish a photographic archive
of the racial types of Italy and Italian Africa, begin publication of non-
specialist, popular articles, organize conferences, use the cinema to
exalt the Italian race, and to set up a popular magazine. In parallel with
this campaign the fight for cultural autarky was pushed ahead with the
aspiration to a systematic censorship of articles and books by foreign
authors.29
In October 1939 Alessandro Pavolini replaced Alfieri as minister for
Popular Culture when Alfieri was posted to wartime Berlin as ambas-
sador. Resources were increased to enable Minculpop to conduct an
extensive wartime propaganda programme. Cannistraro has estimated
that the ministerial budget for 1938–39 had been just over 100 million
lire. ‘Special funds’ alone, intended for secret activities, reached
40 million lire by 1942.30 Where Alfieri had been a very diligent func-
tionary, Pavolini was charismatic, on friendly terms with publishers
such as Bompiani, founding editor of Il Bargello in Florence and the
driving force behind the experimental 18 BL performance in spring
1934.31 He interrupted his tenure, as Ciano had done before him, to fly
bombing raids over north Africa. In January 1943, as the regime
hastened towards implosion, Pavolini was replaced by Polverelli: in the
space of ten years, the ministry had turned a full circle.
Film
Italy’s pre-war film industry had been a commercial and critical success
at home and abroad. Its economic basis was badly damaged, however,
in the war, and Mussolini’s regime inherited a sector which lacked
appropriate technology, capital and a robust infrastructure. There was
no national film industry. To make matters worse, nostalgia for a
Culture Wars 145
golden age was hampering innovation, and public taste was turning to
Hollywood. The Fascist state was slow in coming to the aid of the
Italian film-makers. Its early media priority, beyond press and radio,
was the nationalization of the Istituto Luce in November 1925, with the
task of producing news, propaganda, education and culture for the
home market. This was quite distinct from a strategy on film as enter-
tainment. The support which was made available to production com-
panies was modest, and with isolated exceptions, there was little or no
interest shown by the Fascist hierarchy in cinema. Certainly there was
no strategic plan.32
In this vacuum, the industry struggled and American films flooded
into the country, introducing a thrill of modernization which crossed
all class and regional divisions. American film distribution networks
expanded rapidly in the 1920s attracting huge investment and soft
loans from American banks. The Fox Corporation was the first one to
set up in Italy, in 1921. Italian production companies became depen-
dent on American technology, especially once the talkies arrived in
1929. The American studios were able to increase foreign market share
by using domestic revenue to subsidize overseas sales. All this com-
bined with a growing public appetite in Italy for the American dream:
American posters and publicity were ubiquitous. Between 1925 and
1930, it is estimated that 80% of the films projected in Italian cinemas
were American.33
In 1926 Stefano Pittaluga from Turin bought the failing Unione
Cinematografica Italiana (UCI) and used the acquisition to build up his
own company, the Società anomina Stefano Pittaluga (SASP), giving him
control of over 10% of Italian cinemas. This marked the beginning of
an attempt to build an Italian film industry. Mussolini’s government
had shown itself willing to protect Italian business interests and so
Pittaluga looked for help. A law of 16 June 1927 set out to limit the
number of foreign movies screened in Italy. In 1927 this was more of
an aspiration than a sensible policy given that there were so few new
Italian films available to be shown. Nonetheless, it was recognition for
the sector. Mussolini received a delegation in late 1930, consisting of
Pittaluga and three associates to discuss the Italian film industry. The
outcome of the meeting was his personal commitment to promote and
support the industry in the political and social interests of the country.
Pittaluga’s death in 1931 was a blow to the industry as he had been the
natural leader. The practical consequence of Mussolini’s commitment
to Italian film was law no. 918 of 18 June 1931. Bottai, then Minister
for Corporations, introduced the bill, stating that the government’s

intention was:
To give a considerable, not to say heroic propulsion to the indus-

try so as to facilitate the rebirth of Italian cinema. By means of
this provision we intend to help the industry which faces stiff
competition. The government wants to help the industry resist
foreign competitors who bring to our national market different
light genres of film, such as variety and entertainment, which
constitute a strong attraction for the public. I rarely go to the
cinema myself but I think that films which seek to educate the
public are more likely to bore them. The public wants to be enter-
tained and it is precisely in this field that we want to help the
Italian industry.34
In other words, the strategy for entertainment was to imitate

the style of Hollywood, while protecting the domestic industry
against American competition, but retaining a mixed economy of
domestic innovation and foreign imports. In 1933 Italy imposed a
limit on the number of films which could be imported and it levied
a tax on foreign films, the revenue from which would be ploughed
back into the Italian film industry. This made Italian film-making
indirectly dependent on the American industry in terms of finance
as well as being utterly dependent for its technology. The veline
from Polverelli, however, urged moderation in relation to
Hollywood:
Newspapers are advised not to publish articles about Hollywood

[…] because we have in Italy a film industry of our own to praise.
(20 February 1933).35
Luigi Freddi, former director of the Press Office of the PNF was
given the brief of reporting on the state of the Italian film industry.
His report, written in 1933–34 after a fact-finding visit to America,
was critical of the personnel involved and of the absence of any co-
ordinated strategy.36 He proposed an authoritative body to ‘regulate,
direct, inspire, control and where necessary dispense rewards and
penalties to all forms and initiatives which make up the field of
Italian cinema’. His recommendations led to the establishment
of a Direzione generale della cinematografia, within Ciano’s Under-
secretariat, and later Ministry. Freddi was appointed as director and
Culture Wars 147
he used his inaugural address to reiterate his vision for the Italian
film industry:
The state will frame it. The state will help. The state will reward. The
state will control. The state will goad. The production of this indus-
try concerns directly the dignity, self-image and economic and
moral interest of the regime, and for that reason I do not hesitate to
declare that it is at last time for the state to intervene directly,
stamping on its production the authoritative and severe sign of its
will and control.37
Preventive censorship was generally left to the importers and distrib-

utors, given that Hollywood already had its own strict censorship code
which satisfied Freddi. In 1935 Ciano and Will Hays signed an agree-
ment according to which an annual quota of 250 American films could
be exported to Italy. The different aspects of the industry, including
production, training and distribution were brought together under
Freddi’s control. Most significant of all, the Centro sperimentale di
Cinematografia was set up, and Cinecittà was born, an environment in
which Mussolini’s son Vittorio was quite at home. It was inaugurated
in November 1935 by Dino Alfieri, and soon came to be seen as a
hotbed of anti-Fascism.
Hollywood accounted for almost three quarters of the takings in
Italian cinemas in 1938, on the eve of the Alfieri law which would
restrict American imports. International politics, by that stage, had
strained relations with America and the distribution of German films
had increased in Italian cinemas. Critics such as Interlandi, who had
been railing against American cinema since 1924, and fellow racists
began to call for the Italian industry to make films which showed the
physical superiority of the Italian race, along the lines of German films
which glorified the Aryan myth.38 Interlandi was reprimanded by
Minculpop for the critical tone of film criticism in the pages of Il Tevere,
in relation to national productions.39 This did not stop his young
protégé Giorgio Almirante writing in menacing tones some years later:
After four years of official racism, what has the Italian film industry
done? Nothing, absolutely nothing. That is all the more amazing
when you consider how appropriate the racist propaganda is to a
good and effective commercial film. Anti-Semitism is only one
aspect of racism, and yet how many themes, how much interest it
can offer to a director! It galls me to have to cite foreign examples:
but there is no doubt that the Germans have achieved things which
should open the eyes of our producers. […] But as I said anti-
Semitism is just one aspect of racism. Just think of the formidable
and dramatic theme of inter-racial alliances: there is the complex
and unlimited theme of heredity (think of a Zola of the cinema, of a
director who would be able to render on film the sense of genera-
tions which the invisible tie of the blood unites indissolubly. […]
There is a whole world to explore. […] (No, dear reader, I am not
naïve. I know well that before we can discover the world of racist
cinema we must first rid the world of cinema dominated by Jews,
the world of the more or less clandestine involvement of Jews in the
life of the cinema. No, I am not naïve. But I dare to hope that the
necessary clearing out will proceed without obstacle and with no
favour for anybody. Smile not, dear reader, let me hope…)40
Interlandi himself wrote the treatment for a film Agar, in 1938,

dealing with miscegenation and abortion which evidently did not find
favour with Minculpop censors, and was never realized.41
Theatre
Fascism inherited from Liberal Italy a legacy of statute, custom and

practice on stage censorship. Prefects had delegated powers to censor
on grounds of sedition and offences against morality or the monarchy.
The legislative framework in which they operated had been set in place
by Francesco Crispi in 1889.42 According to the Consolidation Act of
6 November 1926 a licence was required in order to stage plays, show
films, organize conferences, dancing festivals, horse races or any other
public spectacle or entertainment, whether outdoors or indoors. Per-
formances were to be banned at the discretion of the prefect if he
feared a threat to public order or offence to morals or family values.
Regulation of the theatre, therefore, remained the domain of the
prefects, as it had been in Liberal Italy. Royal decree law no. 62 of
21 January 1929 introduced some Fascist modifications, on the eve of
the Lateran Pacts. Performances were to be banned henceforth if
(1) they presented a sympathetic account of a vice or crime which

aimed at exciting class hatred;
(2) they gave offence, even by means of allusion, to the Emperor
King, the Pope, the Head of government, Ministers, institutions of
the state or sovereigns or representatives of foreign powers;
Culture Wars 149
(3) they stirred up disdain for the laws or for national or religious
sentiment or might give rise to a disturbance in international
relations;
(4) they offended the decorum or prestige of public authorities,
officers, agents of the state, members of the armed forces, or
private and family life;
(5) they referred to acts or events which might convulse public
opinion;
(6) they were held to be a danger to the public for some other reason.
These modifications reduced the extent of the prefects’ discretion, but

did not remove it. Law no. 599 of 6 January 1931, however, modified
the Consolidation Act, and set up the Ufficio per la censura teatrale
in the Ministry of the Interior, with Leopoldo Zurlo named as censor.
This represented a centralization of theatrical censorship, which
extended to what might be broadcast over the airwaves.
This development, while it sounds ominous, was not primarily an
initiative of the Fascist state at all according to Nicola Fano: it was the
theatre fraternity itself which had petitioned Mussolini to set up cen-
tralized censorship.43 Before that, in order to get permission to put on a
show, actors had to ask the permission of the prefect in each city or
town in which they wanted to perform. Every first night required a
certificate (visto) which involved submitting a complete copy of the
text and paying an inspection fee. In 1930 this amounted to five lire
which was half of the average daily earnings of a comic actor. More
problematic was providing a fresh copy of the script every few days, in
an era before photocopiers. It meant travelling theatre companies had
to have access to a good typist, reams of paper, a typewriter and a large
supply of carbon paper. In addition, applications had to be presented
to prefects several days in advance. Given that the theatre company
was likely to be working in another province, perhaps hundreds of
miles away, performing to a paying public, this was next to impossible.
Centralization seemed to offer advantages.
In conceding this favour to the travelling players, the Fascists’
motives were not entirely benevolent, and Fano’s interpretation
sounds uncomfortably close to that of Carmine Senise, Bocchini’s suc-
cessor as chief of police.44 The new law did reduce costs for the indus-
try, in theory, but it gave the state far greater control over what the
public could and could not see on a stage or hear on the radio. Before
1931 there had been tension in the system between the ministry at
the centre and the prefects at the periphery, and the decentralized
decision-making arrangement allowed for the possibility of one prefect

permitting a show to be staged while his counterpart in the next
province might take the opposite view. Under the new law, anyone
wishing to stage a show had to submit an application to the censor’s
office along with two copies of the complete script. The censor would
read the script and perhaps cut lines or whole scenes and return the
marked copy to the company’s representative. The other copy was
archived. Approved scripts had permission to be performed anywhere
in the jurisdiction. On the other hand, any script which did not pass
the censor’s test was banned throughout the country (and later
throughout the Italian colonies too). Plays suppressed in this way were
marked rejected. One copy was returned without explanation, the
second one was archived. Some of these rejected copies bear Zurlo’s
annotations, giving some indication as to why they were rejected.45
However, even in cases where permission was granted, there was a
further condition. Prefects were required to send along to each perfor-
mance a member of their staff whose job was to ensure that the words
spoken by the actors corresponded to the approved words on the page.
If they did not, the police had to powers to suspend a performance,
although in practice those powers were rarely exercised.
On the face of it Leopoldo Zurlo might appear an unlikely Fascist
censor. That is how he sought to present himself in his post-war
memoirs, whose title Memorie inutile (1952), echoes those of Carlo
Goldoni. It has been out of print for many years. Already contemplat-
ing an early retirement in 1931 when Mussolini appointed him as head
of the Ufficio di censura teatrale, he had spent years as a civil servant in
Liberal Italy and had taken no part whatever in the March on Rome.
Zurlo had a genuine passion for the theatre and he was zealous to a
fault: he read all the scripts himself rather than entrusting them to the
commission of experts envisaged under the law.
When first established the Ufficio censura teatrale was part of the
Ministero dell’Interno, on the grounds that it was rationalizing what had
been a prefectural responsibility, and therefore reported to Mussolini as
he was the minister. In January 1935 it was transferred to Ciano’s new
Ministry for Press and Propaganda as the Theatre Inspectorate.
Subsequently it was incorporated into the Minculpop. Despite these
changes in the formal lines of management, however, Zurlo continued
to refer any problem cases directly to the duce.46 Therefore, he fulfilled
the role of mediator between the duce and the theatrical community,
which, given Zurlo’s own theatrical leanings, probably explains why
Mussolini chose him for the post of censor.
Culture Wars 151
Zurlo found himself caught up in Mussolini’s circular of 3 April

1934 relating to censorship. Within 90 minutes of Mussolini’s circu-
lar being dispatched, Bocchini issued an order withdrawing permis-
sion to perform a play by an innocuous Fascist playwright Luigi
Chiarelli, called Carne bianca (white flesh), which featured a black
cannibal, and which had already been approved by Zurlo. As a rule
high culture as represented by Chiarelli, was not the target of Zurlo’s
censorious zeal. He was far more concerned by the challenge which
genuine popular culture posed for the self-image of the regime
through the genre of variety.47 This was knock-about comedy which
arose from the stock themes of hunger, sex and poverty, the stuff of
all popular sketches. The regime, on the other hand, wanted people
to believe the illusion of a disciplined and improved Italy. These two
visions were necessarily on a collision course. Humour and satire
were spontaneous among most ordinary Italians, especially from the
mid- to late 1930s, as gaping chasms began to appear between the
bellicose rhetoric of the regime and the pitiful state of the economy
and the military campaigns.
Of all the comic writers and performers working in Fascist Italy
the most emblematic was Angelo Cecchelin (Trieste 1894–Turin
1964), from Cittavecchia in Trieste, a poor, colourful and innately
irreverent quarter of the city. 48 Cittavecchia was precisely the type
of urban area which Mussolini’s regime sought to suppress. It was
the world of Charlie Chaplin’s tramps. (Indeed like Chaplin,
Cecchelin dressed in a black suit with a bowler hat.) Cecchelin’s
play Gli ultimi giorni di Zitavecia (The Last Days of Cittavecchia) was
presented to the censor’s office in 1934, containing a two-page
scene in which a group of prostitutes present arguments in defence
of their trade. Zurlo played safe, mindful of the duce’s capacity to
over-rule decisions, and crossed the two pages out. When returning
the copy with this cut, he also wrote to the prefect of Trieste advis-
ing him to make sure that the banter which had not been cut did
not provoke excessive participation from the audience, such as to
transform the evening into a popular protest against the knocking
down of Cittavecchia. Were such an event to take place, the police
were advised to take any steps they saw fit to restore public order.
There is no suggestion that Gli ultimi giorni di Zitavecia was an anti-
Fascist play. By all accounts it was a rambling, nostalgic show
which drew too much attention to the seamier side of daily life in
urban Trieste, and was therefore too close to realism, an aesthetic
which rarely found favour with the Fascists.
Cecchelin was a showman out of joint with his times. He had grown
up in Austrian Trieste and had observed satirically in 1918 as people
who had prospered under Austrian rule quickly adapted to regime
change in order to protect their status as loyal subjects of the House of
Savoy, and indeed, as Fascists. Predictably this did not go down well
with the local political, commercial and industrial networks, and after
the Fascists came to power he was represented as a Communist. Fano
has argued that rather than being political in any real sense, Cecchelin
inveighed against modern times, against modernization, and as it hap-
pened, that modernization in the 1920s and 1930s meant Fascism. He
was a satirist first and an anti-Fascist second. More and more material
was cut from his shows by Zurlo in the 1930s, but his public remained
loyal.49 To make up the time and provide the audience with value for
their money he struck on the stratagem of improvising a parody of the
Istituto Luce newsreels which had accompanied performances in the
cinemas from 1925. He would come out from behind the curtain
himself and improvise jokes and wisecracks:
It was a sort of touring news-service (gazzettino ambulante) which

elaborated on the news which was on the lips of members of his
audience but which would never have been carried in the news-
papers of the regime. His elaborations were couched in irony,
sassiness and irreverence.50
This was genuine stand-up comedy, of the type which authoritar-

ian governments fear the world over, contrasting the hunger and
poverty of ordinary people with the hypocrisy, cynicism and pious
illusions of the ruling classes. Predictably, the police in the hall regu-
larly moved to break up the evening and accompany Cecchelin to
the questura, as they had done with Marinetti when there was still
fire in his belly.
Other popular comedians fared slightly better under Fascism.
The two most prolific were Enzo Turco and Guglielmo Inglese, both of
whom were associated with Totò, and went on to have cameo appear-
ances in Totò’s post-war films. Their work consisted in popular
escapism and happy endings. It was rarely cut by the censor, and never
rejected. One cut in a play by Inglese, La vera fortuna, is particularly
interesting in terms of what the regime’s implicit aesthetic policy. The
play was submitted in July 1939, and there was a scene which involved
the actors singing the Fascist Hymn to Rome, an imperial anthem begin-
ning ‘Sole che sorgi libero e giocondo’. Zurlo’s annotation on the
Culture Wars 153
archive copy reads: ‘The Hymn to Rome has no place in a review’. In

other words:
It was fundamentally important that writers for the theatre (not just
comic writers) steered clear of any reference to the realism of daily
life in contemporary Italy, to living under the shadow of Fascism.51
Literature and translations
When the Ministry for the Press and Propaganda was set up, book cen-
sorship passed to it from the Ministry of the Interior. A new section
was established within the Directorate general for the Italian Press,
headed by Gherardo Casini. In the first sustained study of literary cen-
sorship under Fascism, Lorenzo Greco presented the case of Elio
Vittorini’s Il Garofano rosso as an example of political censorship in
action at the Ministry for Press and Propaganda, largely on the basis of
Vittorini’s subsequent account of what had happened.52 More recently
Guido Bonsaver has examined the archival evidence and demonstrated
that the decision to censor the novel probably had more to do with
moral than political considerations.53 The novel was published in
instalments by Solaria, the quarterly Florentine literary journal edited
by Alberto Carocci, beginning in February 1933. The prefectural Press
Office decided to sequester the August 1934 edition of Solaria, partly
because of the sexual content of Vittorini’s chapter, which, like
Cecchelin’s play, involves a prostitute. The issue of Solaria also con-
tained a short story by Enrico Terracini which was also held to offend
morals. Bonsaver has argued very plausibly that the censors were on a
heightened alert in the months following Mussolini’s circular of 3 April
1934. Solaria closed down at the end of 1934 because of financial pres-
sures. Vittorini published three articles in Il Bargello in the second half
of 1934, arguing against literary censorship as outmoded prudery.54
Il Bargello had a circulation of about 5,000: presumably a readership of
PNF members. His articles certainly did not provoke an outcry against
literary censorship.
Fear of offending sexual morality is quite certainly the reason why
Henry Furst’s novel Simun was never published in Fascist Italy. Furst, a
polyglot American, translator of D’Annunzio, Ojetti and Croce and
apparently once a member of the PNF, had spent two years back in
America, working first for Prezzolini at the Casa Italiana, Columbia
University and at Vassar College before moving on to the Library of
Congress in Washington.55 In America he married an English woman
who had accompanied him from Rome, but the relationship was short-
lived and evidently something of a personal trauma. He was dismissed
by Vassar College in January 1930 on the euphemistic grounds that he
had not spent Christmas with his wife. Returning to Italy via London
and Paris he began work on his only novel, in Italian, whose plot
involved a homosexual relationship with a French sailor. The manu-
script circulated among friends and acquaintances including Croce,
Eugenio Montale and Mario Soldati, and he had high hopes that
Giacomo Noventa might serialize it for him in 1936. But these came to
nothing because nobody was prepared to take that kind of financial
risk with such a text. The novel was published in Paris, in French as
Simoun, in 1939, in a very short print run, probably with Montale’s
endorsement. Gianfranco Contini reviewed it favourably in 1940.
Once Italian censorship laws had been relaxed in the 1960s it eventu-
ally came out in Italian, two years before Furst’s death.56 His volume of
poems, Songs of Tokimarne, was published in Genoa in 1938 without
incident, but they were not morally or politically contentious and they
were written in English.
Both the police and Minculpop took a close interest in Furst, not
because of his novel, which they will never have seen, but because he
was an occasional reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, com-
menting on Italian books and books about Italy. His review of the
Hoepli edition of Mussolini’s Scritti e discorsi, while expressing his fasci-
nation with the duce, also drew American readers’ attention to a
process of censorship which had taken place between the words
uttered in the heat of the moment and the words in cold print:
This preface, and other writings of the Duce which we miss from this
collection, will perhaps be published in the two volumes that are still
to appear; or perhaps it has been deemed opportune to omit them.
More serious is the fact that some of the most important political
speeches have not been reprinted in their original form. We believe
that our memory does not betray us in recalling a remark in one of
the four ‘revolutionary’ speeches, to the effect that Nietzsche was
right when he said that the masses should be provided with the
necessities of life in order that they may keep quiet and not interfere
with the life of the leaders of humanity. This courageous remark has
always endeared Mussolini to us; but no doubt a Prime Minister may
be excused for omitting it from a publication destined to have a wide
circulation. After all, the thing is not that the phrase should be
reprinted, but that the dream should come true.57
Culture Wars 155
It was well known that Mussolini improvised around his scripts and
that the printed versions were always more anodyne than what his
audience heard.58 But the regime was sensitive about these things
being pointed out by foreign journalists, even when done in approving
terms. Furst also became embroiled in the complex vicissitudes sur-
rounding Moravia’s second novel, Le Ambizioni sbagliate, by reviewing
it for the New York Times Book Review (in early 1936) and offering to
translate it. His letter to Moravia, intercepted by the security forces,
ended up on the duce’s desk.59 Moravia’s novel was not censored, but
Italian editors were instructed not to review it.
On the other hand, some of Furst’s reviews in the New York Times
Book Review will have been welcomed by the regime, however, because
at times he cast polemical barbs at anti-Fascist exiles writing from
America. In his review of Soldati’s America primo amore, for example, he
wrote:
I fear that those who among his countrymen in this country [i.e.,
America] have poured invective on it are not all actuated by the
purest motives. Soldati has not been lenient to the mediocrities who
leave Italy, where they are ignored, to become shining lights of
Italian culture in America, where few are able to put their titles to
the test, and it is only natural that they should hit back. To this
they are perfectly entitled, but not below the belt, gentlemen, not
below the belt!60
This invective may have been aimed at Prezzolini, whom Furst knew,
or at Borgese or Salvemini. On political matters, Furst was a weather-
vane. Criticism of Mussolini and his regime from across the Atlantic
became more pronounced after 1935, the year of the invasion of
Ethiopia, with George Seldes’ Sawdust Caesar (1935), Borgese’s Goliath
(1938), and Gaudens Megaro’s Mussolini in the Making (1938) all
banned in Italy, although of these three only Borgese’s name appeared
on the list of ‘writers unwelcome in Italy’.
The repackaging of the Ministero della Stampa e della Propaganda into
a new Ministero di Cultura Popolare in May 1937, was marked by a con-
ference on books, which took place in Florence on 2–3 June.61 Alfieri’s
Minculpop wanted to stake its claim to control of the libro di stato and
the libri scolastici, the most lucrative and only aspect of the book
market not in its remit, with a view to guiding the sector in the direc-
tion of planned autarky. Alfieri was particularly interested in the
linking of schoolbooks to children’s literature. The stories in the genres
such as adventure, history, and crime were either imported from

America or followed American models. Alfieri wanted to proceed to a
review of these publications, making clear to publishers their duty to
develop Italian subjects, inspired by the exemplary lives and adven-
tures of Italian explorers, navigators, aviators and heroes, so as to
inspire children in school and outside school.62
Schoolbooks, however, had remained under the direction of the
Ministero di Educazione nazionale, over which Bottai now presided,
having returned to the cabinet after an unwelcome year as Governor
of Rome. Bottai objected strenuously in advance of the conference
and Casini, the Minculpop representative had to state at the com-
mencement of proceedings that the schoolbooks were not on the
agenda. Publishers used the occasion as an opportunity to request sub-
ventions similar to the ones allocated to those active in film and
theatre. Disputes over control continued between the two ministries,
but as had happened five years earlier, Bottai was out-manoeuvred
and Alfieri, head of the successor to the Prime Minister’s Press Office,
enhanced his powers. Practical consequences for writers and publish-
ers included the requirement to supply not three copies of a work for
approval, but eight.
The regime, as we have seen, had taken an interest in controlling the
publication and distribution of books from the beginning of the 1930s,
but not in a sustained manner and not to the point of developing a
detailed and strategic censorship policy. The result was that people had
access to anti-Fascist books and modern American novels, even in state
libraries which were controlled by Bottai’s Ministry for National
Education. In early 1938 Casini prepared a memorandum for his minis-
ter, Alfieri, in which he pointed out that the number of foreign books
imported into Italy had dropped by 75% since 1928, and that only 7%
of the national production consisted of translations.63 The strategy of
cultural autarky was working. But for the likes of Interlandi (himself a
former translator) and Marinetti, 7% was roughly 7% too many.
Marinetti began a campaign against translations, attacking publish-
ers in newspaper articles and regional conferences. Interlandi sup-
ported the campaign from the pages of Il Tevere, deploring the fact that
the work of an anti-Fascist like Thomas Mann should be available in
Fascist Italy. Bottai warned of the dangers of isolationism, for an impe-
rial power, from his Critica fascista and continued his tussle with Alfieri
for a primacy in national culture. On 15 January 1938, Casini sent a
telegram to publishers requiring them to send him, as a matter of
urgency, a list of their foreign works in print and those planned for the
Culture Wars 157
future. A census of translations had begun, the purpose of which was

not yet clear.
The political atmosphere became increasingly anti-Semitic over the
next six months. Fabre has shown that the order to remove Jewish and
decadent writers from Italian culture dates from April 1938, one month
before Hitler’s visit. Lists of Jewish writers were drawn up over the fol-
lowing three months and these would form the basis of the list of
writers unwelcome in Italy which was motivated by racist policy but
which was not confined exclusively to Jewish writers. Their books were
to be removed from libraries and retail outlets, and copies in publish-
ers’ warehouses were to be pulped. Included on the eventual list was
Pitigrilli (Dino Segre), better known to the political police as fiduciario
373, active as an OVRA spy in Paris until 22 September 1939, and
Margherita Sarfatti, the duce’s ex-mistress.
The perception of enemies without and within continued to drive
censorship policy for the remaining five years of the regime, and it was
brought to bear on language and translation as well as on the policy of
racism. Alessandro Pavolini replaced Alfieri in 1939 and this handover
quickened the pace of censorship. The trend included a move towards
a cultural autarky which extended into daily patterns of language,
requiring a suppression of the formal personal pronoun ‘Lei’, now held
to be a foreign import and uncomfortable reminder of centuries of
foreign domination, in favour of ‘Voi’. Censors were employed by
publishing houses to ‘correct’ dialogue printed in books.64 Censorship
on the language extended to dialect literature, although plans for its
systematic removal from circulation were not actually implemented.
Increased resources for Minculpop meant that the new minister could
deploy staff to censor American films, translations and even cartoons.
Thus Mickey Mouse was eventually banned in January 1942. In fact
pirated versions of the Disney character swatting flies had supported
the war effort in Ethiopia eight years before to illustrate a popular
song, ‘Topolino in Abissinia’.65
In July 1940, with Italy’s entry into the war, a law was passed with
the aim of controlling the publication of translations. All proposals for
translation now had to be given explicit approval by officials from
Minculpop. The most famous case of translation censorship remains
Vittorini’s Americana project in which Bompiani invested, with a view
to publication in 1941 as part of a series of world literature. Vittorini
had experienced censorship, as we have seen, in 1934, on moral
grounds, and he had worked for Pavolini on Il Bargello in the early
1930s. Bompiani had good relations generally with Minculpop and
clearly did not expect Pavolini’s reaction, which was to sequester the
two-volume anthology. His reasons for doing so are revealing:
The work is worthy of praise for the criteria used in making the
selection of texts, for the information provided and for the whole
presentation. I remain however of the opinion that the publication,
at this time, of the American anthology is inopportune. The United
States are a potential enemy. The attitude of their president towards
the Italian people is well known. It is not the time for courtesies
towards America, not even literary ones. Furthermore, the antho-
logy would only refocus the excessive enthusiasm for recent
American literature, which is a fashion to be discouraged.66
What appeared to be of most concern was Vittorini’s own editorial

contribution, in the form of polemical short introductions to each text.
Pavolini offered as a compromise that the volumes could go ahead,
without Vittorini’s introductions, and with a critical essay instead from
Emilio Cecchi. The book appeared in August 1942, by which time the
list of authors unwelcome in Italy had been distributed to prefects for
onward transmission to publishers.
On the 25 July 1943, after Mussolini was dismissed by the king,
General Badoglio ordered a round up of known or suspected trouble-
makers around the kingdom. Among those arrested were Vittorini, in
Milan and Interlandi, in Rome. Each was held for about a month.
When the RSI was established Vittorini went underground and edited
the Milanese edition of L’Unità. Interlandi fled north from Rome and
Mussolini placed him in charge of radio. Bottai, the self-selected
apostle of Fascist culture was sentenced to death in absentia, at the
Verona trial. The cultural tensions which had been building up since
Italy’s intervention in Spain had become a civil war.
7
Censorship, Secrets and Lies
The effectiveness of censorship in Mussolini’s regime could be mea-

sured in various ways. If the press officer or minister ordered a news
blackout on a topic or pulled a story from the press, then that topic
or story did not go out to the public. It was kept secret: preventive
censorship had worked. There was no Italian press or media cover-
age of the bombing raid on Taranto which hobbled the navy for
example. Reports on enemy radio were ignored in the Italian media,
on the instruction of the minister. It was far more difficult to
measure and control things which might be going on in the day to
day interactions of ordinary people, in the routines of the stand-up
comics, in the apartments, fields, sacristies, railway carriages, bars
and brothels of Italy. Throughout the ventennio there was the linger-
ing doubt, on the part of those in power, that the intended mes-
sages were getting lost, or worse, that they were being modified or
resisted. A symptom of this frustration is the chivvying tone of
Polverelli, Ciano, Alfieri and Pavolini when dealing with the press-
men. Another is Giovanni Gentile’s concern over the possibility of
teachers at the periphery undermining central efforts at education
reform. Yet another is the vast archive of anonymous denunciations
received by senior members of the regime and prefects from all
corners of the kingdom, indicating that not all was well within the
Ethical State, and that perhaps not enough had been removed from
circulation after all. This chapter looks at the interaction of censor-
ship policies with the realities of daily life under the regime, and in
doing so it considers some of the shared assumptions which were
rarely articulated in public but which proved more enduring than
any attempts at an anthropological revolution.
159
Public and private
Addressing parliament on 16 May 1925, Alfredo Rocco, the architect of

Fascist law and order legislation, outlined the key principle motivating
his revision of the legal code:
The state is more than a juridical body. It is, and must be, an ethical
body. The state must make itself the tutor of public morality and it
must assert this morality. It must take care of the spirits as well as
the bodies of its people. It is in the name of this supreme duty that
the state must intervene to suppress lies, corruption and all forms of
deviation and degeneration of public and private morality.1
Therefore from early in the ventennio, and Mussolini’s real ‘seizure of

power’ in 1925, there was an intentional blurring of the public and the
private, and suppression of ‘lies, corruption and all forms of deviation
and degeneration of public and private morality’ became part of the
state’s mission. If the ethical state was to be greater than the sum of its
parts, then what Emilio Gentile has called the ‘anthropological revolu-
tion’ had to be felt at the level of each individual.
The implicit Fascist social policy was that the ethical state would
provide the role models (for healthy children, wholesome women,
valiant soldiers, virile athletes and disciplined workers), secular models
of veneration (such as the war heroes) and directives on types of life
style. These values, at first sight, are not strikingly different from tradi-
tional ones of zeal, temperance, discipline, kindness, generosity, sub-
missiveness and charity. They would be reinforced daily by the press,
radio, posters, and newsreels as well as at school, in church and at
leisure organizations. Their negative poles, sloth, gluttony, lust, anger,
envy, greed and arrogance, would be reprobated by appropriate pun-
ishments and occasionally by isolated acts of exemplary, corrective vio-
lence, where they proved necessary. Mussolini, in his Ascension Day
speech in 1927, would later use the image of a surgeon removing
disease and damaged cells from the body politic. What was different,
and modern about the Fascist value system, was that preparation for
war became a guiding principle of social organization. That required a
growing and healthy population.2 Therefore Fascist social policy had to
be pro-natalist and to involve improvements in children’s health and
general welfare. This general trend on demographic policy, at least, was
fully in line with Catholic teaching, however, so the Church had no
grounds for objection. Indeed given the generalized demographic
Censorship, Secrets and Lies 161
decline in most European countries after the First World War, the
Church was positively disposed to the prospect of greater fecundity in
Italy, and a society poised for bonifica, or renewal. Pope Pius XI’s en-
cyclical Casti Connubi (1931), issued two years after the Lateran Pacts
were signed, reiterated Catholic orthodoxy on the sanctity and indis-
soluble nature of marriage as well as the traditional dogma of procre-
ation being the primary purpose of matrimony, with a consequent ban
on divorce, birth control, and abortion. Who, after all, could publicly
quibble with the ideals of healthy and loving children, kind and
wholesome women, happy families, proud and valiant soldiers, disci-
plined and virile athletes or zealous and temperate workers? In most
respects Mussolini’s programme was not significantly out of line with
contemporary trends in most other European countries of the time
which were witnessing an increased state intervention through social
welfare programmes, a progressive medicalization of all sorts of social
relations and a growing awareness of the importance of the social
sciences in policy making.3
The Fascists’ ethical state embraced positive intentions on progress
and innovation as well as on anthropological revolution, and sought
to bring them to fruition. In that process, the demographic campaign
brought the tentacles of the state into the intimate recesses of private
dwellings. For a start, OMNI, the Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia
was established in 1925 as the Fascist welfare agency. This certainly
had all the appearances of positive innovation and it was trumpeted
publicly as progressive Fascism in action. Part of OMNI’s remit was
to support single mothers and their children, on the grounds that chil-
dren were the nation’s future. This was a significant difference from
traditional Catholic morality which tended to be less supportive of the
figure of the unmarried mother and her child. Consistent with increas-
ing birth-rates, there was a crackdown on abortion: midwives suspected
of performing terminations could find themselves sent to confino,
without a hearing before a magistrate, let alone a trial by jury to estab-
lish guilt or innocence.4
Generations before routine use of the opinion poll, Mussolini’s
regime felt the need to gauge public opinion, in order to ensure that
policy making remained in touch with the people. Where a democratic
government might have qualms about using the police as researchers
into public opinion, a totalitarian one bent on anthropological revolu-
tion could not afford such qualms. The emergency measures of the first
phase of government had put in place some important administrative
instruments of state, of which we are now have an insider’s view.
Covert operations
Antonio Pizzuto, secret policeman, polyglot, and talented novelist, has

left a fascinating posthumously-published insight into the daily routine
of the political police. Born in Palermo in 1893, to a lawyer married to a
poet, Pizzuto had graduated in both law and philosophy, spending
three years in the Red Cross, at Palermo and Agrigento, in lieu of mili-
tary service, before entering the police training school in 1918 out of
necessity, when his father’s death altered the family income for the
worse. An expert linguist, he represented the Italian police force at the
forerunner of Interpol abroad throughout the 1930s and in the post-war
period made a name for himself as an experimental novelist, in the
manner of Tommaso Landolfi and Carlo Emilio Gadda, while maintain-
ing a discreet silence about most of his policing activities between 1922
and 1945. He was also a translator of Immanuel Kant and had flirted
with the idea of translating Ulysses in the mid-1920s. His posthumous
writings, while evidently fictionalized to some degree, provide a unique
insight into the routine mechanisms of Fascist surveillance and censor-
ship. From 1930 to 1944 Pizzuto worked at the nerve-centre of the
Ministry of the Interior, the divisione polizia politica, under Guido Leto,
liaising with OVRA and tracking fuorusciti.
Fear of correspondence between the domestic population and fuorus-
citi induced the Division of the Political Police to order each Questura
to set up an observation service (servizio di osservazione) as well as, or
instead of, a system for the surveillance of correspondence (revisione
della corrispondenza).5 This was to be a covert operation, carried out
with alacrity and care, so that no-one would be aware of its existence.
The questure and prefetture were responsible for reporting daily on this
activity to the DG for Public Security in the Ministry of the Interior,
either to the Divisione affari generali e riservati (section 1) or to the
political police, or both.6 Permission for tracking of specific individuals
had to be sought from the Divisione affari generali e riservati, which in
turn would consult the political police, to ensure that local action did
not jeopardize a political police project or indeed involve the cor-
respondence of an informer. Pizzuto wrote an ironic account of
how this sometimes worked out in practice. The scene is the regular
morning meeting of the senior layer of the police, chaired by Bocchini,
who has become ‘Senator Foscolino’ in Pizzuto’s narrative:
‘Let’s take a look at the telegrams’, concluded Foscolino. Decàmpano

made a throwaway gesture in the direction of the ante-room, from
whose darkness behind the half-open door leaf, came the gleam of
spectacles. A little man entered, stammering ‘May I disturb you?’
There was no reply, but he had grown used to being ignored. He
proffered nonetheless a blue file of deciphered dispatches as if he was
bestowing a gift. Only when he had reached the middle of the room
did the chief acknowledge his presence and, while the semicircle of
senior men opened out to let him reach the writing desk, the chief
said ‘Well Gianfilippo, what delights do you bring me today?’
Gianfilippo, handing over the papers, replied with resignation:
‘The only bit of interesting news, your Excellency, is that that notor-
ious Professor Fosboni has been arrested at the Swiss border in
Domodossola’. There was a silence. But a silence such as that of
babies when they suck in all their breath in preparation for letting
out a seemingly-interminable wail, and which eventually fades away
without either the actor or the audience being aware that it has
ended. ‘Jesus wept!’ shouted Foscolino, and his coffee cup and the
sugar bowl jumped off the tray, sending the spoon flying over the
desk to nestle down in the thick carpet, where Farropelante bent over
to pick it up. Foscolino shouted and swore, threatened and shouted
again, slamming his fists on the desk, sending papers in every direc-
tion. Ungulúsquibus gathered them up and replaced them, ready for
another outburst. Everyone looked balefully at Gianfilippo. ‘Release
him immediately’, spluttered the chief, amid a stream of abuse, ‘and
make sure whichever imbecile arrested him is transferred to the end
of the earth’.7
Prosaic analysis of the files demonstrates conclusively that local

police were in the dark when it came to the strategic objectives of
the political police, which is to be expected in covert operations. More
importantly, there was no robust and effective communication
between the different branches of police.8
In towns, the postal interception usually took place within the
Questura itself. In cities, a police officer worked from the central post
office. Letters were steamed open, read and if necessary copied or
photographed. In most cases they were then resealed and put back into
circulation. If intercepted letters were written in other languages, a
copy was sent to the political police, for the attention of Pizzuto.
Letters in more exotic languages, such as Serbo-Croat or Yiddish were
referred to expert informers who also acted as translators, when
required. The following extract, which may have come to Pizzuto, is
taken from a letter intercepted by police in Genoa on 14 May 1934,
when concerns over dissident groups in France were near their peak
following the Turin arrests at the end of March:
[…] Notre seule espoir est dans la Russie des Soviets, sans elle il est
plus que probable que nous serions soumis aux regimes des camps
de concentrations et à l’inquisition fascistes, malgré que la France
prétend étre une grande democratie dans tout le terme du mot.
Comme tu vois, tout ça n’est guére brillant et l’horizon n’a rien de
rassicurant.
CHARLOS
Montreuil S. Bois9
The complete letter was transcribed at the prefecture in Genoa and

sent to Rome. Its recipient, Henry Furst, like Pizzuto also born in 1893
and also a translator from German, was already under police surveil-
lance. The identity of ‘Charlos’ remains a mystery.
Fear of correspondence with fuorusciti was an important motivation
for policies of surveillance and censorship of private correspondence,
but it was not the only one. Enemies of the people within the state also
had their mail monitored. Benedetto Croce’s police files bulge with
copies of intercepted letters. Some letters intended for him were con-
sidered so sensitive that they were censored definitively by being
removed from circulation altogether.10 The suppression of information
was more far-reaching in the case of intercepted consignments of
underground newspapers and other anti-Fascist propaganda materials.
But censorship was not just about suppression. Most of the serious
opposition had been suppressed by the mid-1920s. It became more
about information gathering than repression, although the latter did
not disappear by any means.
Pizzuto described a visit to the Ufficio speciale, located in a disused
school in Rome, the Istituto Vittorino da Feltre – Scuola Froebeliana:
The cupola was topped by a great white façade bearing the legend
Enter happily Children. Here we teach. We do not torment. A great
silence pervaded the wide avenue with its manicured box hedges.
Silence and peace! […] [Inside] there was the smell of a post office.
Impressive complete collections of official stamps in their holders
decorated the walls, beneath quotations from Emerson, Tommaseo
and Cuoco. Throughout the hall people worked in silence. Stacks of
letters were piled up on the tables and one by one the envelopes
were subjected to sharp tools, the more intractable were dealt with
by the long and sturdy kettle spouts, made of toucan. All resistance
ceded in the face of their jets of steam. They seemed like a squadron
of tiny Fafners. You could think of it as a sort of laparotomy. The
entrails tumbled out and were interrogated. Where necessary they
were put under the rays of the Gall lamps, which revealed invisible
secrets. There were iodine vapours used for reading between the
lines, beside the hyposulphite of soda which would remove all
traces when held before the fan. And when something good turned
up, there was the handy light bath in the drawer to capture it.
When the examination was complete each letter was returned to its
own envelope and subjected to the paste brush.11
No post hoc account of the activities of a member of the secret police

operating in Italy under the Fascist regime can be read without a high
degree of scepticism about the author’s motives. Pizzuto remained in
Rome after 8 September 1943, as Italian liaison officer for General
Kesselring, and remained in his job – indeed he was promoted – after
the war, to Vicequestore of Trento (1945), Questore of Bolzano (1946) and
subsequently Questore of Arezzo. He took his pension in 1950 and
returned to his writing career. Where his account differs from the self-
serving autobiographies of the likes of Leto, Senise and Zurlo is that
there is no attempt at self-justification, and there is a thread of irony
and a sense of the absurd running through the novel as well as consid-
erable linguistic creativity. The imprisoned letters are personified, and
their treatment in the ominously-named Ufficio speciale is brutal. They
are disembowelled, and the verb Pizzuto uses for the spilling of the
guts (fuoruscivano) is a conscious echo of the term for the political exiles
such as Carlo Rosselli, fuorusciti. The narrator knows the potential
consequences of this surveillance activity.
Informers
The aspiration to Fascist totalitarianism in Italy encouraged certain

types of behaviour, most notably in this respect, the practices of inform-
ing and the anonymous denuncia. Not that there was anything particu-
larly new about these activities. The world’s second-oldest profession,
informing had been encouraged by temporal and inquisitorial author-
ities in Italy for centuries.12 The usual pattern was for the heretic, petty
criminal or low-ranking political opponent to be arrested, abjure their
past errors, and to turn informer in return for absolution and freedom.
Such freedom came at the price of guilt and moral corruption. In the
terms of Fascist Italy this meant trading one’s friends, family, neigh-
bours, party or associates against the prospect of years in jail or in
confino. In practice this often meant condemning someone else to years
in jail or in confino instead. Franzinelli, in the first detailed study of the
subject in Italy, has argued that:
Between the poles of repression and clemency there was a subtle

dialectical game, played at the discretion of the dictator and the
chief of police, with the intention of recuperating the felon through
the renouncing of his own conscience and therefore his own reason
for living. The activities of OVRA and the political police in the
15 years from the late 1920s to the fall of the regime are character-
ized more by the implications of moral abjection than by the
brutal use of physical violence (to which they had recourse only in
exceptional circumstances).13
Profound in its simplicity, the regime brought to bear its powers of

retribution and temptation in the police interview, to elicit a confes-
sion and to recruit an informer out of a frightened man or woman
with a weak moral or political code and something to lose: part interro-
gation, part job interview. Once recruited onto the secret payroll of
OVRA or of the police, informers became bit players in the tentacles of
power until they were exposed (bruciati – burned – was the technical
term) or proved unreliable, at which point they were abandoned to
their fates. This coercive model of the ethical state was not trumpeted
in the manner of OMNI, but the fear and suspicion it engendered was
real and pervasive nonetheless.
This pervasive atmosphere also facilitated the more banal practice
of casual informing, often for no direct financial benefit from the
state. Indeed, as in any country at war, informing the police of one’s
suspicions was presented as a moral good. The young and naïve were
more especially prone to informing. Article 282 of the penal code had
criminalized ‘causing offence to the Head of Government’, something
akin to a secular version of blasphemy. This was reinforced in school
through the hagiographic accounts of Mussolini’s life as the country
boy miraculously reborn in the trenches of the First World War as the
Man sent by Providence. These conditions had their effects. As one
example among very many, there is the case of Mario, an 18-year old,
newly appointed to a factory at Savona in October 1939. To personal-
ize his working environment he hung a photograph of the duce on the
machine which he had been allocated. An eager young man, expecting

praise for this initiative, he called the attention of an older colleague to
the new picture. His colleague, Antonio, happened to be a convinced
Socialist who had spent a year in confino for bringing a wreath of red
flowers to the funeral of a friend in 1937. Instead of praise and
approval, Mario heard:
Now we even have him here to keep an eye on us; we are slaves and
we can do nothing about it. He can call all the shots. […] There are
things you can’t understand because you were born in a prison. You
have always lived in it. You have been educated in their way of
thinking, but you are young and you have time to educate yourself
and to understand things that you don’t know about yet.14
Instead of heeding such subversive advice, Mario reported Antonio

to the local PNF delegate. Antonio was picked up that night by the
police. The matter was referred to Bocchini, who discussed it with
Mussolini at their daily briefing. Antonio was sent to confino in Pisticci
for two years.
More usually the product of jealousy or petty rivalries, the casual
denunciation could be wrapped in the flag of patriotism, religious or
sexual orthodoxy, or any other type of hypocrisy. On rarer occasions
people may have been impelled to inform the authorities for what they
held to be nobler reasons, but there is less evidence of that in the
archives. Of the examples there is the story of an itinerant trader in
Siena. Itinerant traders, like doormen in apartment blocks, were the
ideal informers because they saw and heard a great variety of things in
their daily round. Giuseppe, however, was not an informer. Sitting on
a bench in the public park in Siena in September 1934, he got into
conversation with a young German man who was praising Italy’s great
recent achievements. Giuseppe responded to this praise of his country
by the young Nazi by countering that life was better in France, and
that he would be happy to emigrate there if only his family situation
permitted it. The tourist went on his way, casually meeting Giorgio
Alberto Chiurco, member of parliament and historian of the ‘Fascist
revolution’, to whom he related his strange conversation. Chiurco
instigated a police search for the trader, who was easily tracked down.
An earlier charge against him for ‘causing offence to the Head of
Government’, in 1927, had been dropped for want of proof, but that in
itself constituted a police record. Mussolini ordered three years in
confino. Released early, in the amnesty to mark the birth of Prince
Victor Emanuel, Giuseppe was returned to a penal colony in August

1938 for a further four years as a subversive. His children were taken
into care and the life of a family was blighted.15
Finally, at the bottom of the moral ladder, the police archives
contain many thousands of anonymous letters, sent with the malevo-
lent intention of ruining neighbours, rivals in business or in love,
alleged defeatists, and, from summer 1938, Jews. These, at the very
least, testify to a significant element of complicity with the ethical
state on the part of the king’s loyal subjects. Anonymous and forged
letters provide insidious examples of the population taking advantage
of the regime, rather than vice versa, in order to settle old scores.
Franzinelli has cited a striking example of mischief-making from
13 December 1928:
Dear Mussolini,
You are a great big traitor, a coward and a villain. You have a cruel
heart. You are a beast. We have the courage to sign our names, and
we are Germi Emilio and Sabbadini Adolfo, both resident in
Saranza, Via Olmo.
Greetings.16
The Segreteria particolare del duce referred the letter to the Ministry
for the Interior, and local police interviewed Germi and Sabbadini,
taking samples of their handwriting. The investigation was sufficient
to prove that the two men were innocent of writing the letter. They
were asked if they had enemies, or if there was anyone who might
wish to get them into trouble. They were unable or unwilling
to come up with any names. Further investigation by the police
revealed that two years previously, Germi’s son-in-law was believed
to have killed the Sabbadini’s cat. There is no indication that this
was a wilful act rather than an accident, but on the basis of suspi-
cion, the police raided the son-in-law’s house where they found an
automatic pistol. He was duly arrested for unauthorized possession
of a firearm. But his handwriting did not match that of the apoc-
ryphal letter. The letter had not hit its intended targets, but it had
done collateral damage.
Letters, anonymous or otherwise, and transcripts of oral reports were
sent to the DG for Public Security in Rome where Bocchini and his
team examined them. They would routinely seek additional informa-
tion from the local prefect. If required, local police would arrest and
interview the suspect or suspects, and send a report to Rome where a
copy would go to Bocchini, who, as we know, briefed the duce daily.

Decisions were then communicated to the relevant prefect, who had
the power, under the Consolidation Act of November 1926 to send
people to confino without trial. The emotional and economic conse-
quences of confino for families could be profound if their bread-winner
was sent away.17
Informers came from all social strata. The following is the report of a
relatively-cultured one from Milan (19 November 1931), reporting Henry
Furst:
American journalist, ex-legionario in Fiume, translator of Ojetti and,

it seems of Gabriele D’Annunzio too. He visited D’Annunzio a few
days ago.
Furst has been out of Italy for about three years. He has been
working as a librarian at the Library of Congress in Washington.
He returned to Italy a fortnight ago. I know that while abroad he
frequented anti-Fascist circles. In London he met Don Sturzo,
who a few days before the announcement of the August accord
between the state and the Vatican was telling people it was a cer-
tainty, declaring that ‘if the Church has given ground it is a sign
that it has recognized the strength of the Fascist regime’. Furst
himself told me this.
In Paris too Furst was in direct contact with anti-Fascists and now
that he is back in Italy I have found him preoccupied and nervous.
I will give you an example:
One day Furst showed me a letter from the Banca Commerciale
addressed to him, which showed signs that it may have been tam-
pered with. Naturally he attributed this to a secret service. I tried
to convince him that could not be the case and to give me the
envelope, but without success.
Furst really is a great friend of Italy, and he has a profound know-
ledge of our culture. He also has sympathies for the regime and
especially for the Duce, but he was a very close friend of the notori-
ous De Bosis, and of the Toscanini family.18
Furst was not arrested. No action was taken against him, not least
because he had not actually done anything other than complain
to an acquaintance that he thought his letters were being inter-
cepted. He may well have been right. He was monitored closely for
several years. A subsequent report (19 September 1932), filed by the
same informer added some significant details:
I already told you about this American a few months ago shortly
after he had returned to Italy after some years spent in his own
country and months abroad (in France and England). I tried to keep
in contact with him because his behaviour gave me grounds for sus-
picion, suspicion based on his uncommon intelligence and his
detailed knowledge of international politics. He loves to know what
is happening in Italy and to seek out stories about politicians of the
regime, which sometimes he relates to third parties. Most concern-
ing of all is the fact that he is a Jew, and that for the last six months
he has been coming and going to and from France, whilst complain-
ing of poverty which simply isn’t true. I have tried to get into his
confidences, taking advantage of what he was writing to me about
being short of money. But he never lacks means and what he says
sounds strange to me. Also strange is his attitude to the regime,
about which he has little good to say, and his preoccupation with a
loss of freedom and what he describes as the police-state of the
regime. At present he is living in the same building as me in Milan,
Via Passerella 20. In vain I have tried to invite him into my home so
that I could take the opportunity to go through his papers and
certain archives which he carries around with him, made up of
record cards on which are noted down names of books. Furst works
for Walter Toscanini, son of the maestro, and he has been in regular
contact with Gabriele D’Annunzio.
Furst was a legionario at Fiume. He translated Ojetti’s Cose viste
into English. He enjoys a certain popularity in Italian intellectual
circles, and his work is published in several Italian literary
magazines.
I remember that in Fiume with his friend Leone Kisniski [Leon
Kochnitzsky], another Jew, and about whom I have also reported, he
took a pro-Communist line.
This man leads a rather mysterious life, which merits special
attention.
The informer, who also appears to have been in Fiume, was quite
well informed, but not correct in all respects. The errors are significant.
Furst and Kochnitzsky were presented as exotic, remarkable characters,
too smart for their own good. The informer made the inference that
they must therefore be Jews. In fact they were both Catholics, but the
informer’s inference tells us something about assumptions and percep-
tions of difference which were part of the collective imagination in the
early 1930s. Six years before the passing of the Race laws in 1938, and
one year before the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and Hitler’s
ascent to power. Furst’s file remained in Limbo until there was some-
thing more substantive to bring against him.19
Lies, corruption, deviation and degeneration
Furst was informed on by a chance acquaintance, who had known him

slightly over ten years earlier, and who was now a paid informer. Many
informers’ reports were of more domestic affairs, having nothing to do
with foreigners or presumed Jews, at least not before 1938, and they
usually had more self-interested motives. There are thousands of exam-
ples from the files, most of them not yet analyzed in detail, but from
the ones that have come to light some interesting patterns emerge.
They read very much like a sordid decent into Dante’s vision of Hell,
with different categories of sin represented by exemplary sinners who
were alleged to have engaged in a bewildering variety of ‘lies, corrup-
tion and all forms of deviation and degeneration of public and private
morality’, to quote Rocco.
Pasquale, a married man from Lecce with three children,
had fought in the Great War, though he had a blemished record –
sentenced to penal servitude (ergastolo) for desertion in 1916 and
amnestied in 1919. 20 Aged 52, he was arrested on 23 October 1940,
nearly six months into the war for defeatist talk in a private house
which was reported to the police. After two years of confino in
Lucania he was freed in the amnesty for the Ventennale, the regime’s
twentieth anniversary. The podestà received an anonymous letter,
which he ignored, warning him that Pasquale was a dangerous sub-
versive and a smuggler. Pasquale returned home to his wife and chil-
dren. Anti-Fascist slogans appeared mysteriously on the walls of his
house. The carabinieri investigated and discovered that the letter and
the slogans were the work of his wife, a 35-year old nurse who had
taken a lover in his absence, and was keen to be free of her husband
for good. She was arrested on 8 March 1943 and sent to confino
herself for two years. After Mussolini’s fall she appealed disingenu-
ously on the political grounds that she had been sent away for
writing anti-Fascist slogans. She was released on 8 September 1943, a
fateful day for the country.
Years earlier, on 11 April 1932 Dino was reported to the Political
Investigations Office of the Militia for ‘having openly declared himself
to be a Communist and expressing the hope that a revolution would
overthrow the political order in Italy’.21 His accuser was his fiancée.
Her written denunciation included a love letter she had received from
Dino, which contained a compromising passage:
Political ideas – But listen, my dear, if I am a Communist is that fact

a reason for you to hate me or (worse still) not to love me anymore?
Are you an ultra-fascist maniac, or a high-ranking state employee for
whom it would be dangerous to have a relationship with a subver-
sive? And who says that politically I don’t know more than you do,
and that the future doesn’t belong to people who think as I do in
political terms?
Anyway, to be clear, I am not being watched or under suspicion. I
don’t run any risk of that sort. I don’t see how my political ideas
can make you fall out of love with me.
Dino was picked up and interrogated. He made an unsuccessful

attempt to wriggle out of the hole the letter had dropped him in. He
was released with a warning after a fortnight in the cells, and kept
under surveillance for the next four years. What had he really done?
Interviewed by the police, his fiancée admitted that her motive was
revenge because Dino ‘had repeatedly offended her in front of her
girlfriends’.
Bosworth has given a richly-textured account of a denunciation at
Maranzana, near Alessandria, on 27 March 1933, reporting six men
who drank too much wine one spring evening, and on their inebri-
ated stagger home they were heard singing Socialist songs. One
witness claimed to have heard Nella risaia. Another heard Bandiera
rossa. One of the men, described by the police as a ‘work-shy
boozer’, was sent to confino at Grassano (Matera) for three years. 22
The regime had not much time or sympathy for the undeserving
poor, and in that respect it often seemed to encourage the consensus
of the majority who wanted to see the country cleaned up, and the
active complicity of more than a few. Work-shy, boozing gluttons,
after all, were the very opposite of the positive model of disciplined
and zealous workers. This was an infringement of both Fascist and
traditional moral codes: just the sort of thing an anthropological
revolution should eliminate. On this incident, Bosworth has made
the telling point that in spite of a decade of Fascism in government,
and the censorship of subversive publications, songs and perfor-
mances, everybody in the village still recognized Bandiera rossa when
they heard it. Indeed one of the singers was himself still a teenager.
Getting rid of a noisy neighbour for three years with the help of the
police tells us something about the dynamics of village life under

the anthropological revolution.
Sometimes, however, mischief-making backfired. In a tale of treach-
ery, revenge and recrimination worthy of Dante’s treatment of Count
Ugolino, two doctors from Montemaggiore Belsito, Giuseppe Nicastro
and Vincenzo Licata, after once enjoying cordial relations, spent years
locked in trying to smear one another, making the other out to be the
leader of a dangerous and subversive faction. The carabinieri at Termini
Imerese reported, and one can sense a deep sigh behind these words:
They have been fighting each other for years, trying to compromise
each other by means of denunciations, anonymous letters, malign
insinuations, etc. So much so that all the authorities, political,
administrative, judicial, public security, are engaged almost full-time
in dealing with these two individuals. They try to wound each
other’s honour and their public and private reputations by the most
ignoble means, not just the anonymous letters. They even drag into
the dispute their family and friends, to the point where there are
now two groups at war with one another.23
Matters came to a head in February 1939 when a mysterious fire at

the door of the Town Hall and an incendiary device left at the PNF
offices were attributed respectively, in two apocryphal letters, to the
‘Licata group’ and to the ‘Nicastro group’. Both men were arrested and
sent into confino, together.
For the ethical state, sexuality was not a private matter: the state
had the right and the duty to direct and control individual behaviours
in order to achieve power and greatness for the nation, in theory.
Accordingly, the state developed policy on public health, on safe-
guarding traditional moral values, and on raising the nation’s birth-
rate.24 Formulation of these policies brought together biologists,
psychologists, experts in forensic medicine, anthropologists and crim-
inologists as well as artists and the media, but lurking behind their
work were older codes and assumptions about human sexuality which
were not the result of cutting-edge research. Benadusi has argued that
after the first world war, urbanization and industrialization saw the
arrival of mechanization and the introduction of new technologies in
the cities, which, together with a parallel growth in the tertiary sector,
began to undermine the traditional role of men, manifested in male
strength and physical resistance in the mode of Maciste the strongman
of silent films, thus reducing the difference between male and female
employees. The Fascists rejected this blurring of gender roles and set
about a championing of masculinity through a rediscovery of the
body as a temple of virility, by means of programmes of exercise and
health education.25 This plan revived pre-war medical and anthropo-
logical ideas about the fundamental healthiness of the Latin peoples:
‘The effeminacy of the Latin race (razza)’ was not ‘a constitutional or
organic vice, but rather a defect of education’ which might be over-
come by physical exercise, sport and outdoor games.26 The restoration
of virility, and the masculine spirit of the trenches became the leading
strategy of the Fascists, in order to counter the ‘feminine’ principles of
consensus and democracy. This was to be the basis of a bonifica
umana, which would promote traditional gender roles and see an
increase in the birth-rate. Originally, in 1928 Rocco had drafted article
528 of his criminal code as follows:
Homosexual relations: Whoever […] commits libidinal acts on a

person of the same sex, or consents to such acts, is to be punished
if the act gives rise to scandal, with a period of imprisonment of
between six months and three years. The period of imprisonment is
from between one year and five years if the guilty party is aged above
twenty years and commits the deed on a person of under eighteen
years; if the act is committed habitually, or for financial gain.27
Rocco’s proposed article 528 was dropped, however, on the grounds

that the problem did not exist in Italy:
Provision for this crime is unnecessary, because thankfully and as a

matter of Italian pride, the abominable vice to which it gives rise is
not so widespread among us as to justify the intervention of the leg-
islator. Should such cases arise they may be dealt with by recourse
to application of the most severe sanctions in relation to crimes of
carnal violence, corruption of minors and offences against public
morality (offese al pudore).28
In fact, the usual punishment for homosexual men was for them to
be sent to confino, and there were colonies effectively reserved for gay
men. Postal censorship in 1942, rather than a denuncia, revealed a case
of homosexuality involving a married man who worked as a driver in
Rome.29 This case led to a debate over whether to issue the man a
warning or to hush the affair up. In Florence an ex-carabiniere was
denounced and sent to confino, as was his young accomplice who was
classified as a sexual degenerate because he was an active male prosti-

tute whose services were regularly purchased by upper-class foreign
passive pederasts.30 There was no question of the latter group being sent
to confino. Again we can sense the dynamic of social mores at work.
Applying Rocco’s legal framework, officials of the state took action to
root out lies, corruption, degeneracy and deviance from Fascist Italy, by
removing people from circulation and sending them into internal exile
just as offending letters were removed from circulation, to be stored in
the archives.
Minority communities
The Rocco code with which this chapter began, was drafted in the 1920s,
before the Lateran Pacts had been signed. Subsequent amendments in
the early 1930s made provisions for recognizing Protestant churches,
while according the Catholic Church a special position within the state.
Giovanni Gentile, although personally a secularist, in his proposals for
educational reform, had taken an instrumentalist line on the presence of
Catholic ritual and symbolism in schools, as early as 1923. The Catholic
Church therefore gained a level of power and influence in schools the
length and breadth of Fascist Italy which it had not enjoyed under the
Liberal dispensation. Studies of minority communities in the Fascist
period suggest that this increasing influence, in the popular consensus,
did not work to the benefit of those outside the mainstream, in minority
communities. That is particularly true of certain Evangelical groups, pop-
ularly regarded as on a par with heretics. It would become even more
pertinent in the case of the Jewish communities after summer 1938.
Giorgio Rochat, in a detailed study of the Evangelical churches in
Italy during the Fascist period, has shown that moves in the direction
of persecuting minority churches had begun in fact as early as 1923,
and that it came as part of the package of education reforms assembled
by Gentile.31 Gabriella Klein has demonstrated that linguistic discrimi-
nation was being considered against the Waldensians within months
of the March on Rome. In summer 1923, Mussolini, in a letter to
Gentile, deplored the fact that:
The use of the French language in those valleys is so extensive as to

require special teaching. […] We do not want to use force to make
these populations stop speaking French, but equally we do not want
to encourage and help them to continue a custom that should have
died out. In Italy we speak Italian.32
The Waldensians were well-established indigenous communities, in

the foothills of the Alps, which usually managed to maintain a distinc-
tion between their patriotism as loyal Italian subjects, and the commit-
ment of their communities to their spiritual and apolitical identity.
The Waldensian churches prayed for an Italian victory in all wars and
the return of peace, but (with a few exceptions) they did not organize a
collection of gold for the patria.33
Bocchini’s appointment as Chief of Police in 1926 was not good
news for religious minorities, or indeed any minorities. He was a thor-
oughly cynical, clear-eyed career policeman who had no time for
rapture of any religious or even political kind. He regarded small sects
as security risks. The Vatican, on the other hand, had its own reasons
to be concerned, and sought to confound these with the state’s polit-
ical suspicions. In September 1928, when secret negotiations were
underway between Mussolini (represented by Gentile) and the Pope
(represented by Father Tacchi Venturi) plans for the building of a new
Methodist church in Salerno in were blocked by a letter to Mussolini
from Tacchi Venturi:
Your Excellency,
The Very Reverend Archbishop of Salerno informs me that there are

rumours that the pastor and freemason De Rosa, is planning to erect
a protestant church on Via Armando Diaz, in the most conspicuous
part of the city, opposite the historic cathedral of St Matthew […].
I thought it best, at the entreaty of the Archbishop, to bring the
matter to your attention. He writes: ‘It would be highly desirable if
the Duce were to say a curt (recisa) word. It is certain that this is the
sectarian work of Freemasons. The erection of a protestant church
would be a source of shame for the city and would be the cause of
continual strife’.
With profound religious obsequiousness and firm confidence that
this antireligious and antipatriotic proposal […] will not prevail
I confirm my devotion to your Excellency. Pietro Tacchi Venturi S.J.34
This exchange was evidently in the spirit of negotiating the Lateran

Pacts. The Methodist church, in the end, was built in a side street.
Also in 1928, under some pressure from the Vatican, the Pentecostalist
community at Via Adige in Rome was placed under observation. The
Pentecostalists could not credibly be characterized as either anti-Fascists
or Freemasons, so the Church’s strategy in 1928 was to medicalize them
and present them as madmen. Dr Osvaldo Zacchi, a surgeon and brother

of a prominent Dominican, was sent to a Pentecostalist meeting on the
evening of 15 July 1928, under cover. Zacchi observed that some of
those present showed ‘evident degenerative signs characteristic of
epilepsy’. He noted signs of ‘hysteria’ in many of the women as they
broke into ‘cries and gestures, throwing themselves abruptly to their
knees, beating their breasts, sobbing, and shouting convulsively in a way
that was striking’. He concluded that:
For children and adolescents, it is my opinion that the spectacle is

very harmful to the health, having an enormous effect on their
psychic balance and therefore predisposing them to the development
of functional neuropathic forms, perhaps even organic ones.35
The state’s medical advice was less alarming and the complaints of
the Catholic clergy were over-ruled on that occasion.
The special position of the Catholic church within the state, how-
ever, was enshrined in law in 1931, and this was greeted with popular
approval. The law also recognized other faiths, the so-called ‘culti
ammessi’. After 1931, there was to be sustained persecution of the
Methodists in the province of Aquila, at the instigation of the Catholic
clergy, reaching something of a climax in 1934, the year in which
Il proselitismo protestante in Italia appeared.36 Rochat has drawn atten-
tion to this 47-page pamphlet sent from the papal embassy in Rome to
the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 16 May 1934. The date is signifi-
cant, for reasons discussed in earlier chapters, and to which I return
below. According to this pamphlet the dangers of Protestant proselytiz-
ing included the charge that Protestant sects were anti-hierarchical.
The sects in the line of fire were not the ‘respectable’ and largely
foreign, middle- and upper-class Episcopalians or Lutherans, but ‘dan-
gerous’ popular groups such as the Pentecostalists, the Shakers and the
Jehovah’s Witnesses, though the latter, in theological terms, had little
if anything in common with the others.
What the groups did have in common was that they had small
footholds in working-class and rural indigenous communities. These
footholds were the product of cases of where emigrants had returned
from the United States with some savings, bringing their new religion
home with them. To be against hierarchy was presented in the pam-
phlet as tantamount to being anti-Fascist. The guiding principle of all
Protestant sects, the document argued, was that each individual was
the interpreter of divine revelation and therefore free to form his or her
own credo just from reading the Bible. This principle, it was suggested,
lay at the root of all democratic errors, from Liberalism to Socialism to
anarchy. This was a familiar argument against ‘heretical’ communities,
stretching back to the Reformation.
Furthermore, it was alleged that all Protestant sects allowed divorce,
and were therefore out of step with the regime’s family-based values.
Worse still, it was claimed, many of them permitted birth control, even
though it was accepted that in Italy they were careful not to promote
this idea too prominently. Nonetheless, that was their unpatriotic doc-
trine: sex without babies. Finally, all the Protestant sects assailed the
Catholic Church and sought to destroy the papacy, not being able to
bring themselves to see that the bishop of Rome was the pontiff of the
whole Church, throughout all the world. The implication drawn from
that hypothesis was that this represented a desire to attack Fascist Italy
because for almost two millennia the papacy had constituted the great-
est glory of the eternal city and therefore of Italy, embodying the myth
of Romanità.
This was a self-serving little document unlikely to have caused
Bocchini or Mussolini a second thought, until it got to the Evangelicals.
The most serious charge set out related to the Pentecostalists and the
Shakers. In their meetings, it was claimed, again, that the congregation
was whipped up to a paroxysm, constituting a grave danger especially
for women and children. To verify this it was suggested, again, that the
police should send a psychiatrist, under cover, to one of their meetings
in Via Adige, 20, in Rome. It was also noted however, that:
It should be borne in mind that Italian law tolerates faiths other

than the Catholic religion, ‘as long as they do not profess principles
which involve rites contrary to public order and common decency
(buon costume)’. It is therefore difficult to understand why the
Pentecostal cult continues to be tolerated in Italy.37
This was ingenious: basing an attack on an argument for public order

rather than theological deviance or collective mental illness. The police
were uninterested in theology and only interested in criminal forms of
mental health problems. Six weeks after the Turin arrests, however,
they were very interested in the threats to public order from myster-
ious small groups. The Protestant churches began to be viewed with
growing suspicion and the Pentecostalists became the first victims.
They were easy targets. They had no central hierarchy, no support
from foreign governments and no allies among the wealthy, unlike the
Episcopalians. Pentecostalism had been imported into Italy, especially

into poor communities in the South, by emigrants returning from the
United States, and its spontaneity, unusual doctrines and success in
finding new adherents alarmed the Catholic Church.
Il proselitismo protestante in Italia, and the effect which it had within
the security forces and the minority communities, is significant for a
host of different reasons. 1934, the year after Hitler’s ascent to power
in Germany, was the year which saw the introduction of racism as a
policy (in relation to Black Africa) and a new crackdown in Italy on
freedom of expression, with the centralization of book censorship
under the control of the Ministry for Press and Propaganda. (It was
also, as it happens, the year in which the Vatican placed Gentile’s
works on its Index of Prohibited Books.) Il proselitismo protestante in
Italia represents an attempt on the part of the Church to use Fascism’s
lurch further to the Right in order to protect its influence over the
Italian population. The Rome Questura, which had previously been pro-
tective of the Pentecostalists, suggested towards the end of 1934 that
the church on Via Adige should be closed down. It was joined by the
prefect and the Fascist federation. On 14 March 1935, Carmine Senise
at the Division of political police issued a long memorandum, and the
following day the church was closed, even though it was recognized
under the law of October 1931 as a non-Catholic church. Three weeks
later, on 9 April 1935, Buffarini Guidi, Undersecretary at the Ministry
of the Interior, issued the following circular to prefects:
There exist in some provinces of the kingdom simple de facto associa-

tions which, under the denomination of Pentecostali or Pentecostieri or
Neumatici or Tremolanti, practice a cult in meetings generally presided
over by an Elder. The cult professed by these associations, which is not
recognized by article 2 of law 24 of 24 June 1929, no. 1159, is no longer
permitted in the kingdom, by virtue of article 1 of the aforementioned
law, it having been established that it leads to religious practices which
are contrary to the social order and damaging to the physical and
psychic integrity of the race. Therefore your Excellencies will see to the
immediate suppression, wherever they exist, of the associations in ques-
tion, and the closure of the relevant oratories and meeting rooms,
maintaining vigilance that no further meetings and manifestations of
religious activity may take place in any form whatsoever.38
This circular was issued by the police (Buffarini Guidi and Bocchini),
not by a magistrate. The Pentecostalists were recognized by the law of
24 June 1929, but the transfer of responsibility for religious denomina-

tions from the Ministry for Justice to the Ministry for the Interior in
summer 1932 had taken their fates out of the hands of the magistrates
and put them into the hands of the police. Rochat has argued that the
significance of the Buffarini Guidi circular is that the argument against
the Pentecostalists in 1935 is not one based on public order – the
Vatican case the previous year – but on the defence of social order and
crucially, defence of the race. It is therefore in line with the evolution
of social policy as Fascist Italy became an imperial power.
The Pentecostalists were hardly a serious menace to social order even
if, in theory, they did not recognize temporal rulers. In practice they
were obedient, poor and without influence. Defence of the race was a
new category on Italian soil in 1935 and it appears to take up Zacchi’s
medical account of their degeneracy, one of those things the ethical
state was on a mission to root out. This circular put the Pentecostalists
on a par with homosexuals in the eyes of the Fascist police. Rochat has
demonstrated that what was prohibited, in effect, was not being a
Pentecostalist, but to practice the faith even in a private meeting. The
distinction is a subtle one but one which applied with equal force to
homosexuality, as Benadusi has shown. The defence of the race argu-
ment is also to be found in a circular (28 February 1936) from Senise,
urging attentive surveillance of Protestant churches in the light of
conflicting loyalties over Ethiopia.39
On 22 August 1939 Bocchini sent out another circular on religious
sects, which confounded the relatively numerous Pentecostalists with
the tiny group of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The ban on Pentecostalists was
extended to the Jehovah’s Witnesses too, although theologically they
had nothing whatever in common. The point was that they were
regarded as degenerates. In this respect, Nazi models were being
domesticated for an Italian setting. In Nazi Germany the Jehovah’s
Witnesses had been banned under the anti-Communist Reichstag Fire
decree in 1933 as being both Communist stooges and sympathizers
with the Jews.40 This characterization, however, did not accord with
the anti-bourgeois drift of Fascist policy in 1938.
Pentecostalists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, whatever else they might
be, could not be characterized as wealthy or bourgeois. They were
emphatically not the targets when Mussolini launched his anti-
bourgeois campaign in October 1938, in an effort to stir up enthusi-
asm, especially among the young and restless, the ‘Fascist Left’ as it has
been called, following on from his self-presentation as supercontadino,
threshing wheat in the fields of the Agro Pontino: an exemplary rebuke
to the sedate and comfortable bourgeois in his city apartment.41 The

campaign extended to linguistic pedantry, outlawing the use of ‘Lei’,
the polite form of the personal pronoun, as well as attempting to
excise foreign loan words and to replace them with newly-coined
Italian terms. Excising foreign words from the language may have been
an absurd aspiration, but it did represent a lethal consistency, albeit
one increasingly distant from reality, continuing the surgical image,
from the Ascension Day speech in 1927, of cutting out cancerous
growths. When this model was next grafted on to social engineering in
the Race Laws, the consequences became more tangible, and tragic
rather than absurd.
The archives contain many anonymous denunciations of Italian Jews
from 1938. Some of them elide official racism with the anti-bourgeois
campaign. The Race Laws made it an offence for Jewish families to
have non-Jewish servants. On 30 April 1940, an outraged resident of
Turin wrote anonymously to the prefect complaining that despite the
new laws:
The rich Jews, who brag about having friends in high places and
being able to oil the wheels, have kept their servants. Look, for
example, at the multi-millionaire Jew who lives at 25 Via Tommaso.
This gentleman has ten (yes 10) Aryans working for him as servants.
Is this Fascist justice I ask you?42
Guido Leto, long-time head of OVRA, in his unreliable memoirs,

sought to minimize the levels of persecution suffered by the Jewish
communities in Italy from 1938 onwards.43 While there is no compar-
ison to the atrocities in Nazi-occupied Europe, and there are numerous
anecdotes of heroic acts of kindness and humanity among the Italian
population, the archival record also reveals a significant atmosphere of
malevolence, amoral opportunism and moral cowardice. A police spy,
reporting in June 1942 on public opinion in Rome, wrote that:
Those Israelites who remain here in their businesses, are making

money to the detriment of Aryan businessmen who are at the
front, doing their duty. In fact, a Catholic called to arms, if he has
a business, has to abandon it for the Country, and start up again
from nothing when he gets back. The Jew, excluded from military
service, carries on in his business, industry or profession and gets
richer. Not only that, they spread defeatism, stabbing our soldiers
in the back.44
Against this background of what was accepted as commonsense, it is

no great surprise to find anonymous denunciations of Jewish busi-
nesses by interested rivals, seeking to eliminate a competitor.
With racism and religious intolerance in place as government
policy from summer 1938, on the eve of war, in 1940, the focus of
repression still included small sects such as the Adventists, near the
Yugoslav border, as well as the Jewish communities. 45 Between
summer 1940 and 25 July 1943, about 400 Italian Jews and 6,000
foreign Jews were interned in Italy, on Mussolini’s instructions.
These people were selected for internment on the basis of suspicions
about their activities, often brought to light by anonymous inform-
ers. In fact without the active collusion of parts of the Italian popu-
lation, the security forces could not have rounded up so many
Italian and non-Italian Jews.
War and public opinion
Alcohol and conviviality loosen tongues: bars and public places were a
major source of intelligence on public opinion, up and down the
kingdom, and abroad. Indeed, given that that the population did
much more talking than writing, by far the most common form of
surveillance and information gathering was carried out by spies in
schools, factories, trains, trams, bars and on the streets and in the
piazzas up and down the country and in centres of subversion abroad.
Information gleaned from these sources could lead to the implementa-
tion of other forms of censorship (e.g., seizing printed matter, confino,
instructions to editors) or more simply the gauging of public opinion
in the days before opinion polls. The most complete and revealing
archive of bar conversations to survive in the archives comes from an
OVRA informer at the periphery, in Cagliari on the island of Sardinia.
As a peripatetic trader (venditore ambulante) it was quite natural that he
would travel his daily rounds visiting bars and piazzas, striking up con-
versations with people and overhearing the conversations of others. In
the evenings he would go home and write his account of what he had
observed during the day and convey it to his political handler. His
reports have proven fertile ground for a number of important studies
of everyday life under Fascism.46
As it became clear in late 1940 that the war would not be won
quickly, public opinion started to turn from bellicose aspirations for
Italy’s rightful place in the sun to concern about poverty and food
shortages, although in truth both strands can be seen in the pragma-
tism of a young Sardinian soldier whose conversation was noted by the

spy on the eve of 10 June 1940:
If we go to war it will be short and sweet. Today’s war is not like

1914. This one will be over in a flash (guerra lampo) so it’s worse for
people who stay behind. Today it’s better to be in the army than to
stay at home, especially if you have lots of kids. Between the family
subsidy and the army pay, the family is guaranteed enough to eat,
but times are hard for those who stay at home. They have no
money. Things are dear and hard to come by.47
The patriotism of a young middle-class person was less conditional

in the run up to war:
Uncle, in this grave hour I call on your sense of being Italian, if it

still burns in your heart, to come home [from abroad] to be ready
for the call up, if your Country needs you.48
But by and large, the Sardinian informer’s reports from late May 1940
show almost overwhelming popular support, in his part of Cagliari,
from all classes, for intervention in the war in order to crush the French
once and for all.49 In the chorus of popular enthusiasm at the Caffè
Todesco there was just one discordant voice which, in response to his
companion’s professed willingness to volunteer for action, suggested
that it was poverty which lay at the root of his enthusiasm. To this his
companion replied:
You may be right. But I’m still an Italian. I have fought a war, in
1915, which I didn’t understand at all. But I’d fight this one with
enthusiasm.50
This sentiment will have reassured the authorities that the official
message was getting through. The Italian population had no great love
for the Germans, but there was considerable admiration for their deter-
mination and efficiency. Hitler’s easy victory in northern France rein-
forced this admiration and gave a boost to Mussolini’s reputation for
foresight in having chosen the right ally.51 The anti-bourgeois cam-
paign, which had already elided into the anti-Semitic one, was easily
grafted on to a prejudice, in the popular imagination, against a carica-
ture of the British as upper-class twits who ate five meals a day. Even in
the popular imagination, however, as reported by the Cagliari informer,
there was a clear gender division between bellicose men and the more
practical, sceptical women who observed that there were already bread
shortages in Sardinia, even before war was declared:
The people who have money are clearing out the shops to hoard
pasta, rice, jam, etc. We have no money. What are we going to do in
wartime when we have nothing to eat?52
The consensus among the neighbours and customers of the peri-

patetic trader was that it was better to be drawing pay and family
allowance in the army than to be starving at home, especially for those
with numerous dependents.
Three days after Italy entered the Second World War, on 13 June
1940, censorship in Italy moved from being a cottage industry to being
an industrial enterprise, a full-blown attempt at totalitarianism. Seven
thousand new censors were recruited, at least one thousand of them
civilians. A small proportion of women were employed to reseal
envelopes. In the first year of Italy’s war, ten million letters were exam-
ined by the censors. But the sudden expansion of activity brought with
it unforeseen problems. In effect two systems of censorship had been
established: one for the military and one for the civilian population.
Therefore, when a woman wrote to her husband at the front, her letter
could be delayed twice, by two different censors. Delays were soon irri-
tating both soldiers and civilians. The Ministry of the Interior
responded to this crisis on 8 July 1940 by merging the two services and
making military censors accountable to the civil censorship board, that
is to say, to the Minister of the Interior, who was also the Head of
Government.
By means of Royal Decree Law no. 1415 (8 July 1938) Mussolini’s
government had introduced the principle of postal as well as tele-
phonic and telegraphic censorship in time of war. Two further Royal
Decrees, nos 2247 and 2248 of 12 October 1939 were issued but were
not published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale as they were held to be military
secrets. The first of these decrees enabled wartime censors to examine
the contents of postal telephonic, telegraphic and radio communica-
tions and to suppress them if suppression was held to be in the
national interest. The second decree set out the framework in which
wartime censorship was to take place.53
War-time censors, who were all male and members of the PNF,
read between 150 and 200 letters per day. They had to balance fol-
lowing detailed guidelines with the exercising of their own judge-
ment in difficult cases. Entire sentences could be obliterated with

indelible ink if they crossed the line on any one of four different cri-
teria: military secrets (e.g., location of troops), political sentiments
(including ‘inappropriate sentimentality’), economic complaints
(e.g., increases in the price of bread) or moral reasons (generally
relating to ‘intimate relations’). Especially troublesome letters could
be removed from circulation altogether. This provision had already
been in place for political undesirables, well before Italy’s entry into
the war.54
Wartime censorship was on a different scale and of an order differ-
ent from the processes described by Antonio Pizzuto earlier in this
chapter. It was not surreptitious activity. Soldiers and those corre-
sponding with soldiers knew their mail was being censored. And it
was not unique to Fascist Italy. It combined repression of certain
types of information with a detailed investigation into what the
Italian population was really thinking, assuming that people were
writing what they were really thinking, even when they knew their
words would be read by censors. Each month, prefects compiled
reports on public opinion, on the basis of censored letters, and
sent the reports to the Viminale, headquarters of the Ministry of
the Interior, from whence they were conveyed to Mussolini. 55 The
reports gave the regime a regular update on public opinion and
therefore interacted with Minculpop policies on instructions to the
press and radio about themes to promote or ignore.
Censors had to look out for five categories of information. First there
were notizie segrete, military secrets which consisted in information
about the location or state of readiness of the armed forces. Allowing
such information into the public domain could compromise national
security and be a danger to the ‘political interests, internal and interna-
tional, of the state’. According to the instructions:
Censorship, in addition to intercepting and suppressing secret

information which might be useful to the enemy, assists with
identifying crimes of espionage and the passing on of military
secrets (to be punished by death with demotion of rank), notifying
the Servizio informazione militare of all suspect or incriminating
correspondence.56
The second category to look out for was that of notizie riservate
or reserved information, that is to say, information which was
not actually secret but which the regime did not wish to have
discussed or brought to other people’s attention. This category was

sufficiently vague to have perplexed censors. A detailed list was
provided in the annex to Royal Decree no. 1161 of 11 July 1941. It
included ‘regulations and positions of the armed forces’, their ‘use
and efficiency’, ‘communications systems’, ‘means and organiza-
tion of transport’, ‘military fortifications, bases and systems’, ‘civil-
ian factories for war production and civil power plants’, ‘military
and civilian mobilizations’, ‘official publications, documents
and records’, and ‘through the activities of the government’. It
remained an elastic category. The third category concerned false
and defeatist news. This was defined as ‘news which is untrue and
which is apt to disturb public order or otherwise damage the public
interest’ as well as ‘criticisms of or polemic about military opera-
tions or the progress of the war’, ‘expressions of denigration’,
‘words of scorn’ or ‘invective’ against the war, the conduct of the
war, the armed forces and their command. The fourth category
concerned news which had not been authorized or which differed
from the official interpretation. This was a long-standing Fascist
concern, which had been brought to bear on newspapers on a
regular basis since the mid-1920s. According to military law it
became an offence to spread unauthorized news concerning ‘the
number of wounded, dead or taken prisoner’, ‘changes of person-
nel in military command’, ‘forecasts on the outcome of military
operations’ as well as ‘interpretations of news different from those
brought to the public’s attention by the government or the mil-
itary command through official channels’. In addition, censors
were to look out for information which although not such as
would need to be censored, on the grounds that it was not false,
‘could not be made public at the present time for fear of alarming
people unnecessarily’. As Rizzi observed, the unspeakable was not
simply that which was true but had to be veiled in secrecy, or erro-
neous because it was untrue or dangerous, it extended to that
which had not yet been announced by the regime. The final cate-
gory consisted of information to be gathered. This might be new
information which could be used in the national interest as part of
the war effort. It could include news on morale, discipline, living
conditions and examples of patriotism. It could also cover the eco-
nomic, financial and material conditions of the country as well
as information on individuals and organizations. From these
instructions Rizzi has constructed a grid representing the decision
procedure for censors.
CATEGORY ACTION
Secret or reserved information or Remove letter from circulation.

defeatist interpretations which Incriminating correspondence, to be
represent a crime or a grave lack sent to the Servizio informazione
of discipline militare and the police
Information suspected of being of Remove the letter from circulation
a subversive, pacificist or
pornographic nature
Information to be censored Carry out partial censorship and
(not incriminating) return letter to regular delivery service
News which could cause alarm if Forward the letter, but with a delay
transmitted before it has been
officially sanctioned
Information which violates the Return to sender
censorship arrangements
Useful information which should Draw attention to it in your report
be gathered
Innocuous news which does not Let it pass without obstacle
require censorship
In compiling this detailed account of people’s hopes and fears,

censors had detailed guidelines to follow which were set out in a
highly-confidential 50-page document in a small font, called the Norme
per il funzionamento degli uffici provinciali di censura postale (Guidelines
for the Running of Provincial Offices for Postal Censorship), issued by
the Servizio informazione militare in 1935. Censors were warned that:
It is necessary that the examination of correspondence should be

carried out with attention and cunning, since the most dangerous
elements dedicated to espionage and subversive propaganda use
great ingenuity in trying to avoid censorship by giving their corre-
spondence the most common and innocent appearance.57
The checklist to be followed required the censor to use his contextual

knowledge when examining the external characteristics of any com-
munication. First on the list was the letter’s place of origin: was it of
military importance or a centre of subversive activity? Did the date
immediately precede, correspond to, or follow some important event?
What was known of the person to whom the correspondence was
addressed? Was the person somebody regarded as suspect? Censors

should be suspicious if the address were vague, e.g., to a post-office box
or more generally to unknown commercial offices. How was the corre-
spondence addressed: on a typewriter, in block capitals or artistic calli-
graphy? Were there any unusual markings? Was the postage stamp
affixed in the normal way and did the postage paid correspond to what
would be expected for such a letter or package? Censors should also look
out for absence of the sender’s details, for envelopes which appeared to
contain a further envelope, for seals and other devices designed to make
it difficult to open packages without leaving a mark. They were also to
note particular patterns such as frequent correspondence between one
address and another.
Even with those guidelines, however, detailed as they were, there
remained an element of interpretation. Lepre has cited the example of
a letter from a woman in which she writes that she is sad because her
husband is far away.58 Should that be interpreted as ‘dangerous for the
spirit of the army or of the country’? Such a sentiment was indeed
judged to be dangerous by the provincial commissioners. It was an
example of ‘inappropriate sentimentality’ and should therefore be cen-
sored as coming too close to defeatism. Complaints about a rise in the
price of vegetables were even more serious and should be suppressed
because they fell into the category of ‘complaints about the increasing
costs of living’. A third category to look out for was that of sexual rela-
tions. All such allusions were to be blacked out, after they had been
copied into the files. As poverty took hold of the country, the censors
found themselves faced with moral dilemmas, having to use their dis-
cretion in human tragedies such as the letter from a wife to her
husband who is away at war, in which she pleads for his forgiveness
because she has bartered her body to the miller for a sack of flour in
order to feed her children.59
Even before entry into the war, in 1939–40 the standing of the
regime – though not the duce – had deteriorated seriously because of an
increase in unemployment, a fall in the real value of salaries with con-
sequent worsening in living conditions, especially among the poor.
This was compounded by the introduction of rationing. This all
resulted in a sort of passive anti-Fascism which the censors noted in
their reports to their superiors. The wartime censors observed a trend
in morale which began with a mixture of reckless enthusiasm and
cynical pragmatism in mid-1940, fuelled on the one hand by two
decades of duce mythology rather than a sober analysis of the far from
encouraging economic and military conditions, and on the other hand
by acceptance of the view that the war would be brief and that it
offered Italy substantial gains, a view bolstered by newspaper reports of
the Nazis cutting through French, Belgian and Dutch defences like a
knife through butter.
Worsening conditions were not sufficient to undermine the duce
mythology, until well into the war, probably not before late 1942. The
problems were blamed on others, by the majority of the population. The
following, from Naples, is a representative example of the blame culture:
Here life is becoming impossible with this mafia which makes the
local decisions. There are no longer sufficient powers to put a stop
once and for all to the abuse suffered by the poor consumers. We
have the laws which were made by our great and beloved Duce, but
they are completely undermined by this shady crowd of hoarders
(accaparratori). What we need again is the manganello and a good
dose of castor oil. Those are the only things to put manners on them.
It’s the only way to put an end to this scandal. […] we have unlim-
ited faith in our Duce. If only the others were worthy of Him.60
Talk of hoarders widened the cast list of public enemies from Jews and
other minority groups to the reawakening of class consciousness. The
content of the censored letters from mid-1941 began to revolve around
food, or more precisely, the lack of it. Censors, and their political
masters, will have been alarmed at this spontaneous rekindling of inter-
nal divisions, communicated between the poor at home and their men
at the front, not least because of the prospect of these armed men return-
ing home at the war’s end, to exact vengeance against those currently
identified as the powerful.61 The letters of the soldiers themselves were
before long bristling with indignation against their superior officers:
Dear sister, just to let you know that I am well and I hope you are
too. Things are bad here, not just the life we are leading but because
they don’t give us our rights and make us eat our rations without
any seasoning. We are the unlucky band. These scoundrels, our
officers, don’t just earn thousands of lire each month, but they rob
us too, this race (razza) of rogues and exploiters of poor soldiers. If
I’m not killed by the enemy I’ll die of poisoning. If we defend our
rights as soldiers, they shoot us.62
As Italy’s military campaign went from bad to worse and the

economy began to collapse with consequent rationing and hunger,
public opinion hardened against the regime and even the censors
themselves, now regarded as part of a repressive apparatus, as we can
see in this poignant extract from a letter to a soldier-husband in
Russia:
There’s no need for you to say it to get it off your chest because
even if the censor blots it out I’ll still know the dog’s life you are
being made to live in Russia by people who call themselves Italians.
They would do better to look at the rotten mess they have made
here rather than doing down other countries. The censor can cross
out what he likes but God knows everything and it will all come out
in the end […]. The newspapers are a disgrace. Nothing but lies. I
know they are written by lackeys who have sold their souls for
cash.63
Naturally, this letter was suppressed. Pavolini had stopped briefing

journalists on Russia by this point, which meant there was little or no
Russian coverage in the Italian press. It had been taken off the news
agenda. The three strands of censorship, the preventive, the informa-
tive and the productive, had converged.
Morale and popular culture
In wartime, radio technology became a double-edged sword for the

Fascist regime. By 1940, Italian access to radio had never been wider,
even though it was relatively modest by the standards of other devel-
oped countries. The propaganda effort geared up on the home front.
But it was largely bombast, as practised by the likes of Mario Appelius.
It was not popular, or at least, not popular for long. Unregulated pos-
session of radio sets allowed for the reception of propaganda cam-
paigns from abroad, aimed at undermining Mussolini and his
government. Principal among these foreign stations were Radio Londra
(Radio London) and Radio Mosca (Radio Moscow).
The Fascist government recognized the threat and tried to deal with
it in two ways. Firstly, legislation introduced in July 1938 was tight-
ened. This had set out penal sanctions for listening to foreign radio
stations. Those caught doing so could be sentenced to up to six
months of detention and fined 10,000 lire.64 On 15 June 1940 it was
decreed that all private radio-transmitting equipment be dismantled,
placed in a sealed box and handed over to the authorities. Secondly,
Minculpop was allocated 60 million lire to set up jamming stations in
the major Italian cities.65 This initiative proved almost entirely

counter-productive according to Maura Piccialuti Caprioli.66 The
regime was losing credibility in the propaganda war. Reports from the
BBC were more balanced and timely than those from the EIAR. So the
assumption made by the Italian population was that if their govern-
ment jammed Radio London broadcasts, it must mean that things were
going especially badly on one or more of the Italian fronts. On
21 February 1941, newspaper editors were instructed to give front-
page prominence to a reminder that it was illegal to listen to foreign
radio.67 Further legislation was introduced in 1941, increasing penal-
ties for listening to foreign stations. People could now be sent to
confino for 18 months.68
Nonetheless, according to a report from Genoa on 15 August, four
months later:
Despite the increase in the sanctions on people who listen to enemy

radio stations, there are still many, from what I hear, who continue
to receive enemy news. Indeed, from what I hear, the threefold
increase in the penalty for those caught listening to enemy news,
instead of decreasing the number has actually increased the number
of listeners, and increased curiosity.
The explanations I have heard indicate that the general view is
that if our government has increased the punishment for those who
listen to enemy radio it must mean that the government has some-
thing to hide, and doesn’t want people to know what is really hap-
pening, and that what is reported by our radio and our press does
not correspond to the truth.69
Yet another decree law came into force on 5 January 1942, setting a
minimum penalty of six months and a maximum one of three years.
The minimum fine was to be 4,000 lire; the maximum 40,000.
In spite of these measures, it remained the case that very few poor
people owned radio sets, and penalties under Fascism, for all sorts of
infractions, fell disproportionately hard on the poor and those without
influence. It is therefore no great surprise that Piccialuti Caprioli has
observed:
The number of those sent into confino for listening to enemy radio
stations was considerably lower than those punished in that way for
singing Bandiera rossa in a tavern while under the influence or for
insulting a portrait of the duce or for being Jehovah’s Witnesses.70
Her analysis of the files of those sent to confino for listening to Radio
Londra indicates that they were drawn almost exclusively from the
working class or the socially marginalized such as travelling players or
musicians. Relatively minor offences such as listening to the radio,
poking fun at official news reports or telling anti-Fascist jokes were a
sufficient pretext for removing these social undesirables from circulation,
with a stiff sentence to make an example of them.
The regime had always been nervous of jokes, sensing subversion in
humour. In various parts of Italy streets were named after Arnaldo
Mussolini following his death in 1931. Via Arnaldo Mussolini, in Italian,
lends itself to two interpretations, the intended one ‘Arnaldo Mussolini
Street’ and the subversive one which could be translated as ‘Get rid of
Arnaldo Mussolini’. Police in Liguria observed a piece of graffiti under
one such street name – ‘e via anche suo fratello!’, meaning ‘and get rid
of his brother too!’.71 This sort of spontaneous humour and delight in
language, bursting bubbles of pomposity is one of those enduring fea-
tures of Italian culture which Fascism did not manage to eliminate,
despite its best efforts.
More examples are provided by the people’s interaction with
Hollywood and popular film generally. Franzinelli and Bosworth have
both cited variations on a list of film titles and related terms which was
doing the rounds of the entire kingdom in the early 1940s.72 Its perusal
indicates if not anti-Fascism, then at least a growing scepticism about
the regime:
Il pirata sono io! [I’m the pirate] Hitler

Un’ora sola ti vorrei [An hour of you is enough] Mussolini
Il prigioniero dell’isola [The prisoner on the island] The King
I diavoli volanti [The flying devils] The Mussolini
family
La prima moglie [The first wife, i.e., Rebecca] Donna Rachele
Mussolini
I miserabili The Italians
Paradiso perduto [Paradise Lost] The Empire
L’eterna illusione [The Eternal Illusion] Vincere [Winning]
Non è una cosa seria [It’s a joke] Fascism
Alba tragica [Tragic dawn] 28 October
Cartoni animati [Cartoons] The Fascist
hierarchy
Sette anni di guai [Seven years of misfortunes] The Pontine Land
Reclamation
I pirati della Malesia [The pirates of Malaysia] The Blackshirts of

the Militia
L’eroe del giorno [The Hero of the Day] Churchill
Terra d’oro [Land of Gold] England
I nostri parenti [Our kin] The Russians
Dopo divorzieremo [We’ll split up later] The Axis
Un caso disperato [A Hopeless Case] The War
One of those caught in possession of the list, a Sicilian hairdresser

working in Milan, was arrested in February 1942, beaten up and sent to
confino in Basilicata. No soldier suffered the same fate although the list
circulated in army barracks. Fascist justice struck selectively.
Bosworth has also related the story of an itinerant musician, Angelo
Rossi, who was sent to confino in December 1942 for spreading rumours
about the duce having an ulcer which would kill him, spelling certain
defeat in the war. According to Bosworth:
Rossi’s story […] provides significant insight into a rural world, with
rural attitudes, flourishing at the very gates of Rome, despite two
decades of ‘modernizing’ Fascist propaganda. Rossi and his audience
retained a knowledge of their own, an understanding of present
and future that was nearer the truth than that retailed by Fascist
officials.73
The Fascist criminal justice system dealt with him in the manner con-
sistent with other cases of unwanted news: they censored his story by
sending him into internal exile, as a warning to others.
What this brief excursion into the censored private lives of ordinary
Italians under the regime reveals is a very mixed picture. On the one
hand, the censor was a person with a certain level of education and
culture, who was aware that among intellectuals and the upper classes
there were admirers of British and American culture. He knew that this
did not extend to other parts of society, except in very rare cases. Lepre
has argued that the historian may then imagine the surprise of the
censors and informers at the end of the war in 1945 when they heard
accounts of friendship and regard for the British and Americans among
the Italian population generally.74 In fact there was little or no trace of
such sentiments in the letters they censored or the reports which they
filed. Indeed up until July 1943 the British and the Americans were
referred to in terms of open hostility, as the enemies raining bombs
down on Italy. America, as represented in the pages of a novelist such
as Steinbeck – a banned author whose work was nonetheless available

and read, albeit not very widely – was no match for the order and dis-
cipline of Nazi Germany. War-time letters also contain elements of a
passive or indifferent anti-Semitism, as do the reports of police and
informers. Many anonymous denunciations were rather more active in
their anti-Semitism, but these were usually motivated by material con-
siderations of gaining an advantage rather than ideological ones of race
and blood.
On the other hand, there was something different from and older
than Fascism going on in Italian popular culture, especially during the
war. The more the dictatorship tightened its grip on the country,
the more unarticulated examples of other forms of commonsense
manifested themselves, indicating submerged roots of behaviour and
attitudes which were impervious to attempts at ideological manipula-
tion, and the imposition of models of the New Man of Fascism.75 These
ancient roots of a popular imagination showed themselves in puns and
word play and in the images and iconography of Catholicism, what
Bosworth has referred to aptly as a ‘Catholic subsoil’. There are many
examples of the latter in wartime letters, censored by the authorities so
as to avoid the spread of defeatism. A soldier on the Russian front
wrote home, on 4 May 1942:
The good things we seek never come. I am so tired, so tired and

I can’t go on. I don’t know how I will be able to get through it.
There’s no end to it. All I hope is that the grace of the Lord will take
me out of this torment.76
In addition to simple, orthodox prayers, apocalyptic prophecies

began to appear in letters from early 1942, indicating ancient, pre-
rational anxieties. According to one version, a Latin document, dating
from 1701 had been found in the ruins of a demolished convent in
Germany. It related that 240 years in the future a terrible conflict
would break out in Europe:
Seven kingdoms will fight against an eagle and another two-legged

bird. The struggle between the East and West of Europe will be long
and cruel, and many men will die. Great horseless chariots will
crush under their mighty wheels the harvests and the crops. Flying
monsters will spew fire and incandescent blasts will annihilate cities
and villages. This work of destruction and death will last for three
years and five months and a time will come when it will be impossi-
ble to buy or to sell. Bread will be distributed in crumbs, the walls of

houses will be tinged with blood and men will be forced to live in
steel sarcophagi at the bottom of the sea. The war will reach its
greatest intensity of violence when the pomegranates flower for the
third time. Peace will come the following Christmas.77
The censors carefully removed such stories from postal circulation,

but there is no doubt that they circulated in other ways, indicating
deep, supernatural fears which proved more instinctive than Fascist
totalitarianism in times of trouble.
One final symptom of popular anxiety will conclude our journey
through the infernal regions of collective nightmare. Flying had been
one of the great expressions of Fascism’s modernity and virility. The
duce was to be seen flying his own plane in an iconic image of the
regime: the aviator as superman. To complement Bosworth’s story of
the unfortunate musician who was sent to confino for suggesting that
the duce had an ulcer (which he did), Imbriani has presented anxious
stories of the duce suffering from paralysis:
The duce, finding himself on a plane along with his assistant pilot
and undersecretary Valle, had to ditch suddenly in order to avoid a
hurricane, and the rapid change in temperature and low air pressure
brought on an attack as a result of which he now has to take care.78
For the imagination of a population which had grown up, not

merely with Catholic popular culture but with a superficial yet wide-
spread knowledge Dante’s vision of the afterlife, what we appear to be
witnessing is an example of contrapasso in the collective consciousness,
according to which sinners are punished by an inversion of their sins:
the virile duce has become impotent.
8
Conclusion
In Liberal Italy the prefects had enjoyed extensive powers of censorship.

They had the power to suppress subversive newspapers and to withhold
permission for public performances on stage or in the cinema. Their dis-
cretion ranged over politics, blasphemy and morality. The Catholic
Church also held a tenacious influence over the morals and political
culture of a very large mass of Italian families, an influence which
rivalled that of the state. From 1861, Church and state questioned the
legitimacy of each other’s control over the lives of ordinary Italians, par-
ticularly in relation to schooling, but both were as one in their fear of
Socialism and revolution, especially at the end of the first world war,
against the background of events in Russia. Fascism emerged at the end
of the Great War, wanting to turn its back on the Church and the Liberal
state, and to set its course in a direction at variance with the Bolsheviks
in Russia, forging a new man out of the spirit of the trenches.
D. H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Florence in 1928,
the sixth year of the Fascist state, without any trouble from the prefect.
It could not be published in Britain until the 1960s because of British
censorship laws. The novel, however, was available to anyone in Italy
who could read English. But it did not appear in Italian translation
until the 1960s. US authorities burned copies of Ulysses on the dock-
side in 1922. Antonio Pizzuto, a member of the elite Italian secret
police, entertained plans to translate Joyce’s novel into Italian just a
few years later. By one set of measures therefore, Fascist censorship was
considerably more progressive than literary censorship in the western
democracies. The cultural censorship of the Fascist state was certainly
more open to Modernism and experiment than that of the Catholic
Church or of the Nazis, across the Alps. It is in this context that we
should examine the relationship of Fascism to censorship.
196
Conclusion 197
Continuities
As we have seen, Fascism, as a movement, set out with the impulse to

suppress political interpretations of reality which were not consonant
with its own. The Fascists of the First Hour were mostly men brutalized
by war, frustrated by the impotence of the government, and the per-
ceived cowardice of the non-Interventionists; they were eager for
change. The attack of the squadristi on the offices of Avanti! demon-
strates that frustration very clearly. It was a crude political stunt aimed
at one group of non-Interventionists. The police, no friends of the
Socialists either, did not intervene to stop the destruction, thereby
undermining their role as guardians of law and order, and hastening
the demise of Liberal Italy.
28 October 1922 was commemorated in Fascist mythology – and still
is in some quarters – as the date marking a ‘Fascist revolution’, a seizure
of power. The evidence suggests rather that the king, never a very com-
mitted democrat, lost his nerve, fearing the army might disobey, and
Mussolini, safely out of the firing line, a couple of hundred miles away
in Milan, took his chance, arriving the following morning in the sleep-
ing car of an express train: trasformismo rather than revolution. Not a
shot fired in anger. Nobody really knew what it meant at the time.
Giolitti, King Victor Emanuel III, and the other old men, long used to
power, banked on the uncouth Mussolini not knowing what to do with
authority, and turning to them for guidance.
Once in power, the methods changed, but it was gradual rather than
rapid change. The impulse to suppress unwelcome news continued
unabated for two decades. News was filtered out if it might upset the
consensus and undermine public faith in the government. On a banal
level, the regime sought to censor or minimize coverage of daily news
stories of crime, the cronaca nera, quite unlike Nazi press policy in
Germany in the 1930s. Mussolini was determined to present Fascist
Italy as a state which had restored law and order after the post-war
social upheaval; a strategy certainly at odds with that of April 1919.
This dismayed some of his early supporters, but it went down well with
the population at large. The closing down of Left-wing newspapers and
periodicals in the first phase of Fascist government did not meet with
popular protest. There was tacit approval from the monarchy, the
Church and most sections of the business community. Mussolini now
occupied the middle ground: ‘extremism in the middle’.1
In the first phase of Fascist government we can see three models of
censorship policy in action; the three discussed in the Introduction:
preventive, informative and productive censorship. The preventive

model, very familiar to the prefects of Liberal Italy, intensified and
took as targets opposition newspapers and magazines. But even as
opposition newspapers were being driven out of business, information
gathering and surveillance methods were being honed as tools of gov-
ernment. Transcripts of tapped telephone calls came directly to
Mussolini. Additional spies and informers were recruited and paid with
irregular, secret funds. This information gathering was directed at
opponents rather than at monitoring the general public. The fruits of
all this intelligence were channelled through the Press Office, which
reported directly to Mussolini, and eventually through the Agenzia
Stefani.
The public argument for greater police surveillance, enunciated in
Mussolini’s speech to parliament on 3 January 1925 concerned primar-
ily the need to monitor subversive activity and to take action against
enemies of the state. Public opinion hardened in support of these emer-
gency powers following the four attempts on his life. Censorship of the
surviving newspapers had no appreciable effect on their sales figures,
however, which is in itself one indication of consensus. So was Fascism
simply more efficient than the previous governments at managing the
bureaucracy of censorship inherited from the Liberal State?
The panopticon model and its limits
The foregoing chapters have demonstrated that there was much more
to Fascist censorship than repression. The regime had a more ambitious
agenda: to create the Ethical State and to re-forge Italians as a race
of new men and women. Just as a virus modifies healthy cells, this
Fascist aspiration was a genetic modification of the aspiration of the
Risorgimento. It was in the field of education that this agenda first man-
ifested itself. As a means to realizing the ethical state, Giovanni Gentile
embarked on a purge of textbooks which his Commission held to be
defective or deficient. This purge involved pulping thousands of
volumes, well out of the public gaze, rather than burning them
in piazzas throughout the country. It was a purge, nonetheless, and
achieving control over the schoolbook market provided important
lessons in terms of practices which would later be used in the wider
publishing industry. This model of censorship was not simply repres-
sive. It retained the threat of repression but placed the financial risk on
the publisher, from whom it cascaded down to editors and writers,
establishing a culture of self-censorship, without the need for dracon-
Conclusion 199
ian laws. It was a model of censorship which invited and rewarded

complicity. A select few publishers grew rich on the lucrative school-
book trade. Many more went out of business. But evidence of public
outcry is scant.
The methods of the schoolbook purge were simple and familiar to the
state administration. Lists were drawn up for each region, according to a
proforma. This gave to the Minerva, the headquarters of the Ministry
for Public Instruction, an exhaustive dataset of all textbooks which were
used in Italian elementary schools. Lombardo Radice’s Commission, in
Rome, set about a careful examination of these texts, subject by subject.
Despite the fact that this was an impossible task for a relatively small
group of experts, the original plan for regional commissions was never
implemented. Fascism in government had embarked on a plan of
utopian centralization, indicating a distrust of devolved powers but also
an underestimation of the resources that would be required to make it
work. The intended purge of schoolbooks, or market regulation, ran to
its predictable conclusion after six years, with the introduction of the
libro di stato, or state textbook for elementary schools, and the suppres-
sion of all other titles. In one sense this was repressive, preventive cen-
sorship, because it closed down many small publishers. In another sense
it was productive censorship, because the textbook writers, whether
Grazia Deledda, Roberto Forges Davanzati or a host of names we no
longer remember, lent their active support to constructing and reinforc-
ing the narrative of Fascism. This included censoring the earlier,
Blackshirt, accounts of Mussolini’s life, to make them fit with the char-
acterization of the virile statesman sent by Providence. Textbook
writers, editors and publishers therefore combined – many of them
probably in good faith – in limiting the horizon of expectation of a new
generation, to instil the belief that to be Italian was to be a Fascist.
At the same time, in the adult world, information gathering for the
first couple of years of Fascist government was not radically different
from the procedures of Liberal Italy. The Ministry for the Interior con-
tinued, on a limited scale, to monitor and intercept telephone lines
and letters. There were small networks of informers, recruited to under-
mine anti-Fascist activity. It was only after the declaration of dictator-
ship in January 1925 that the methods began to become more refined,
firstly through Rocco’s new legal code (1926) and then as a result of
reforms in policing and an enhancement of the Prime Minister’s Press
Office. 1925–26 marks the beginning of a new phase, moving from
preventive censorship to productive, or self-censorship, in several
spheres of activity.
Was there a conscious model of censorship and surveillance by

1925–26? It would appear that Rocco was setting out a legislative basis
for a Fascist appropriation of Jeremy Bentham’s social model of the
panopticon, which, according to Michel Foucault:
is an important mechanism, for it automizes and disindividualizes

power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a
certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an
arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in
which individuals are caught up. […]. Consequently, it does not
matter who exercises power. Any individual, almost at random, can
operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his
friends, his visitors, even his servants.2
The reference to family, friends and servants alludes specifically to

Bentham’s figure of the prison governor – because this was his model
for the ideal prison – though Bentham himself advocated use of his
model outside the confines of prisons to all forms of social organiza-
tion.3 Mussolini’s government embraced something very like this
model with the passing of the Rocco laws, in which the unblinking eye
of the state sees everything and knows everything.4 The censor and
policeman could observe everyone and everything without being seen
themselves. They were the incarnation of power. In this model, power
resides in the knowledge that the prisoner can be watched, and knows
he can be watched, at any given moment. Therefore ‘surveillance is
permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action’.5 In
Mussolini’s own words, when planning the establishment of OVRA in
1926:
We must transform the Inspectorate General of the police into a

mysterious, powerful and omnipresent organism. Every Italian
should feel at every moment of his or her life that they are under
control, observed, scrutinized, under surveillance. […] It will be as if
every individual is in the sights of a gun, as if two arms were ready,
in that instant, to stop them […] like some monstrous dragon, like a
gigantic octopus. That’s it. Just like the tentacles of an octopus.6
In this model, censorship did not have to be continuous. It was

sufficient for journalists and newspaper directors to know that their
printed words could lead to sequestration and be aware of the
financial consequences. The same held true for radio producers, but
Conclusion 201
the model ceases to be valid for ordinary citizens writing letters, at

least until wartime censorship. The divisions of the police involved in
the monitoring of postal correspondence and telephone calls were
very careful to cover their tracks because their mission was not to
prevent the free expression of sincere sentiments. On the contrary,
they were seeking to track down subversives, deviants and undesir-
ables. Therefore it was imperative that the panopticon model was not
too widely disseminated in Italian society in the mid-1920s, and
indeed not until the totalitarian apotheosis of World War II.
This is an important distinction. Newspaper men and those in the
media and publishing had to be aware of the model, in order for pro-
ductive censorship to flourish. The phone tap had been introduced in
Italy by a Liberal government, and used as an exceptional service.
Under Fascism it was transformed with progressive stealth and as a
matter of policy into an indispensable tool. People within the state
machinery and the media needed to know that they were under sur-
veillance in even the deepest recesses of their family life. They knew
the phones were tapped. Surveillance was used not only against subor-
dinates in the hierarchy, in order to ascertain their level of commit-
ment to the regime; Mussolini’s evening conversations with his
brother in Milan were tapped and transcribed. Later, throughout the
‘years of consensus’, Mussolini had a powerful weapon with which to
assess the true loyalty of his men and women. On the other hand, the
great mass of the population was to be kept in the dark and fed care-
fully-sifted information. The security forces cracked down on subver-
sives, vagrants and criminals, cleaned up the streets, inspiring public
confidence by means of that process, and their attention remained
fixed on those categories of undesirables until well into the 1930s, as it
had under previous administrations. An unguarded comment in a
private telephone conversation could lead to years in confino.7 Mauro
Canali has cited the case of Giannino Macario Bay, a military historian,
whose phone was tapped from 1934 until 1941, at which point he was
interned on suspicion of subversion.8 The Moravia family house in
Rome was likewise tapped for almost ten years, right up to July 1943.9
This was effective surveillance, but something other than simply the
panopticon model, because these victims were probably not aware the
state was listening in.
For the surveillance of postal and telephonic communication to bear
fruit as an information-gathering tool, informative censorship, it had to
be secret, and unsuspected, and that reveals a contradiction inherent
in totalitarianism, which in fact was not very different from a problem
faced by military censors during the First World War. Enzo Forcella,
writing about the experience of the latter argued:
On the one hand, we wanted to know in detail the feelings of sol-

diers and of the ‘internal front’. On the other, the frank expression
of those feelings could be considered an offence, and the military
censors did what they could to impose a stereotyped and anodyne
type of correspondence. The political and military authorities
worried not just about the circulation of ‘correspondence contain-
ing even generic expressions of denigration of war-time opera-
tions, of disdain and of contempt for the army’, or ‘news and
interpretation different from that brought to public attention by
the government or by military or naval commands’, or that ‘public
order and morale might be disturbed’. They wanted to ensure that
such expressions were not even thought, that such news did not
exist.10
What Mussolini and the other Fascists took over from this war expe-
rience was the desire to impose discipline as part of their utopian
anthropological revolution, to supervise another re-birth in Italian
consciousness, and in that process to implant the stern censor into the
conscience of every Italian.
Internalizing the censor, or the concept of self-censorship, while far
from being a new idea, was current in the culture of the early decades
of the twentieth century from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic writ-
ings. According to that model, the message, whether a letter, phone
call, article in a newspaper, or work of art, equated to a symptom, a
compromise between the need to express something and the duty to
remain silent. The duty to silence, to support implicitly the Fascist
norms, was imposed on the media and publishing industry through
strategies of encouragement (such as flattery or irregular funding) and
punishment (sequestration, hostile take over, confino). It was extended
to the wider public by making examples of aberrant modes of behav-
iour and meting out exemplary sanctions. Freud’s model, however,
does not really apply to the vast majority of Italians living under
Fascism. They did not have to fear censorship and to:
soften and distort the expression of [their] opinion. According to

the strength and sensitiveness of the censorship [they found
themselves] compelled either merely to refrain from certain forms
of attack, or to speak in allusions in place of direct references, or
Conclusion 203
[…] conceal […] objectionable pronouncements beneath some

apparently innocent disguise.11
There are numerous examples of newspaper editors being castigated

for their errors and omissions in respect of self-censorship, and sol-
diers’ letters home from the front likewise extend to regular allusion to
avoid the censor’s black pen. But it is more difficult to prove that the
Italian population at large chafed under the yoke of Fascist censorship.
Informers were ubiquitous and people could get into trouble for
unguarded comments, and sometimes they did. But while many were
sent to confino, they were a minority. Did that make for an atmosphere
of fear and anxiety throughout society?
Censorship and complicity
Another way of putting that question is to ask how committed was

the Italian population to Mussolini’s idea of an anthropological revo-
lution? The connections between censorship and consensus demand
close elaboration. Rochat has argued that Mussolini’s government
after 1932 tried to address the growing economic difficulties of the
global Depression by injecting a greater dynamism at all levels of
society through the forging of the myths of Romanità, of empire,
African conquest and the development of an organized racism.
Children and adults were enrolled into all sorts of Fascist and para-
Fascist organizations whose aim was to control all forms of socializa-
tion, in order to effect the anthropological revolution for which
Emilio Gentile has argued, producing a new type of Italian, aggressive
yet obedient, sharing sets of behaviours and ways of looking at the
world. At the root of these values was a parochial nationalism which
condemned and derided everything that came from abroad or which
smacked of apparently out-dated values such as democracy or freedom
of conscience.
As part of Mussolini’s anthropological revolution, the razza italiana,
the Italian race, from 1935 was presented with a collective identity,
which, as with any collective identity, implied exclusion of the Other.
The Italian razza had its national secrets, and these needed to be
protected from outsiders by means of censoring information. So, for
example, if Italy was to be presented to the world as a virtually crime-
free society, then newspapers had to refrain from publishing crime
stories, even though it was in their commercial interests to do the con-
trary: Hence the rationale for censorship of cronaca nera. Censorship,
therefore, became a weapon in the defence of the national interest,

and therefore in the individual interests of all Italians, and thus a form
of social contract between the individual and the state.12 The obliga-
tions on the individual included a curtailment of free speech and criti-
cism, in the national interest. This sort of social contract is common
enough in times of war, and it was certainly also present in democratic
wartime Britain, but the Italian Fascists sought to make it the social
norm during the ventennio by holding up foreign powers and internal
subversives as enemies of the state, whose presence required the vigi-
lance and support of the Italian population in order to preserve the
state from a descent into chaos. The list of external ‘enemies’ included
Bolsheviks, the principal signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, the
Greek leaders, the Ethiopian emperor, the League of Nations, Jews, and
the ‘plutocratic’ powers ranged against the Axis from 1939.
The spectre of the foreign antagonist fed a sense of outrage against
the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations, and the regime called
for national solidarity, as the ‘proletarian nation’ battling with the old
imperial powers, especially Britain and France. This was similar to a
state of war, only without the fighting. The power of such a rhetoric of
external threat was that the Fascist government could impose restraints
on the press and the media in the national interest. In the face of the
external enemy things had to be kept secret and it could be assumed
that there were traitors among all strata of society. Although not artic-
ulated explicitly, this was a powerful argument, and it placed no limits
on what might be deemed to be secret. Individuals had to accept that
defending the secrets of the state implied prying into the secrets of
other individuals, and therefore, potentially, their own. In other words,
we observe something like the internalization of the panopticon
model.
Long before the League of Nations’ sanctions, Mussolini’s 1928
speech to newspaper directors on the mission of journalism had con-
tained explicit orders on the suppression of information such as crime
stories or reports of suicides. This line was reinforced in daily instruc-
tions to the press throughout the 1930s, instructions which intensified
after the outbreak of the Second World War. A further motivation for
information gathering, which came to have an increasing importance
in the 1930s was as a means of gauging public opinion. From 1934,
and the beginning of Mussolini’s wars, surveillance and censorship
became the principal weapons in assessing and managing the morale
of the population at large and of soldiers at the front. Censorship was
the domain of several different branches of government, but central to
Conclusion 205
all of Fascist governance was the Divisione polizia politica in the

Ministry of the Interior.
Censorship became more systematic in 1933–34. This corresponded
to Galeazzo Ciano’s return from Shanghai and his replacing Gaetano
Polverelli at the Press Office. At this point, almost 11 years into
Mussolini’s regime, prefects retained devolved powers over book cen-
sorship, as they had in Liberal Italy, and while there were occasional
directives from the Ministry for the Interior, they were rare. Fabre has
cited one from 1929, expressing concern over the availability of foreign
books, by Russians, and Americans with Socialist sympathies, such as
Jack London.13 In general, however, even after the recalibration of the
Press Office into an Undersecretariat and then into a Ministry, books
were rarely censored on political grounds. Bonsaver has argued that the
issue of Solaria which contained a chapter from Vittorini’s Il Garofano
rosso was sequestered on moral rather than political grounds.14 When
one considers other episodes in the novel, which were not censored,
the argument for moral censorship is compelling. But, as ever with
Italian Fascism, there were contradictions here too. Henry Furst’s gay
novel Simun, written in Italian during the early 1930s, did not appear
in print in Italy until 1965. His collect of poems, Songs of Tokimarne,
written in English, was printed privately in Genoa in 1938, without
incident.
The real factors driving the more systematic censorship policy were
the Nazis’ victory in Germany, the first stirrings of racist policy and the
aspiration to imperial expansion in Africa. In 1934, Ciano as under-
secretary for Press and Propaganda, established a tighter, more central-
ized control of censorship, reducing the discretionary powers of the
prefects, but not eliminating them. He built up extensive new powers
over book publishing and the media. Fabre has demonstrated that the
anti-Semitic strain of racism motivated the drawing up in 1938 of lists
of writers whose work was to be banned. These lists were eventually
distributed to prefects and publishers in 1942. By that time, in fact
from June 1940, wartime censorship had made explicit the panopticon
model of censorship which was in operation in Italy. It was supple-
mented by jamming stations to block foreign radio broadcasts, an
extensive network of spies in the community as well as police reports
on public opinion which played their part in shaping news coverage.
By 1943 it was clear there remained little confidence that Italy would
end up on the wining side in the war, and a comparison of the daily
newspapers with letters to and from the front reveals a gulf in public
opinion. Censors removed letters from circulation in a forlorn attempt
to hold back the tide of news. The earlier sense of discipline and inter-
nalization of self-censorship had become less pervasive, although of
course there remained true believers in the Blackshirt cause, or more
specifically those who clung to the myth of the duce, laying blame else-
where.15 A mother writing from Cuneo on 13 July 1943 put it like this:
Poor Duce! He has done so much and he finds himself betrayed

right at the crucial moment in the struggle. […] I have been trying
to talk to them [her adult daughter and her children] for three days
but they won’t listen to me. They say we should never have got
involved in this war. […] If I had the strength to match my will, I
would organize a squad, and they could start with their cudgels in
this house and continue with beatings throughout the village. If I
thought the Duce would get my message, I would tell him things
that he doesn’t know. If he knew his people, he would be more
severe. He is too indulgent, too good. And we are ungrateful.16
Twenty-four years after Marinetti’s account of the smashing up of

the Avanti! offices, the impulse to violence is still apparent in this
authentic Fascist text, now blacked out by the censor.
The historian with access to the censored books, newspaper articles
and the suppressed passages from letters, as well as the veline, transcripts
of telephone conversations and the files on political internees, has a
censor’s insight into the truths which the regime sought to suppress,
and therefore the moral responsibility as well as the keys to decode the
dream-work content of Fascist rhetoric, its education, media and cul-
tural policies, and to understand the often provisional nature of popular
consensus, and a tacit willingness to suspend disbelief.
It is an inescapable fact that the majority of the Italian population,
especially the middle classes, believed fervently in their duce for
20 years as a Napoleonic hero, sent by Providence to rescue the
country from chaos. This mythology was fostered both by the official
and semi-official media and by the accounts of popular biographers
and apologists, especially those writing in the late 1920s and early
1930s.17 The intimate imaginary dialogue created by these accounts
and by the Italian media, where pictures of the duce were ubiquitous
and where his voice was often to be heard on radio, enabled the
illusion of an almost magical sense of communication between indi-
viduals and their leader. It crops up again and again in the letters. One
problem raised by this personality cult however, was that when things
went wrong, and clearly it was not the duce’s fault, then his retinue of
Conclusion 207
hangers on or the local prefects must be to blame. The personality cult

undermined the already weak confidence in the state.
The personality cult is at its least subtle in children’s literature. Luisa
Passerini has cited an example: a boy is taken prisoner by an African
tribe. He tears the page out of his Illustrazione italiana on which there is
a picture of Mussolini and addresses it:
Duce, look at me, help me. I want to see you. I want to speak to
you, tell you my name. […] You don’t know that a poor lad like me,
far away from his home, loves you so much […] I bear your picture
next to my heart, beloved duce, now that I have risked my life and
got you back from the hands of the evil ones. Now save me! […]
Duce, do you want me among your Balilla? Will you let me come to
you in Rome?18
This story clearly draws on a long tradition of casual racism in colo-

nial literature, much of it written originally in English, but familiar to
Italian children of the 1930s through translations and the novels of
Emilio Salgari. It is a representative example.
For those actively involved in the media and publishing industries, the
meaning of censorship in the ethical state was more often than not
moral abjection. Fascist censorship exploited economic conditions and
human weakness by combining the promise of patronage with the threat
of sanction. There was always a more remote threat of physical violence.
Once the critical opposition newspapers had been closed down by 1925
there was no longer a free press in Italy. Editors understood this, and
knew that their newspapers could be sequestered without warning,
causing them financial difficulties. Solaria, the low-circulation cultural
quarterly in Florence, never recovered from the sequestration of the issue
containing a chapter from Vittorini’s Il Garofano rosso. In order to stay in
business, publishers had to act as censors, keeping their writers in check.
Some of these writers seem to have been quite content going along with
the regime. Quite a few of them received regular subsidies from the Press
Office.19 Others had comfortable sinecures. Did this amount to active
collusion?
In some cases it did, but there is a danger of overstatement. Belardelli
has argued that since known anti-Fascists wrote entries for the
Enciclopedia italiana and since the articles in the encyclopaedia are all
in line with Fascism, it therefore follows that these known anti-Fascists
really did share the regime’s orientation.20 This argument sounds remi-
niscent of Deledda’s account of Communists in the libro di stato, aimed
at 12-year olds. Belardelli’s argument is more sophisticated but equally

fallacious. It is true that some anti-Fascists wrote for the encyclopaedia,
including honourable men dismissed from Italian universities for refus-
ing to swear the pernicious oath of loyalty to the regime. The second
premise of the argument is the flawed one, flawed for at least two
reasons. Firstly, most Italian anti-Fascist intellectuals of the time (and
some Fascist ones) were influenced by Benedetto Croce’s philosophy,
and shared his view that culture should be kept separate from politics.
Some anti-Fascists, therefore, did not perceive a contradiction in
writing entries for the Italian encyclopaedia edited by Giovanni
Gentile, because they did not accept the Fascist premise that culture
and politics were intertwined. Anti-Fascists simply did not accept the
ideological view that to be Italian meant to be Fascist. Secondly,
‘Fascism’ was (and remains) a hopelessly woolly term, open to any
number of different interpretations. Its proponents and apologists have
consistently made the most of these ambiguities. Giorgio Levi Della
Vida, distinguished scholar of the Arab world, wrote for the ency-
clopaedia. There is nothing overtly anti-Fascist about what he wrote.
(Had there been we may be sure it would have been censored). But
there is nothing remotely Fascist about his contribution either.
Belardelli’s conclusion does not follow from his premises, unless one
accepts the Fascist view of culture, politics and Italian identity; and
that surely is to beg a question.
Nonetheless, while there were not a few honourable exceptions, the
archives demonstrate plenty of passive indifference to the loss of
liberty which Fascism entailed for minorities and marginalized groups,
as well as considerable hostility to the figures of public enemies put
forward by the state’s media machine, be they Abyssinians (after the
unsuccessful attempt on Marshal Graziani’s life), Jews or Americans
(during the war). Letters and bar talk suggest widespread popular
support for Mussolini’s strategy on entering the war in June 1940,
because it looked as if Germany was about to win. This held up until it
became clear that Italy was going to lose. Rather more sinister than
amoral opportunism of this kind was the activity of spies, informers
and those responsible for anonymous denunciations. Mussolini’s
police could not possibly have built up the vast mass of evidence
which was at their disposal without the active complicity of many
ordinary Italians, content to go along with the regime and to use the
police state as a mechanism for settling old scores with neighbours,
family members, ex-lovers, business rivals, or simply people they did
not like.21 Among the ranks of the spies and informers, no doubt, there
Conclusion 209
were true believers, although a study of their motivations is beyond the

scope of this book. The local police, generally not particularly fascis-
tized, tended to be sceptical about the motivations of anonymous
letters, with good reason. Some reports, however, were sufficient to
ruin the lives of individuals and their families. Rather than creating the
New Man and an anthropological revolution, Fascism’s dark side, cen-
sorship, surveillance and punishment, reveals instead the tenacity of
Old Adam.
Notes
Chapter 1 Introduction
1 Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (London: Little, Brown and Co., 1996); Robert Gellately, Backing
Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001). On the reception in Germany of Goldhagen’s theses see Fred
Kautz, The German Historians, ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ and Daniel
Goldhagen (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2003).
2 Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004).
3 Giorgio Fabre, Mussolini razzista. Dal socialismo al fascismo: la formazione di
un’antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005); Razza e fascismo. La persecuzione contro
gli ebrei in Toscana, 1938–1943, 2 vols, edited by Enzo Collotti (Rome:
Carocci, 1999); Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003); Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista.
Vicende, identità, persecuzioni (Turin: Einaudi, 2000).
4 Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e confidenti anonimi: l’arma segreta del
regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), especially pp. 135–96.
5 For a critical historian’s view of Gianfranco Fini’s statement, see Simonetta
Fiore, ‘Interview with Enzo Collotti’, La Repubblica, 29 November 2003,
p. 43.
6 Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Duce. Vol. 1: Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936
(Turin: Einaudi, 1974).
7 Nicola Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo. Fascismo e postfascismo (Milan:
Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2006), first published in 1996, the year after
De Felice’s interview with Pasquale Chessa, which was published as Il rosso
e il nero (Milan: Baldini and Castoldi, 1995); Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava
gente? Un mito duro a morire (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005), pp. 205–27.
8 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, trans-
lated by Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975). Cannistraro wrote this
work as a PhD thesis and the Italian translation appeared with a preface by
De Felice. The book was never published in English.
9 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 9.
10 Marcello Staglieno, Arnaldo e Benito (Milan: Mondadori, 2003) for example.
This view is countered by a number of very well documented recent studies
including: Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editori e scrittori ebrei
(Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998) and his Mussolini razzista; Michele
Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista, and his more recent La Shoah in Italia. La
persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005).
11 What does mark it out from other conservative histories of the period is
Staglieno’s contention that the king, rather than Mussolini, was behind the
abduction and murder of Matteotti in 1924.
12 David Forgacs, in his Rome Open City (London: British Film Institute, 2001)
has demonstrated how this ideological construction also informs Rossellini’s
210
Notes 211
classic Neorealist film. By setting the movie in the first quarter of 1944
Rossellini was able to avoid disturbing issues such as on the one hand the
deportation of Jews in the immediate aftermath of 8 September 1943 and,
on the other, the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine (March 1944), and in
doing so, he could plausibly present an Italian population more or less
united in their resistance to the Nazis.
13 See Tranfaglia, Un passato scomodo, pp. 19–20.
14 Claudio Pavone, Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralità nella Resistenza,
second edition (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994 [1991]), p. xi. On the prob-
lems of memory and remembering in English see also Roger Absalom,
‘Memories of Occupations: Perugia 1943–45’ in Essays in Italian Literature
and History in Honour of Doug Thompson, edited by George Talbot and
Pamela Williams (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 117–24.
15 It is nonetheless true that at least one provincial town (Locorotondo in
Puglia) now has streets named after prominent Fascists such as Italo Balbo,
Giovanni Gentile, and even Giorgio Almirante, long-time leader of the
Movimento sociale italiano, forerunner of Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza nazionale.
16 On this theme, especially in relation to colonialism, see Del Boca, Italiani,
brava gente?.
17 For a very useful historiographical account in English see R. J. B. Bosworth,
The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of
Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998). Most of the secondary
sources I draw on in this book have been published since that book
appeared.
18 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia 1915–1939
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991); Angelo Michele Imbriani, Gli Italiani e il duce.
Il mito e l’immagine di Mussolini negli ultimi anni del fascismo, 1938–1942
(Naples: Liguori, 1992).
19 Mimmo Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’OVRA. Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della
polizia politica fascista, third edition (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000
[1999]), Franzinelli, Delatori (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), and Franzinelli,
Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista 1919–1922 (Milan:
Mondadori, 2003), Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino,
2004); as well as Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–43. Le veline
del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005). Of funda-
mental importance for recent work on Fascist censorship is Fabre’s L’Elenco
(1998).
20 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978);
Lorenzo Greco, Censura e scrittura: Vittorini, lo pseudo-Malaparte, Gadda
(Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983); Loris Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere. La censura
militare in Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale 1940–45 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984);
and Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli italiani e la censura di guerra
1940–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992).
21 David Forgacs, ‘How exceptional were Culture-State relations in twentieth-
century Italy?’ in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy,
edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda,
2005), pp. 9–20 (10).
22 Marinetti also turned up a few months later in Fiume among the Arditi for
Gabriele D’Annunzio’s defiant and theatrical occupation of that city. See
212 Notes
Claudia Salaris, Alla festa della rivoluzione: artisti e libertari con D’Annunzio a
Fiume (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002).
23 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘La battaglia di Via Mercanti il 15 aprile
1919 prima vittoria del Fascismo’ in his Opere, vol. II, edited by Luciano De
Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), pp. 449–50, cited in Mimmo Franzinelli,
Squadristi, p. 22.
24 Roger Griffin, ‘The Sacred Synthesis: the Ideological Cohesion of Fascist
Cultural Policy’, Modern Italy, 3 (1998), 1, 5–23 (7).
25 Griffin, ‘The Sacred Synthesis’, p. 10.
26 Marinetti’s strategy here was analogous to Mussolini’s method of self-
presentation in his war-time diary which he published in instalments in
Il Popolo d’Italia. See Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 15–32.
27 R. J. B. Bosworth, ‘War, Totalitarianism and “Deep Belief” in Fascist Italy,
1935–43’, European History Quarterly, 34 (2004), 4, 475–505 and his
Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane,
2005).
28 Roberto Maggiore, Razza e Fascismo (Palermo: Agate, 1939), p. 28.
29 David. D. Roberts, ‘How not to think about Fascism and Ideology,
Intellectual Antecedent and Historical Meaning’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 35 (2000), 185–211 (192).
30 Epigraph to Franzinelli, Squadristi, p. 1. Mussolini’s own words, from a 1925
speech: ‘Preferisco al cattedratico impotente lo squadrista che agisce’.
31 Emilio Gentile, ‘The Fascist Anthropological Revolution’, Culture, Censorship
and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, pp. 22–33 (30–31).
32 Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, (1984) p. 11.
33 Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, (1984) p. 7.
34 Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino, Il Duce proibito. Le fotografie
di Mussolini che gli italiano non hanno mai visto (Milan: Mondadori, 2003).
35 On the sacralization of the Fascist state: Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello Stato
nuovo (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2002 [1982]); Emilio Gentile, Il culto del littorio
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993) [in English, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist
Italy, trans. K. Botsford (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996)]
and also his Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002);
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley-Los
Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2001); Jeffrey T. Schnapp,
Staging Fascism 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1996); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi,
Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997); Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self:
The Political Culture of interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and
Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
36 Griffin, ‘The Sacred Synthesis’(1998); Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology:
Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London:
Routledge, 2000); Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: between Anarchist
Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence R.I.-Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 1996); and Philip J. Morgan, Italian Fascism, 1915–45, second edition
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), especially pp. 143–5.
Notes 213
37 Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes. Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis-

London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Barbara Spackman, Fascist
Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (London-Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and
Sexuality. Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1985); and his later book The Image of Man. The Creation of
Modern Masculinity (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), as
well as Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For more on the sacralization of German
politics under the Nazis see Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History
(London: Macmillan, 2000). In the Italian context, see Lorenzo Benadusi,
Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento totalitario fascista
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005).
38 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, (1978) p. 191.
39 Cited in E. Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, p. 27.
40 Spackman, Fascist Virilities, p. xii and Passerini, Mussolini immaginario,
pp. 99–109.
41 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, p. 87. Prezzolini’s formulation (La Voce,
4 December 1913) is cited by Emilio Gentile on various occasions, e.g.,
Il culto del littorio, p. 237 and Il mito dello Stato nuovo (Rome-Bari: Laterza,
2002 [1982]), p. 123.
42 Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, p. 136. Braun was describing an
illustration by Sironi in Il Popolo d’Italia, 19 November 1922, three weeks
after the March on Rome.
43 There are several earlier books which provide collections of images. Among
others, see Umberto Silva, Ideologia e arte del Fascismo (Milan: Mazzotta
editore, 1973) and Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin:
Bollati Boringhieri, 1988). Among less critical but equally well-stocked
volumes see Nicola Caracciola, Tutti gli uomini del duce (Milan: Mondadori,
1982) and Storia fotografica del fascismo, edited by Renzo De Felice and Luigi
Goglia, second edition (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1982).
44 Cited by Gentile, Fascismo. Storia e interpretazione, pp. 106–7. Gentile in turn
is citing Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario, second
edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), p. 310.
45 My principal archival sources are in the Archivio centrale di Stato (ACS) in
Rome, specifically the Direzione generale di pubblica sicurezza (DGPS),
Ministero dell’Interno (MI), files of the Divisione affari generali e riservati
(DAGR) and the Divisione polizia politica (DPP). New material includes the
second batch (‘secondo versamento’) of papers from the Ministero della
Cultura Popolare (Minculpop), released in July 2003. The Istituto Luce is in
the process of digitizing its very extensive archive and some of the results
are available at http://www.archivioluce.com.
Chapter 2 Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition

1 From an article by Francesco Giunta, leader of the squadristi in Trieste, orig-
inally published in Il Popolo di Trieste, 4 March 1921 and later in F. Giunta,
Essenza dello squadrismo (Rome: Libreria del littorio, 1931), pp. 53–5. Cited
214 Notes
in Mimmo Franzinelli, Squadristi. Protagonisti e tecniche della violenza fascista

1919–1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), p. 51.
2 Alceste De Ambris, ‘Il Fascismo al bivio’ in La riscossa dei legionari fiumani,
12 September 1922. See Renzo De Felice, Sindacalismo rivoluzionario e
fiumanesimo nel carteggio De Ambris-d’Annunzio (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1966),
pp. 331–42, for a full transcription.
3 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1963), chapter 5, ‘Fascism – Left, Right and Centre’.
4 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop
per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), pp. 8–10.
5 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media,
translated by Giovanni Ferrara (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1975); Renzo De Felice,
Mussolini il duce. Gli anni del consenso (Turin: Einaudi, 1974); Doug Thompson,
State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity 1925–43 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1991); and Giovanni Belardelli, Il ventennio degli
intellettuali. Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza,
2005).
6 Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist
Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and her How Fascism
ruled Women: Italy 1922–45 (Berkeley-London: University of California Press,
1991); Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in
Fascist Italy 1922–43 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1985).
7 Christopher Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901: from Nation to Nationalism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 482–5.
8 Their reports are preserved in the Archivio centrale dello Stato. As one
example among many, the following is a report from the prefect of Milan
marked ‘riservato’ and dated 3 March 1922: ‘The newspaper L’Azione is
financed principally by two groups, one of which runs the Credito italiano,
which has its delegate on its board of directors and the other group is led by
the Marquis Raggio of Genoa (not the senator) and by the brother of the
late Raimondo, member for San Remo. Its director is Guglielmo Quadrotta,
the well-known modernist, ex-communicated because of his differences
with Pius X. The political line of the newspaper is reformist in the manner
of Raimondo. Its inspiration is Bonomi who has been constantly in the
company of Quadrotta recently. Indeed it has been said that Bonomi is the
real director of the newspaper. We know [crossed out and replaced in pencil
by ‘it is said’] for certain that in spite of the fact the current polemics which
make it seem to favour Nitti, in reality Quadrotta is completely against
Nitti’s return to power. The newspaper has sufficient means to enable it to
run for two years. It has no plans to expose itself to large expenses. Its
objective is to be regarded as politically authoritative. So it is not worried
about increasing sales. It defends the interests of Ligurian and Milanese
industry’ – ACS, MI, PS, DAGR 1923, b. 68, Milan.
9 Jonathan M. Dunnage, The Italian Police and the Rise of Fascism. A Case Study
of the Province of Bologna, 1897–1925 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood-Praeger,
1997), p. 72: Law 675 of 23 May 1915 ‘prohibited references in the press to
the number of dead, injured or imprisoned in the war, to changes in military
leadership and to military operations. Editions of newspapers could be
Notes 215
confiscated by the prefect, sub-prefect or “whoever was acting in his place” if

in their opinion publication could lower public morale and faith in the gov-
ernment interests in any way. Most important, Article 3 of the Law stipu-
lated that all editions of the newspapers should be presented to the prefect,
sub-prefect or their representatives at least an hour before publication for
possible censorship’.
10 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship 1915–1945
(London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 75.
11 There is an example in the file of ACS, MI, PS, PP, FP, b. 1283, f. Soldevilla
(Don) Pedro.
regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 91. There is a memorandum
from Mussolini (written on headed paper of the Ministero degli Affari
Esteri) to Aldo Finzi, his first undersecretary in the Ministry of the Interior,
Rome 27 January 1923: ‘Dear Finzi, from now on transcripts of phone taps
are to be copied to me only. So, one copy which you receive and you send
to me.’ The original document is to be found in ACS, Collezione De Felice,
Autografi di Mussolini, Album 1, document 17. The relative informality of
this memorandum, which marks a fundamental change in policy, is to be
explained by the fact that Finzi was Mussolini’s own appointment, a
squadrista who had flown over Vienna with D’Annunzio and had been with
Mussolini at Piazza San Sepolcro. Finzi, an assimilated Jew, was sacked after
the Matteotti murder, although he does not appear to have been involved,
and ended his days as one of the victims in the Fosse Ardeatine. For a
popular account of his life: Domizia Carafòli and Gustavo Bocchini
Padiglione, Aldo Finzi. Il Fascista ucciso alle Fosse Ardeatine (Milan: Mursia,
2004). Mussolini’s own telephone calls were regularly tapped too. Some
transcripts of calls to his brother are to be found in Marcello Staglieno,
Arnaldo e Benito. Due fratelli (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), pp. 154–5 and
pp. 233–4.
13 Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), p. 81.
14 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978), p. 12.
For more recent work on the subject see Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime
1932–1943 (2005) and Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano, second
edition (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000 [1996]), pp. 141–84.
15 The law was Royal Decree, 15 July 1923, n. 3299, in Leggi e decreti reali,
1924, p. 1530 (secondo l’ordine di inserzione nella Gazzetta Ufficiale),
Edizioni Roma, ‘Il foro italiano’.
16 Distribution was prevented the first week because the editor was out of the
country, the second week because police were not satisfied with the guaran-
tees offered by the new (replacement) editor, the third week because the
signature of the second editor was not deemed authentic and the fourth
because his signature, now authenticated, was placed on the wrong page.
The story was reported by Avanti!, 23 March 1923.
17 Giordano Bruno Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano. Una vita (1903–1944), second
edition (Milan: Mondadori, 2001 [1979]), p. 88.
18 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, (1975) p. 73.
19 ACS, SPD, cr, b. 6, f. 251/R, telegram no. 8195, Cesare Rossi to Mussolini,
7 April 1924.
216 Notes
20 ACS, MI, PS, b. 25, categoria F1, Rome, 29 October 1923, from the prefect of
Rome. Cited in Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 14.
21 On the funding of Il Popolo d’Italia see Meir Michaels, Mussolini and the Jews:
German-Italian relations and the Jewish question in Italy, 1922–1945 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978) and Giorgio Fabre, Il contratto. Mussolini editore di
Hitler (Bari: Dedalo, 2004).
22 Document cited by Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 14.
23 Leggi e decreti reali, 1924, p. 1534.
24 Rossi left his post in the recriminations over the abduction and murder
of Matteotti. Following a j’accuse article which he published in
Amendola’s Il Mondo he became a bête noir for the Fascists and despite a
brief exile in France he spent over a decade in Italian jails between 1928
and 1940. See Mauro Canali, Il delitto Matteotti, second edition (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 2004).
25 Frank Rosengarten, The Italian Anti-Fascist Press (1919–1945): from the legal
opposition press to the underground newspapers of World War II (Cleveland
Ohio: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968); and Giorgio Luti,
La letteratura nel ventennio fascista: cronache letterarie tra le due guerre:
1920–1940, third edition (Scandicci: La nuova Italia, 1995).
26 See Paolo Murialdi, La stampa quotidiana del regime fascista, in Nicola
Tranfaglia, Paolo Murialdi and Massimo Legnani, La stampa italiana nell’eta
fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1980), pp. 31–257 (p. 39).
27 The Times, 11 May 1925, issue 43958, p. 15.
28 John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: the view from America (Princeton
N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).
29 Canali, Le spie del regime, p. 131ff. On the reform, or otherwise, of the police
in this period see also Dunnage, The Italian Police and the Rise of Fascism
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood-Praeger, 1997).
30 Article 181 of Consolidation Act (Testo Unico) on Public Security, 1931.
31 Canali cites documents in ACS, Autografi del duce, Cassetta di zinco, b. 4.
32 Benito Mussolini, ‘Il discorso dell’Ascensione’, Scritti e discorsi, VI (Milan:
Hoepli, 1934), pp. 37–77.
33 Mussolini, ‘Il discorso dell’Ascensione’, p. 51.
34 Carmine Senise, Quando ero capo della polizia (Rome: Ruffolo, 1946), p. 66.
35 Canali, Le spie del regime, p. 63.
36 For example, ‘category F’ refers consistently to the press.
37 On the organization of OVRA see Mimmo Franzinelli, I tentacoli
dell’OVRA. Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia politica fascista, third
edition (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000 [1999]), pp. 61–90; Romano
Canosa, I servizi segreti del duce (Milan: Mondadori, 2000) and Canali, Le
spie del regime.
38 Antonio Pizzuto, Rapin e Rapier, edited by Antonio Pane (Rome: Editori
riuniti, 1998).
39 Cited in Franzinelli, I tentacoli dell’OVRA, p. 63.
40 Joel Blatt, ‘The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà,
OVRA and the Origins of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic Campaign’, Journal of
Modern Italian Studies, 1 (1995), 22–57.
41 On an example of the rivalries see George Talbot, ‘A Micro-History of
Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst’ in Censorship, Culture
Notes 217
and the State in Twentieth Century Italy, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert
S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95.
42 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 362.
43 Between March and May 1924 ten telegrams were sent to over 40 newspa-
pers and to the Volta news agency.
44 Arnaldo Mussolini to Manlio Morgagni, 22 September 1922, cited in
Marcello Staglieno’s almost hagiographic double biography, Arnaldo e
Benito, p. 137.
45 Giorgio Fabre, ‘Mussolini e le sovvenzioni della COMIT’, Quaderni di storia,
57 (2003), 281–99.
46 Fabre, ‘Mussolini e le sovvenzioni della COMIT’, 284.
47 Fabre, ‘Mussolini e le sovvenzioni della COMIT’, 283.
48 Predictably this interpretation is hotly disputed by Staglieno, pp. 122–5.
There is, however, more bluster than argument.
49 Donato Barbone, ‘Ancora sulle elargizioni della COMIT a fascisti
(1919–1930)’, Studi di storia 58 (2003), July–Dec, 259–79.
50 Barbone, ‘Ancora sulle elargizioni della COMIT a fascisti (1919–1930)’,
260.
51 In the wake of the Lateran Pacts in February 1929, the Corriere padano,
reprinted part of an article by Francesco Nitti, published in the
Münchener Post on 5 February. Although the intention was to discredit
Nitti (referred to throughout as ‘Cagoia’ and described as a ‘lurid traitor’),
his critique of Fascism was carried on the front page – Corriere padano,
14 February 1929. Quilici and Balbo died together over Tobruk in what
was, ironically, the only plane shot down in Libya by the Italian military
during the war. Rumours still persist that Balbo, heroic aviator and the
duce’s arch rival for the role of Fascist alpha-male, may have died on
Mussolini’s instructions.
52 Murialdi, La stampa quotidiana del regime fascista; Murialdi, Storia del
giornalismo italiano, pp. 141–84.
53 Romano Canosa, La voce del duce. L’Agenzia Stefani: l’arma segreta di Mussolini
(Milan: Mondadori, 2002), p. 22 and Staglieno, Arnaldo e Benito, p. 137.
54 Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 24.
55 Cited in Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 32.
56 Manlio Morgagni, L’Agenzia Stefani nella vita nazionale (Milan: Alfieri &
Lacroix, 1930), cited in Canosa, La voce del duce, p. 33.
59 Cited in Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 28.
60 Settimelli made reference to his presence at Piazza San Sepolcro in a
letter to Mussolini from confino in 1938 – ACS, MI, PS, C.O., 544.830,
cited in Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: between Anarchist Rebellion
and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996),
p. 265
61 For Settimelli, one of Mussolini’s earliest biographers: Simonetta Falasca-
Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 49; and Paul O’Brien,
Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist
(Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 5.
218 Notes
Chapter 3 Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State

1 Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993), p. 14.
2 Pasquale Villari, ‘La scuola e la quistione sociale in Italia’, Nuova Antologia,
XXI, November 1872.
3 Social unrest did flare up from time to time and in the case of
Puglia it led to the rural metamorphosis of Fascism as squadristi came to
the assistance of the landlords in the violent reaction against the brac-
cianti. See Frank M. Snowden, Violence and the Great Estates in the South
of Italy. Apulia 1900–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986).
4 On satire in Il Becco giallo see Monica Galfré, Il regime degli editori. Libri,
scuola e fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), pp. 3–4.
5 Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, eighth edition (Rome-Bari:
Laterza, 2003), pp. 105–18.
6 Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile. Una biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995).
7 A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick-
London: Transaction Publishers, 2001) and Francesco Perfetti, Assassinio
di un filosofo: anatomia di un omicidio politico (Florence: Le Lettere,
2004). See also M. E. Moss, Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher. Giovanni Gentile
Reconsidered (New York: Peter Lang, 2004); and Angelo Guerraggio
and Pietro Nastasi, Matematica in camicia nera. Il regime e gli scienziati
(Milan: Paravia Bruno Mondadori, 2005), pp. 73–85. For an earlier
account in English, which has not aged well, see Tracy H. Koon, Believe,
Obey, Fight: Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922–1943
(Chapel Hill-London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985),
pp. 41–59.
8 Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 304.
9 Cited in Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 305.
10 See below, chapter 6, p. 134.
11 Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, p. 29.
12 Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, p. 29.
13 ‘Ammonimenti’, Dopo la vittoria. Nuove frammenti politici (Rome: La Voce,
1920), p. 51. This is Gregor’s translation. See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile:
Philosopher of Fascism, p. 32.
14 Cited in Moss, Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher, p. 33.
15 Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 311. He resigned on 14 June 1924.
16 ‘Circular to School Authorities’, 25 November 1922, in Giovanni Gentile,
La riforma della scuola in Italia, third edition, revised and edited by Hervé A.
Cavallera (Florence: Le Lettere, 1989), pp. 4–5 (4).
18 Gentile, La riforma della scuola in Italia, pp. 94–5.
19 The number of students following economics degrees at Italian universities
went up from 7,212 in 1920–21 to 23,011 in 1940–41, well ahead of the
general growth in undergraduate numbers in the same period, i.e., 53,239
in 1920–21 to 127,058 in 1940–41. Source: ISTAT, Statistica dell’istruzione
superiore nell’anno accademico 1945–46 (Rome, 1948). Cited in Zamagni, The
Economic History of Italy, p. 305.
Notes 219
20 Ordinanza ministeriale, 11 November 1923, cited in Enricomaria Corbi and

Vincenzo Sarracino, Scuola e politiche educative in Italia dall’unità a oggi
(Naples: Liguori, 2003), pp. 169–70 (169).
21 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 12.
22 Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo. L’opera della Commissione centrale
per l’esame dei libri di testo da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice ad Alessandro
Melchiori (1923–1928), edited by Anna Ascenzi and Roberto Sani (Milan:
Vita e Pensiero, 2005), p. 4. Lombardo Radice was writing in 1926.
23 Ministerial circular, 2 March 1923, no. 21 ‘Inchiesta sui libri di testo’,
reproduced in Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 34.
24 ‘Relazione sui libri di testo per le scuole elementari e popolari ed elenco dei
libri approvati’ (Bollettino Ufficiale del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione,
1923, supp. 2, no. 26, pp. 5–46), cited in Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo
e fascismo, p. 79.
25 Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 13.
27 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 15
28 Relazione della Commissione Ministeriale dei libri di testo, 1927, reproduced in
Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, pp. 665–8 (666), and cited by
Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 26.
30 Cited in Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 28.
31 Galfré, Il regime degli editori, pp. 102–3.
32 Letter sent to Mussolini, dated 7 March 1934. ACS, SPD (1922–1943), CO,
b. 272, f. 13.799 ‘Ceschina Comm. R. E., Casa editrice, Milano’. Cited in
Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editorial e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio
Zamorani editore, 1998), pp. 15–16.
35 In a letter of 16 April, 1940 Federico Gentile wrote: ‘It is inconceivable that
curricula for the licei and ginnasî should continue to require a knowledge of
authors such as Pascoli, Carducci and D’Annunzio when all we can print in
the anthologies are mutilated extracts’. In some cases, long poems had to be
abridged in order to comply with copyright law. See Galfré, Il regime degli
editori, p. 168.
36 Brian Moloney, Italian Novels of Peasant Crisis, 1930–1950. Bonfires in the
Night (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 58–9.
37 Enrico Bemporad to Arpalice Cuman Pertile, 7 October 1927, cited in
Galfré, Il regime degli editori, p. 83.
41 Gentile, La riforma della scuola, pp. 23–6 (24).
42 Gentile, La riforma della scuola, pp. 23–6. Cited in Turi, Giovanni Gentile,
p. 318. On the relationship of Fascism to the Protestant churches in Italy
see Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni
del controllo e della repressione (Turin: Claudiana, 1990).
43 Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni del
controllo e della repressione, p. 81.
220 Notes

45 Agostino Gemelli, Religione e filosofia nelle scuole medie, La civiltà
cattolica (1929), pp. 80, 2, 421–3. Cited in Turi, Giovanni Gentile, p. 401.
46 Ernesto Codignola’s letter to Gentile, 10 March 1935, describes him as an
idiot (coglione). It is cited in Rino Gentili, Giuseppe Bottai e la riforma fascista
della scuola (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1979), p. 1.
47 Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo, p. 32.
48 Cited in Brian Moloney, Italian Novels of Peasant Crisis, 1930–1950,
pp. 58–9.
49 Cited in Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, p. 305.
50 Gentili, Giuseppe Bottai e la riforma fascista della scuola, pp. 20–1.
regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 30.
52 A good example is the short film archived under the title Giornale Luce
A0328, Taranto, 5 May 1929. See http://www.archivioluce.it/ for details.
53 Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871–1982 (London: Longman, 1984), p. 278.
54 Clark, Modern Italy, p. 272
55 Clark, Modern Italy, p. 276.
56 Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 28–36.
57 Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 29.
58 Helmut Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato. I docenti universitari e il regime fascista,
translated by Loredana Melissari (Milan: La nuova Italia, 2000 [1993]).
59 Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato, p. 10.
60 L’Osservatore romano, 4 December 1931. The piece was also carried in
Il nuovo cittadino in Genoa. See Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato, pp. 12–13.
61 Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli Italiani e la censura di guerra 1940–1943
(Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 26.
62 ACS, MI, PS 1939, b. 22, f. Teofani, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 32.
Chapter 4 Journalism as Mission

1 Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, vol. VI (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), pp. 249–55.
2 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, VI, p. 250.
3 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, VI, p. 251
4 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, VI, p. 252.
5 Meir Michaels, ‘Mussolini’s unofficial mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi – Il
Tevere and the evolution of Mussolini’s anti-Semitism’, Journal of Modern
Italian Studies, 3 (1998), 217–39.
6 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 8, Il Mezzogiorno.
7 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, trans-
lated by Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975) p. 91 and Giordano
Bruno Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano. Una vita (1903–1944), second edition (Milan:
Mondadori, 2001 [1979]), p. 90.
8 Gaetano Polverelli, Rinnovare il tipo di giornale (1932), cited in Cannistraro,
La fabbrica del consenso, pp. 419–24. ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 155, f. 10.
9 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 3, f. 12, sf. 113 (10 August 1934). On the question of
dialect usage, see also an earlier circular from Polverelli to the prefects
Notes 221
(1 August 1932): ‘Fascism is intransigently unitary. So articles will be

immediately sequestered if they are written in favour of dialects, regional,
provincial or local (campanilismo) conceptions of the divisions of the old
Italy’ – ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 3, f. 12, sf. 113.
10 Royal decree law of 13/3/1934 authorized the relocation of the office to
Palazzo Balestra on the Via Veneto.
11 Gastone Silvano Spinetti, letter to Storia contemporanea, 2 (1971), 223–5,
cited in Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano, p. 93.
per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005). See also Ministri
e giornalisti. La guerra e il Minculpop 1939–43, edited by Nicola Tranfaglia
(Turin: Einaudi, 2005). For less representative selections see Giancarlo
Ottaviani, Le veline del Minculpop. Aspetti della propaganda fascista (Milan:
Todariana, 1999) and Riccardo Cassero, Le veline del Duce (Milan: Sperling
& Kupfer, 2004). Earlier anthologies include Carlo Matteini, Ordini alla
stampa (Rome: Editrice Polilibraria Italiana, 1945); Francesco Flora,
Stampa dell’era fascista. Le note di servizio (Rome: Mondadori, 1945);
Fausto Coen, Tre anni di bugie (Rome: Pan, 1977) and more recently
Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele Valerio Marino, Il Duce proibito. Le
fotografie di Mussolini che gli italiani non hanno mai visto (Milan:
Mondadori, 2003).
13 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 90.
15 Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano, p. 90.
16 The humour is linguistic: ‘Via Mussolini’ could mean ‘Mussolini Street’ but
it could also mean ‘Mussolini out!’, precisely the opposite of the intended
‘Viva Mussolini’, ‘Long live Mussolini’.
19 Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo italiano, second edition (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 2000 [1996]), pp. 144–5.
20 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47 ‘Soldati, Mario’.
21 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47, Soldati. The document, from the Regia
Questura di Roma, is no. 38587 U. P. A. 4. A, 9 December 1934. Novara was
asked to keep the Rome Questura informed as well as the DAGR (section 1)
and the political police.
22 ACS, MI, DPP, FP, b. 1287, f. 47, ‘Soldati’.
23 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 8, ‘Moravia, Alberto’. Anonymous typed
document with a hand-written date 24/1 934 XII.
24 George Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism
and Le ambizioni sbagliate’, Modern Italy, 11 (2006), 2, 127–45.
25 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime 1932–1943, p. 235.
26 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978), p. 71,
quotes a press release from the Agenzia Stefani which appears never to have
been issued: ‘The New York Herald Tribune writes that the activity of journal-
ists in Somalia is being frustrated because there is in operation a very rigid
political and military censorship’.
27 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 305 ‘Ufficio stampa A. O.’, telepresso no. 461/7–5,
Asmara, 1 November 1935.
222 Notes
28 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 299 ‘Giornalisti A. O. Espulsioni’, telegram dated

22 December 1935 (no number).
29 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 299 ‘Giornalisti A. O. Espulsioni’, telegram dated
2 January 1936 (no number).
30 ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 48, f. 305 ‘Ufficio stampa A[frica] O[rientale]’, telegram
no. 2527, 14 May 1936.
31 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 72.
32 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, p. 61.
33 Celso Luciano, Rapporto al duce (Rome: Società editrice ‘Giornale del
Mezzogiorno’, 1948), p. 8.
34 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 7. Report from informer 3049, 10 February
1940. The article in question is A. Trizzino, ‘La propria gobba’.
35 Ministri e giornalisti, p. 308.
36 Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli Italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Rome-
Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 13–14; R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life under
the Dictatorship (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
Chapter 5 The Duce’s Image

1 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Fascismo e mass media, trans.
Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 276–80. On the history of
the Istituto Luce see Ernesto G. Laura, Le stagioni dell’aquila. Storia dell’Istituto
Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 1999) and for Luce coverage of the
second world war, Luigi Passarelli, La guerra italiana nei documentari
dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Prospettiva editrice, 2006).
2 Unfortunately none of these silent films appear to have survived. Several
later films were made with the title Vita nuova. For details see the very
impressive digital archive of the Istituto Luce on the web:
http://www.archivioluce.com/.
per orientare l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), p. 137.
4 Giacomo Paulucci de⬘ Calboli, president of the Istituto Luce, writing in 1939,
cited in Sergio Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce. Mussolini nelle fotografie
dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Editori riuniti-Istituto Luce, 2001), p. 16.
5 Letters exchanged between Emilio De Bono and Cesare Maria De Vecchi,
two of the quadrumviri. See Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce, pp. 9–10.
6 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (London:
Penguin, 1969 [1959]).
7 Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce, pp. 51–3; Mimmo Franzinelli and Emanuele
Valerio Marino, Il duce proibito. Le fotografie di Mussolini che gli Italiani non
hanno mai visto (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). On Mussolini’s probable use of
stimulants Franzinelli cites the transcript of an intercepted telephone call
from Manlio Morgagni to a friend, reporting the observations of a techni-
cian who had been working inside Villa Torlonia, Mussolini’s residence in
Rome.
8 Plinio Ciani, Grafito del Ventennio (Milan: SugarCo, 1975), p. 26, cited in
Mimmo Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, introduction to Franzinelli
and Marino, Il duce proibito xxviii.
Notes 223
9 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, XXVIII, edited by Edoardo and Duilio

Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1959), p. 136.
10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by
Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977 [1975]), p. 217.
11 Not the only one in Europe, by any means – see Robert O. Paxton, The
Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 24–32.
12 Sergio Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce. Un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia
e memoria (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).
13 Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce, p. 15.
14 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia 1915–1939 (Rome-
Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 28–9. See also Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard,
1999), p. 277.
15 On Marinetti’s account of death and rebirth in a muddy ditch following a
car crash see Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist. Manifesto Writing and
European Modernism, 1885–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2003), pp. 124–5. The Ungaretti poem I have in mind is ‘Pellegrinaggio’,
written in the trenches, and dated 16 August 1916.
16 Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 255.
17 Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
18 Sironi’s life very nearly ended at Dongo along with Mussolini’s – he was
recognized by the partisans in Mussolini’s fleeing entourage and spared
because he was an artist.
19 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in
Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 185.
20 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism. 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for
Masses (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996).
21 Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of interwar Italy
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 247.
22 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley-Los Angeles-
London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 13.
23 Curzio Malaparte, Muss. Il grande imbeccile, edited by Francesco Perfetti
(Milan-Trento: Luni editrice, 1999), p. 98.
24 Lorenzo Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo. L’omosessualità nell’esperimento
totalitario fascista (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005), p. 30.
25 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
translated by Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by
Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 219–53.
26 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, pp. 144–5.
27 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, p. 243.
28 Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, p. xxiff.
29 Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, p. xxv.
30 Malaparte, Muss. Il grande imbeccile, p. 98.
31 Other reasons for the censorship of images had less to do with the duce’s
unpredictable body. Sometimes Mussolini decided to impose a news black-
out on certain meetings he had held, such as his meeting with the Austrian
Chancellor, Schuschnigg in May 1935. The reason for this was political:
Italy did not want to provoke Hitler by giving publicity to the meeting.
224 Notes
32 Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio
Zamorani editore, 1998), p. 26ff. See below, p. 125ff.
33 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 148. Ten and a half years later, on the
twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome, Pavolini again deplored
newspaper coverage of her – Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 156.
34 Giornale Luce B0021, 1931 Dino Grandi in America – http://www.archivio-
luce.com.
35 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, pp. 288–95.
38 Tranfaglia, La stampa dela regime, p. 149.
39 More generally on this line of enquiry see Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes.
Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis-London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995); Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities. Rhetoric, Ideology,
and Social Fantasy in Italy (London-Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. Respectability and
Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), and
his later book, The Image of Man. The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New
York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), as well as Klaus Theweleit, Male
Fantasies, Vol. I: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1987). For German image politics under the Nazis: Michael Burleigh, The
Third Reich. A New History (London: Macmillan, 2000).
40 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 47. Benadusi cites at least one
example of an Italian national (a restaurant owner) in Africa orientale being
sent to confino for having had passive relations with a local boy in Eritrea.
See Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 182. The relevant documentation
is to be found in ACS, UCP, FP., b. 9, f. ‘Otello A.’
41 Vito Massarotti, Nel regno di Ulrichs, Appunti e considerazioni sull’omosessual-
ità maschile (Rome: Lux, 1913), p. 7, cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo
nuovo, p. 48.
42 Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany. Conformity, Opposition and Racism
in Everyday Life, trans. R. Deveson (London: Batsford, 1987), p. 199.
43 Luzzatto, L’immagine del duce, pp. 222–3; Franzinelli and Marino, Il duce
proibito, p. 45. They are different photographs. The one reproduced by
Luzzatto is blurred and would have been discarded in any case. See
Franzinelli, ‘Immagini da una dittatura’, p. xxxi, for his analysis of the
official photograph of the Abyssinians.
44 Paolo Chiozzi, ‘Autoritratto del razzismo: le fotografie antropologiche di
Lidio Cipriani’, in La menzogna della razza. Documenti e immagini del razz-
ismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, edited by the Centro Furio Jesi (Bologna:
Grafis, 1994), pp. 91–4.
45 Enzo Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei. Le leggi razziali in Italia (Rome-Bari:
Laterza, 2003), p. 31.
un antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), p. 143.
47 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 147.
49 Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Submissive Women and
Strong Mothers (London: Routledge, 2004). See also Victoria De Grazia, How
Notes 225
Fascism ruled Women: Italy, 1922–45 (Berkeley, California: University of

California Press, 1992).
50 Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime, p. 171. Images of naked women appear to
have preyed on Polverelli’s mind. They surfaced again years later when he
became minister for Popular Culture: ‘A propos what I said about semi-
naked women (I have some examples in front of me), these semi-naked
women attract the attention of adolescents and that leads to masturbation.
These youths then arrive at their regiments worn out and that, especially in
time of war, is a danger to the race’ – Ministri e giornalisti. La guerra e il
Minculpop (1939–43), edited by Nicola Tranfaglia (Turin: Einaudi, 2005),
pp. 115–16.
51 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 34.
52 David Atkinson, ‘The Construction of Italian Libya’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003),
1, 15–29 (22).
53 Loredana Polezzi, ‘Imperial reproductions: the circulation of colonial
images’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 1, 31–47 (40).
54 Joel Blatt, ‘The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà,
OVRA and the origins of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic campaign’, Journal of
Modern Italian Studies, 1 (1995), 22–57; Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia
fascista. Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), pp. 90–1.
56 Telesio Interlandi’s editorial in Il Tevere, 31 March 1934.
57 Cited in Mimmo Franzinelli, Delatori. Spie e confidenti anonimi: l’arma segreta
del regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), pp. 144–5.
58 Fabre, Mussolini razzista and also Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista and his
more recent La Shoah in Italia. La persecuzione degli ebrei sotto il fascismo
(Turin: Einaudi, 2005); Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy
(London-New York: Routledge, 2002); Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei; and
another book by Fabre, Il contratto. Mussolini editore di Hitler (Bari: Dedalo,
2004).
60 Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 174. An early draft of Mussolini’s essay was pub-
lished in Pagine libere, 15 Sept.–1 Oct. 1910, pp. 389–400.
61 ACS, MI, UC, telegram, 1 March 1929, no. 7885, cited in Fabre, Mussolini
razzista, p. 13.
62 Collotti, Il fascismo e gli ebrei, pp. 5–6.
63 Edda Ciano, La mia vita. Intervista di Domenico Olivieri, ed. Nicola Caracciolo
(Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 30. Cited in Fabre, Mussolini razzista, p. 15.
65 Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista, pp. 73–6.
66 The case of Henry Furst is instructive in this regard. See George Talbot,
‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the Case of Henry Furst’ in
Censorship, Culture and the State, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C.
Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95.
69 The Istituto Luce film of the speech (18 September 1938) has not survived,
but the off-air recording from the radio is in the archive of the Discoteca
dello Stato.
226 Notes
Chapter 6 Culture Wars

1 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945
(London: Allen Lane, 2005), pp. 274–5.
2 George Talbot, ‘Unpublished Letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’,
3 Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: between Anarchist Rebellion and
Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence R.I.-Oxford: Berghahn Books,
1996), pp. 220–1.
4 ACS, PNF (Mostra), b. 69, f. ‘Congresso del PNF del 1925’, document titled
Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, dated 1 June 1925, cited in Philip V.
Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Mass media e fascismo, translated by
Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. 22.
5 This was also true of Fascist movements in other countries. See Robert O.
Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004), pp. 55–86.
6 Mussolini’s improvised speech, known as Al Popolo di Roma, given from the
balcony of Palazzo Chigi on the night of 28 October 1926, after an earlier,
scheduled performance at the Colosseum – Benito Mussolini, Scritti e dis-
corsi, V (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), pp. 447–51 (448–9).
7 Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Rubè (Milan: Treves, 1921), pp. 240–1.
8 For the list ‘writers unwelcome in Italy’ see Cannistraro, La fabbrica del
consenso, pp. 427–34 and Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editori e
autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998), pp. 474–81. There are
many different copies of the list in various archives. Fabre’s version is
longer than Cannistraro’s: it contains an additional 14 names. Well over
90% were Jewish.
9 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, V, pp. 373–5.
10 Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, V, pp. 374–5. The English translation is partly
that of Doug Thompson in his State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and
Conformity, 1925–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).
12 Maurizio Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista (Naples: Liguori, 1978),
pp. 43–4; Walter L. Adamson, ‘The Culture of Italian Fascism and the
Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Selvaggio’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 30 (1995), 555–75.
13 Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, review of Gli Indifferenti (1929), reprinted in his
La città assoluta e altri scritti, edited by Mario Robertazzi (Milan: Mondadori,
1962), pp. 214–20.
14 Moravia’s case, however, is more complicated, and is tied up with the Race
Laws of 1938. See Fabre, L’Elenco, pp. 33–8; George Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia,
and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate’, Modern
Italy, 11 (2006), 2, 127–45. My contention in that article is incorrect that
the ‘Pincherle Alberto’ on the list of unwelcome authors refers to Moravia.
It refers to the Biblical scholar Alberto Pincherle (1894–1979), translator
and editor of Gli oracoli Sibillini giudaici (Rome: Libreria di Cultura, 1922),
editor of I detti di Gesù (Rome: Bottega di poesia, 1922) and author of
various works published by Laterza.
15 ACS, MI, PS, DAGR, f. 4, b. 108, F4/AG ‘Sturzo Luigi (pubblicazioni di)’,
cited in Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 20. Fabre maintains that there was
Notes 227
already a list of banned authors in existence by 1934, although copies have

not yet come to light. The list included the works of Lenin, but not those of
Stalin.
16 Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 22.
18 See chapter 3, pp. 73–5.
19 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, pp. 275–6.
20 Bruno Spampanato, ‘Antifascismo della cultura’, Critica fascista, 11 (1933), 1,
1 January. Cited in Berghaus, Fascism and Politics, p. 233, in his translation.
21 Cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 65.
22 Undated note written by Polverelli in 1933. ACS, MCP, Gab., b. 155, f. 10
(Ufficio stampa), cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 103.
23 Cited in Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 22.
24 In other words, the provisions of the Consolidation Act, article 112.
25 Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 30.
26 ACS, MCP, b. 84, f. 3, sf. 1800/1. Cited in Cesari, La censura nel periodo
fascista, p. 56.
27 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, pp. 56–63.
28 Most of these veline can now be consulted in Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa
del regime 1932–1943. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare l’informazione
(Milan: Bompiani, 2005).
29 Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, pp. 132–6; Cesari, La censura nel periodo
fascista, pp. 60–1.
31 On BL 18 see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, 18 BL: Theater of the Masses for the Masses
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996). On Il Bargello, Peter
Hainsworth, ‘Florentine Cultural Journalism under Fascism: Il Bargello’,
Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 3, 696–711. On Pavolini’s friendship
with Bompiani, Guido Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and the
Case of Elio Vittorini’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 2, 165–86 (181).
32 Gian Piero Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiana (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991),
pp. 186–8.
33 James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy. The Passing of the Rex
(Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 67.
34 Giuseppe Bottai, cited in Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, pp. 166–7.
36 Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, p. 186.
37 Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema italiano, pp. 186–7.
38 Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, p. 69, describes anti-American
editorials in Il Tevere from 1924, sitting incongruously beside large adver-
tisements for films starring Tom Mix and John Ford. Examples of Fascist
concerns over a lack of racism in Italian cinema include G. Cogni,
‘Preliminari sul cinema in difesa della razza’, Bianco e nero, 2 (1938), 1,
66–74, cited in Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, p. 316.
39 ACS, MCP, Gab., II vers., b. 7.
40 Il Tevere, 5–6 August 1942, p. 3, signed gi. al., i.e., Giorgio Almirante.
41 ACS, MCP, Gab, II vers., b. 7.
42 Censura teatrale e fascismo (1931–1944). La storia, l’archivio, l’inventario, ed.
Patrizia Ferrara (Rome: Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, 2004), p. 19.
228 Notes
43 Nicola Fano, Tessere o non tessere. I comici e la censura fascista (Florence:

Liberal libri, 1999), pp. 21–3.
44 Leopoldo Zurlo, Memori inutile. La censura teatrale nel Ventennio (Rome:
Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1952), p. 7.
45 The archive is now to be found in ACS, MCP, Ufficio Censura Teatrale. The
archive has been catalogued and the catalogue published – Censura teatrale e
fascismo (1931–1944), ed. Patrizia Ferrara.
46 On Mussolini’s capacity to short-circuit the chains of command he had
himself put in place see Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and the
Case of Elio Vittorini’, 169.
47 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, pp. 42–7.
48 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, pp. 42–52; Roberto Duiz and Renato Sarti, La vita
xe un bidon. Storia di Angelo Cecchelin, comico triestino (Genoa: Baldini
Castoldi Dalai, 1995).
49 The Cecchelin plays rejected by Zurlo were: El negus in spirito (1936), Xe
arivada Sua Ecellenza (1936), Una montura (1938), Lo scandalo del giorno (1940)
and L’omo del giorno (1943). See Censura teatrale e fascismo (1931–1944),
pp. 286–92.
50 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, p. 47.
51 Fano, Tessere o non tessere, p. 56.
52 Lorenzo Greco, Censura e scrittura. Vittorini, lo pseudo Malaparte, Gadda
(Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983), pp. 99–132.
53 Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship of Literature’, pp. 172–3.
54 Hainsworth, ‘Florentine Cultural Journalism under Fascism’, p. 705.
55 For Furst’s apparent membership of the PNF there is a letter to D’Annunzio
in his file at the Vittoriale, Archivio Generale xlviii, 1 (fascicolo Furst),
dated 1 August 1925, from Iran, in which he claims to have joined. I am
grateful to Jeffrey T. Schnapp for bringing this to my attention. Throughout
the 1930s Furst was under periodic surveillance by the Italian police. See
George Talbot, ‘Unpublished Letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’
and ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of Henry Furst’,
in Censorship, Culture and the State, edited by Guido Bonsaver and Robert
S. C. Gordon (Oxford: Legenda, 2005), pp. 86–95.
56 Henry Furst, Simun (Milan: Longanesi, 1965).
57 Henry Furst, ‘Writings and Speeches of Mussolini’, New York Times Book
Review, 14 October 1934.
un’antisemita (Milan: Garzanti, 2005), pp. 297–8.
59 Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 36; Talbot, ‘Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism’,
135–7.
60 Henry Furst, ‘An Italian’s Memory of America’, New York Times Book Review,
2 August 1936.
61 Fabre, L’Elenco, pp. 58–62.
62 Cesari, La censura nel periodo fascista, 54.
63 ASDMAE, MCP, SE, b. 41, f. ‘Ufficio stampa, sf. Compiti e attribuzioni del
Ministero’. Cited in Fabre, L’Elenco, p. 62.
64 This exercise in linguistic autarky was initiated by Bruno Cicognani in an
article published in Il Corriere della Sera on 15 January 1938. It relates to
Mussolini’s anti-bourgeois campaign, for which see Thomas Buzzegoli,
Notes 229
‘L’umorismo antiborghese e le ossessioni della stampa fascista’, Italia

contemporanea, 239–40 (2005), 173–90.
65 Luigi Goglia, ‘Le cartoline illustrate italiane della guerra 1935–1936: il negro
nemico selvaggio e il trionfo della civiltà di Roma’, in La menzogna della
razza. Documenti e immagini del razzismo e dell’antisemitismo fascista, edited
by the Centro Furio Jesi (Bologna: Grafis, 1994), pp. 27–40. The song in
question runs as follows:
Su moviamo con ardore

Il nemico a sterminare
Che il vessillo tricolore
Dovrà sempre trionfare!
Goglia comments that ‘the process of trivialization of war reaches its extreme
limits here, converting extermination of an enemy into a lighthearted game
and the identification of the enemy with an insect’, p. 32.
66 Pavolini, letter to Valentino Bompiani (7 January 1941), cited (in part) in
George Talbot, Montale’s ‘mestiere vile’: the Elective Translations from English
in the 1930s and 1940s (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p. 33. For the
full text see La fiera letteraria, 19 December 1968. See also Nicolo Carducci,
Gli intellettuali e l’ideologia americana nell’Italia degli anni trenta (Manduria:
Lacaita, 1973); Christopher Rundle, ‘The Censorship of Translation in
Fascist Italy’, The Translator, 6 (2000), 1, 67–86; Bonsaver, ‘Fascist
censorship on literature’; and Jane Dunnett, ‘Anti-Fascism and Literary
Criticism in Postwar Italy: Revisiting the mito americano’ in Culture,
Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, pp. 109–19.
Chapter 7 Censorship, Secrets and Lies

1 Alfredo Rocco, La formazione dello Stato fascista (1925–1934) (Milan: Giuffrè,
1938), pp. 797–8.
2 Carl Ipsen, Dictating Democracy: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gender, Family and
Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945, edited by Perry Willson
(Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004).
3 Perry Willson, ‘Gender and the Private Sphere in Liberal and Fascist Italy’,
in Gender, Family and Sexuality, pp. 1–19 (6–7).
4 Alessandra Gissi, ‘Between Tradition and Innovation: Italian Midwives
during the Fascist Period’, in Gender, Family and Sexuality, pp. 122–38.
5 Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), p. 79.
6 The Questore in Rome, for example, requested that his opposite number in
Novara should file copies of reports on Mario Soldati to both the DAGR,
section 1, the Political Police and the Questura in Rome – ACS, MI, PS, DPP,
FP, b. 1287, f. 47, ‘Soldati’, document dated 9 December 1934.
7 Antonio Pizzuto, Rapin e Rapier, edited by Antonio Pane (Rome: Editori
riuniti, 1998), pp. 152–3. The novel was written between 1944 and 1948 but
never published in Pizzuto’s lifetime (1893–1976). It was rejected by both
230 Notes
Bompiani and Longanesi. Pane has reconstructed the novel from papers in
the Fondazione Antonio Pizzuto.
8 George Talbot, ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the case of
Henry Furst’, in Bonsaver, Guido and Gordon, Robert S. C. (eds), Censorship,
Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy (Oxford: Legenda, 2005),
pp. 86–95.
9 ACS MI PS DPP, b. 539, f. 36 FURST Enrico.
10 George Talbot, ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’,
11 Pizzuto, Rapin e Rapier, pp. 170–2.
regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), pp. 3–5; for a contrast with Nazi
Germany, Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler. Consent and Coercion in Nazi
Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). On inquisitorial practices,
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a sixteenth-century
Miller, translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 [1976]).
14 ACS, MI, PS 1940, b. 26, f. ‘Savona’, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 63.
16 ACS, MI, PS 1929, b. 186, f. ‘Anonime’, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori,
pp. 82–3.
17 There are many examples of confino causing financial ruin to be found in
Franzinelli, Delatori, and in English, R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Life
under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
18 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, b. 539, f. 36 ‘FURST Enrico’. Lauro De Bosis had died
earlier in 1931 when his aircraft ran out of fuel returning to France from
dropping anti-Fascist leaflets over Rome. Arturo Toscanini, after some initial
enthusiasm for Mussolini, left Italy in 1931, having been roughed up by
Blackshirts for refusing to play Giovinezza, a Fascist anthem. On De Bosis see
J. M. Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator. Lauro de Bosis resists Fascism in Italy
and America (Westport, Connecticut-London: Praeger, 2002). These pages
amplify my account in ‘A Micro-History of Censorship in Fascist Italy: the
case of Henry Furst’, in Censorship, Culture and the State in Twentieth-Century
Italy.
19 Talbot, ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’.
22 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, pp. 333–8.
23 ACS, Confinati politici, FP, b. 711, f. Nicastro, cited in Franzinelli, Delatori,
p. 89.
24 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 51ff.
25 Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 44; Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and
the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women and Strong Mothers (London-New
York: Routledge, 2004).
26 The words are those of the physiologist Angelo Mosso (1897), cited by
Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 45. See also Gori, Italian Fascism and
the Female Body, pp. 42–4.
27 Cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 107.
Notes 231
28 Cited in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo nuovo, p. 115.

29 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, b. 822, f. M.A. Cased in Benadusi, Il nemico dell’uomo
nuovo, p. 284.
30 ACS, UCP, FP, b. 657, f. ‘Eugenio M’. Case cited in Benadusi, Il nemico
dell’uomo nuovo, p. 175.
31 Giorgio Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche. Direttive e articolazioni del
controllo e della repressione (Turin: Claudiana, 1990).
32 Gabriella Klein, La politica linguistica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986) p. 82.
33 Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 157.
34 ACS, PCM, 1928–30, f. 2/5, n. 1531, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese
evangeliche, p. 74.
35 ACS, G.1, Roma, Pentecostali, report dated 16 July 1928, cited in Rochat,
Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 114. The medical terminology, current
at the time, is to be found in Boris Sidis, The Causation and Treatment of
Psychopathic Diseases (Boston: Badger, 1916).
36 Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 222
37 The document from which Rochat cites, Il proselitismo protestante in Italia, is
in ACS, ASMAE, SS, 1934, b. 22, f. 9.
38 Cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 246.
39 ACS, G.1, Propaganda evangelica, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese
evangeliche, p. 156.
40 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (London: Macmillan,
2000), p. 173.
41 Thomas Buzzegoli, ‘‘L’umorismo antiborghese e le ossessioni della stampa
fascista’, Italia contemporanea, 239–40 (2005), 173–90.
42 Cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 142.
43 Guido Leto, OVRA Fascismo Antifascismo (Bologna: Cappelli, 1952),
pp. 190–2.
44 Cited in Franzinelli, Delatori, p. 153.
45 ACS, G.1, Gorizia, cited in Rochat, Regime fascista e chiese evangeliche, p. 187.
46 Simona Colarizi, L’opinione degli Italiani sotto il regime, 1929–1943 (Rome-
Bari: Laterza, 1991); Angelo Michele Imbriani, Gli Italiani e il duce. Il mito e
l’immagine di Mussolini negli ultimi anni del fascismo, 1938–1943 (Naples:
Liguori, 1992); Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli Italiani e la censura di
guerra, 1940–1943 (Milan: Mondadori, 1992); and Bosworth, Mussolini’s
Italy.
47 Cited by Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 13. The source is ACS, MI, PS, A56 IIg,
b. 30–47.
48 Cited in Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 19. The letter was sent from Florence,
24 May 1940.
49 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 8.
50 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, pp. 8–9.
51 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, pp. 143–57.
52 Lepre, L’occhio del duce, p. 12
53 Loris Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere. La censura militare in Italia nella seconda
guerra mondiale, 1940–45 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1984), p. 11. A number of local
studies have been published in recent years, including, for Lucca, Giuseppe
Pardini, Sotto l’inchiostro nero. Fascismo, guerra e censura postale in Lucchesia
(1940–1944) (Montespertoli: MIR edizioni, 2001).
232 Notes
54 A letter from Henry Furst to Mario Soldati, dated (October 1939) had been
removed from circulation because Furst had expressed the view that the
democratic powers would win the war. Indeed a much earlier letter from
Furst had been suppressed as early as 1932, again for political reasons –
Talbot, ‘Unpublished letters from Henry Furst to Benedetto Croce’, Italian
Studies, 60 (2004), 112–31.
55 Colarizi, L’opinione degli Italiani sotto il regime.
56 Cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 41.
58 Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, p. 3.
59 Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, pp. 51–2.
60 Letter from Naples, dated 20 November 1941, cited in Lepre, L’occhio del
Duce, pp. 115–16.
61 Lepre, L’occhio del Duce, pp. 93–4.
62 Letter from an unidentified military post, dated 7 May 1943, cited in Lepre,
L’occhio del Duce, p. 92.
63 Letter dated 28 June 1942, from a woman in Villa Agostina Asola. Cited in
Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 105.
64 Royal decree law no. 1415, 8 July 1938.
65 Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso. Mass media e fascismo, trans.
Giovanni Ferrara (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975), p. 257.
66 Maura Piccialuti Caprioli, Radio Londra 1939–1945 (Rome-Bari: Laterza,
1979), p. 35.
67 Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa del regime. Le veline del Minculpop per orientare
l’informazione (Milan: Bompiani, 2005), p. 75.
68 Royal decree law no. 530, 18 April 1941.
69 Informer’s report from Florence, 21 July 1941, cited in Piccialuti Caprioli,
Radio Londra, pp. 41–2.
70 Piccialuti Caprioli, Radio Londra, p. 47.
71 Cesare Garelli, Linguaggio murale (Milan: Garzanti, 1978), p. 77. I am grate-
ful to Charlotte Miller for bringing this to my attention.
72 Franzinelli, Delatori, pp. 99–100; Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, 477. There are
several versions of the list, to be found in three envelopes at ACS, PS, Cat. F
1, b, 95 and b. 96 and b. 97.
73 Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy, p. 480.
75 Colarizi, L’opinione degli italiani sotto il Regime, p. 5.
76 Cited in Rizzo, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 118.
77 Letter from a mother to her son at the front, 5 July 1942, cited in Rizzi,
Lo sguardo del potere, p. 122.
78 Imbriani, Gli italiani e il duce, pp. 57–8.
Chapter 8 Conclusion
1 Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, New York: Doubleday,
1963).
2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977 [1975]), p. 202.
Notes 233
3 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 206.

4 In relation to military censorship see Loris Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere. La
censura militare in Italia nella seconda guerra mondiale, 1940–45 (Milan:
Rizzoli, 1984), pp. 24–7.
5 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 201.
7 See R. J. B. Bosworth, ‘War, Totalitarianism and “Deep Belief” in Fascist
Italy, 1935–43’, European History Quarterly, 4 (2004), 4, 475–505, which deals
with this theme in relation to police reports of confinati.
8 Mauro Canali, Le spie del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), pp. 685–6.
9 ACS, MI, PS, DPP, FP, Pincherle Moravia Alberto e sorella Adriana.
10 Enzo Forcella and Alberto Monticone, Plotone d’esecuzione (Rome-Bari:
Laterza, 1988 [1972]), p. xxi, cited in Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, p. 25.
11 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (London:
Penguin, 1991 [1900]), pp. 223–4.
12 Rizzi, Lo sguardo del potere, pp. 33–5.
13 ACS, MI, PS, DAGR, Massime, b. S4 103 A (provv.), S4 B, f. 5, ‘Traduzione e
diffusione nel Regno di opera di autori stranieri’, circular no. 18627, 20 May
1929, cited in Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco. Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei
(Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998), p. 21.
14 Guido Bonsaver, ‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and the Case of Elio
Vittorini’, Modern Italy, 8 (2003), 2, 165–86.
15 Aurelio Lepre, L’occhio del duce. Gli italiani e la censura di guerra, 1940–1943
(Milan: Mondadori, 1992), p. 160.
17 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario. Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939
(Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991), p. 79.
18 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 196–7.
19 There are many examples. They include Sibilla Aleramo, Vitalino Brancati
and Vincenzo Cardarelli. See respectively, ACS, MCP, 2nd vers., b. 1, b. 2
and b. 3.
20 Giovanni Belardelli, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali. Cultura, politica, ideologia
nell’Italia fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005), p. 16
regime fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), p. 17.
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Index
Abyssinia, 100, 117–18, 120, 124, Asmara, 94, 99, 100, 221
208, 224 autarky, 123, 144, 155, 156, 157, 228
Accademia d’Italia, 67, 133, 136 Avanti!, 8–10, 12, 21–2, 25, 31, 135,
Actualism (Attualismo), 11, 53, 66, 69 197, 206, 215
Addis Ababa, 100, 120 Aventine Secession, the, 30, 32
Agenzia Stefani, 26, 31, 39–40, 43–6, Azione cattolica, 74
77, 84, 86, 115, 140, 198, 217,
221 Badoglio, Pietro, 99–100, 158
Agnelli, Giovanni, 42–3 Baker, Josephine, 117
Albertini, Luigi, 32–3, 43 Balbo, Italo, 41, 211, 217
albo professionale dei giornalisti, 31, 91, Balzac, Honoré de, 66
94 Banca commerciale italiana, 39–42, 169
Aleramo, Sibilla, 233 Banca d’Italia, 128
Alfieri, Dino, 89, 97, 100, 141–4, 147, Banca italiana di sconto, 40
155–7, 159 Bandiera rossa, 73, 172, 191
Almirante, Giorgio, 147, 211, 227 Barbone, Donato, 40–2, 217
Amendola, Giovanni, 31, 216 Barletta, Gesualdo, 37
America, 8, 37, 45, 92–3, 95, 97 Basso, Lelio, 31
102–3, 106, 122, 137, 146, 147, Bauer, Riccardo, 31
153, 155–8, 193, 216, 224, 227, Bay, Giannino Macario, 201
228, 230 Belardelli, Giovanni, 207–8, 214, 233
Americana, 157, 229 Bellavia, Vicenzo, 94–5
Amicucci, Ermanno, 96, 97 Belluzzo, Giuseppe, 62, 66
Ansaldo (the steel company), 40 Bemporad (Florentine publishing
Ansaldo, Giovanni, 91 house), 40, 61, 64–5, 67
anti-bourgeois campaign, 12, 115, Bemporad, Enrico, 65, 67, 219
123, 180–1, 183, 228–9, 231 Benadusi, Lorenzo, 114, 119, 173,
anti-Communism, 65, 180 180, 213, 223, 224, 225, 230, 231
anti-Fascism, 3–5, 17, 26, 28, 36–7, Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 16, 113, 212, 223
67, 73, 74, 91, 93, 95, 96, 112, Benjamin, Walter, 114–15, 223
125, 128–9, 134, 138, 142, 147, Bentham, Jeremy, 200
151–2, 155, 156, 164, 169, 171, Berezin, Mabel, 16, 113, 212, 223
176–7, 188, 192, 199, 207–8, 229, Bertuetti, Eugenio, 94, 97
230 Bianchi, Michele, 56, 137
anti-Semitism, 1–2, 12, 16, 125–31, biennio rosso, 21–2, 41, 53
147–8, 199, 220 Bocchini, Arturo, 6, 34–8, 42, 72, 84,
Antonini, Giacomo Antonio, 95 95, 128, 149, 151, 162, 167–9,
Appelius, Mario, 90 176, 178–80
Aquarone, Alberto, 18, 213 Bomba, Leo, 92
Arditi, the, 8, 19, 21, 110, 211 Bompiani, Valentino, 144, 157, 227,
Argan, Giulio Carlo, 93 229
Ascenzi, Anna, 70, 219 Bonfantini, Corrado, 93–4
asili d’infanzia, 58 Bonfantini, Mario, 93–4
243
244 Index
Bonomi, Ivanoe, 214 Catholicism, 113, 121, 194

Bonsaver, Guido, 153, 205, 211, 217, Cecchelin, Angelo, 151–3, 228
227, 228, 229, 233 Cecchi, Emilio, 94, 158
Bontempelli, Massimo, 136–7 censorship, 5, 7–8
Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 134–5, civil communications, 26, 162–6,
137, 155, 226 174, 184–90, 215, 216, 225
Bosworth, R. J. B., 46, 104, 138, 172, language, 157
192, 193, 194, 195, 211, 212, 215, literary, 47, 111, 137, 142, 144,
217, 222, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 153–7, 179, 196, 205, 211, 221,
233 226, 227, 228, 229, 233
Bottai, Giuseppe, 4, 19, 69, 71, 79, 88, military, 99–100, 104, 184–90, 205,
101, 112, 137–9, 142, 143, 146, 233
156, 158, 220, 227 models, 13–15, 197–202, 205
Brancati, Vitaliano, 233 moral, 46, 205
Braun, Emily, 16, 17, 112, 212, 213, organisational aspects, 18–19, 82,
223 182, 184–5, 196, 205
Britain, 102–3, 121, 196, 204 policy, 20–5, 80, 116–17, 140–1,
Bruno, Giordano, 69 159, 172, 204
Buffarini Guidi, Guido, 179–80 press, 32, 39, 42, 77, 80, 82, 85,
Butler, Judith, 108 88–9, 101, 207, 214–15
propaganda, 16, 104–5
Cabiria, 123 radio, 205
Caccavale, Saverio, 36 schoolbooks, 48, 59, 62, 75
Camerini, Mario, 94 self-censorship, 24, 32, 59, 61, 65,
Canali, Mauro, 7, 34, 201, 211, 215, 67, 75, 84, 98, 198–9, 202–3,
216, 227, 233 206
Cannistraro, Philip V., 3, 16, 28, 80, theatre, 148–53
133, 144, 210, 214, 215, 220, 222, Central Commission for Textbook
224, 226, 227, 232 Reform, 58–9, 69
Canosa, Romano, 45, 216, 217 Ceresole, Enrico, 46
Capasso Torre di Pastene, Giovanni, Cerruti, Vittorio, 130
30, 46, 80 Cesari, Maurizio, 7, 142, 211, 215,
Caporetto, Battle of, 25, 40 216, 217, 221, 222, 224, 227,
Cappelletto, Giovanni, 44 228
Carabba (Lanciano-based publishing Ceschina (Milan-based publishing
house), 64, 67 house), 63–4
Cardarelli, Vicenzo, 233 Chamberlain, Neville, 126
Carducci, Giosuè, 64, 219 Chaplin, Charlie (The Great Dictator),
Carli, Mario, 133 112, 116, 151
Carocci, Alberto, 153 Charles Albert (Carlo Alberto), King,
Caruso, Monsignor Enrico, 69 24
Casa Italiana (Columbia University), Chiarelli, Luigi, 151
92, 95, 96, 134, 153 Chiurco, Alberto, 167
Casati Law, 48–9, 55, 68 Churchill, Winston, 193
Casati, Alessandro, 60, 62 Ciano, Galeazzo, 19, 28, 77, 82–3, 86,
Casati, Gabrio, 49, 62 87, 89–90, 94, 95, 96, 99, 102,
Casini, Gherardo, 97–8, 153, 156 116, 117–18, 123, 125, 126,
Catholic Church, 2, 24, 42, 46–51, 65, 139–41, 144, 146, 147, 150, 159,
67–8, 73, 128, 175, 177–9, 196 205, 215, 220, 221
Index 245
Ciarlantini, Franco, 61, 62 De Feo, Luciano, 106

Cicognani, Bruno, 228 De Vecchi, Cesare Maria, 47, 69, 222
Cinecittà, 147 Decennale, the, 80, 108, 111–13, 139
Cines, 92–3 defeatism, 35, 103, 168, 171, 181,
Cipriani, Lidio, 121, 224 186–8, 194
Codignola, Ernesto, 56, 220 Del Vecchio, Ugo, 128
Colarizi, Simona, 104, 222, 231, 232 Deledda, Grazia, 65, 70, 75, 199, 207
Collodi, Carlo, 51 Di Stefano, Michelangelo, 35
Collotti, Enzo, 2, 210, 213, 214, 215 dialects, use of, 51, 82, 83, 157, 220–1
colonialism, 99–100, 121, 124, 125, Disney Corporation, 157
207, 211, 225 Dumini, Amerigo, 34
Columbia University, 92, 142, 143
Communism, 3, 4, 27, 42, 47, 52, 70, EIAR, 191
74, 76, 81, 98, 126, 143, 152, 170, 18 BL, 27, 113, 144, 223, 227
171, 172, 180, 207 Einaudi, Giulio, 93
confino, 34, 37, 47, 72, 73, 76, 77, 91, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 164
93, 94, 121, 161, 166, 167, 169, Enciclopedia italiana Treccani, 16, 67,
171–5, 182, 191–3, 195, 201–3, 95, 136, 207
217, 224, 230 Episcopalians, 177, 179
Congress of Fascist culture, 53, 133 Eritrea, 94, 96, 99, 100, 121, 224
Consorzio aereo italiano, 42 Ethiopia, 8, 83, 89, 90, 92, 98–100,
Contini, Gianfranco, 154 124, 127, 155, 157, 180, 204
copyright, 64, 219 Evangelical Churches, 68, 175, 178
Corporativism, 22, 41
Cortese, Ferdinando, 105 Fabre, Giorgio, 2, 7, 19, 39–41, 117,
Crespo brothers, 43 121, 124, 127, 128, 130, 141, 157,
Crispi, Francesco, 24–5, 44, 148, 214 205, 210, 211, 216, 217, 219, 224,
Crispo Moncada, Francesco, 34 225, 226, 227, 228, 233
Critica fascista, 79, 102, 137, 138, 156, Faccetta nera, 118, 122
227 Facta, Luigi, 52
Critica sociale, 40 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, 16, 112,
Croce, Benedetto, 52–3, 67, 73, 74, 114, 212, 213, 217, 223
96, 132, 134, 153, 154, 164, 208, Fano, Nicola, 149, 152, 228
226, 228, 230, 232 Farese, Domenico, 35–6
Croci, Pietro, 43 Farinacci, Roberto, 42
cronaca nera, 33, 79, 81, 86, 143, 197, Fedele, Pietro, 60–1, 62
203 Federzoni, Luigi, 30–1, 33, 44
Cuman Pertile, Arpalice, 65, 219 Fellini, Federico, 75
Cuoco, Vincenzo, 164 Ferretti, Lando, 46, 79–81, 82
film industry in Italy, 8, 15, 28, 39,
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 5, 21, 39, 66, 105, 143–7
96, 110, 137, 153, 169, 170, Finzi, Aldo, 39, 41, 42, 215
211–12, 214, 215, 219, 228 Fiume, occupation of, 21, 26, 39, 110,
Dante, 171, 173, 195 144, 169–70, 211–12
De Ambris, Alceste, 22, 214 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 96, 137
De Amicis, Edoardo, 60 Forcella, Enzo, 202, 233
De Bosis, Lauro, 169, 230 Ford, John, 227
De Felice, Renzo, 2, 3, 6, 12, 16, 84, Forgacs, David, 7, 8, 210, 211
127, 133, 210, 213, 214, 215 Forges Davanzati, Roberto, 43, 199
246 Index
Foucault, Michel, 109–10, 200, 232, Graziani, Rodolfo, 120, 208

233 Great War, 1, 13, 16, 17, 21, 24, 25,
Fox Corporation, 145 54–5, 70, 72, 105, 113, 123, 134,
France, 36, 43, 63, 102, 164, 167, 170, 161, 166, 171, 173, 196, 202
183, 204 Greco, Lorenzo, 7, 153, 211, 228
Franco, General Francisco, 3 Gregor, A. James, 52, 218
Franzinelli, Mimmo, 2, 7, 15, 115, Griffin, Roger, 9–10, 212
116, 120, 166, 168, 192, 210, 211, Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 28, 81, 215,
212, 214, 215, 216, 220, 221, 222, 220, 221
223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 232, 233 Guglielmotti, Umberto, 100
Frassati, Alfredo, 42–3 Gulì, Ernesto, 35
Freddi, Luigi, 106, 146–7
Freud, Sigmund, 202, 233 Havas News Agency, 43–4
Furst, Henry, 153–5, 164, 169–71, 205 Hays Code, 8
Futurism, 8–9, 19, 21, 22, 132–3, 135 Hays, Will, 147
Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 69
Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 162, 211, 228 Hitler, Adolf, 2, 3, 103, 116, 117, 126,
Galantara, Gabriele, 17 127, 128, 129, 130, 157, 169, 183,
Galfré, Monica, 57, 64, 66, 218, 219 192, 223
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 118 Hollywood, 8, 113, 122, 145–7, 192
Gayda, Virgilio, 100 homosexuality, 119–20, 174, 180
Gellately, Robert, 5, 210, 230
Gemelli, Padre Agostino, 69, 74, 220 Il Bargello, 144, 153, 157, 227
Genovesi, Giovanni, 50 Il Becco giallo, 17, 51, 218
Gentile, Emilio, 12–13, 16, 105, 112, Il Caffè, 31, 32
160, 203, 212, 213 Il Corriere della Sera, 23, 25, 31, 32, 33,
Gentile, Federico, 64 39, 42–3, 79, 87, 117, 228
Gentile, Giovanni, 11, 16, 19, 47, 48, Il Corriere italiano, 30
51–5, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, Il Corriere padano, 41, 217
67, 68, 69–70, 71, 75, 134, 159, Il Giornale critico della filosofia italiana,
175, 198, 208, 211, 218, 219, 220 69
Gerarchia, 130 Il Giornale d’Italia, 29, 46, 117
Giannitrapani, Domenico, 63 Il Giornale del Contadino, 41
Giolitti, Giovanni, 14, 24, 25, 197 Il Giornale delle Puglie, 39
Gioventù italiana del Littorio, 72 Il Lavoro, 143
Giunta, Francesco, 213 Il Lavoro fascista, 87
Giustizia e Libertà, 38, 93, 125, 216, Il Mattino, 43, 86
225 Il Messaggero, 102, 117
Gobetti, Piero, 31, 132 Il Mezzogiorno, 80, 220
Gobineau, Arthur de, 127 Il Momento, 31
Goebbels, Joseph, 6, 82, 101, 139, 140 Il Mondo, 29, 31, 32, 216
Goffman, Erving, 108, 222 Il Piccolo di Trieste, 27, 31, 107
Goldhagen, Daniel, 1, 5, 210 Il Popolo d’Italia, 8–9, 26, 28, 31,
Goldoni, Carlo, 150 39–41, 43, 46, 63, 77, 79, 80, 86,
Gori, Gigliola, 122, 224 87, 102, 112, 115, 126, 129, 213,
Gramsci, Antonio, 132 216
Grand Council of Fascism (Gran Il Popolo di Roma, 102, 122, 128, 143
Consiglio), 80 Il Popolo di Trieste, 213
Grandi, Dino, 80, 117, 224 Il Popolo, 29, 31
Index 247
Il Resto del Carlino, 43 L’Asino, 17

Il Roma, 25 L’Avanguardia, 27
Il Selvaggio, 136, 226 L’Illustrazione italiana, 143, 207
Il Sereno, 31 L’Osservatore romano, 68, 74, 220
Il Tevere, 79, 102–3, 125, 147, 156, La battaglia del grano (propaganda
220, 225, 227 film, 1925), 106
Imbriani, Angelo Michele, 195, 211, La Civiltà cattolica, 68, 69, 220
231 La Critica, 52–3, 67
Index of Prohibited Books, 47, 69, 179 La foresta fonte di ricchezza
informers, 6, 13, 19, 34–8, 42, 92–3, (propaganda film, 1925), 106
95, 104, 109, 128, 162, 163, La Gazzetta del Popolo, 96–8
165–71, 182–3, 193, 194, 198, La Nazione, 27
199, 203, 208, 222, 232 La Riscossa dei giovani repubblicani, 29
Inglese, Guglielmo, 152 La Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia, 43
Interlandi, Telesio, 79, 103, 125–6, La Rivoluzione liberale, 31
137–8, 144, 147, 148, 156, 158, La Stampa, 23, 31, 42–3, 79, 99, 107
220, 225 La Tribuna, 68, 137
Interpol, 162 La Voce repubblicana, 29, 31, 32
Ireland, 102–3 La Voce, 59, 134, 213
Istituto per la ricostruzione industriale Landolfi, Tommaso, 162
(IRI), 89 Lateran Pacts, 2, 42, 46, 67, 69,
istituti magistrali, 57, 70 127–8, 148, 161, 175, 176, 217
istituti scientifici, 70 Lawrence, D. H., 136, 196
istituti tecnici, 49, 56 Le Bon, Gustav, 10, 18
Istituto Luce, 15, 46, 72, 105–8, 111, Le Monnier (Florentine publishing
115, 116, 123, 131, 145, 152, 213, house), 65, 67
222, 225 League of Nations, 2, 83, 204
Italian Communist Party (Partito Lepre, Aurelio, 7, 75, 188, 193, 211,
comunista italiano), 3 220, 231, 232, 233
Italianità, 80–1 Leto, Guido, 36, 162, 165, 181, 231
Letteratura, 97
Jehovah’s Witnesses, 177, 180, 191 Levi Della Vida, Giorgio, 208
Jewish Liberalism, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 21, 23,
communities, 19, 121, 130, 175, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 39, 42,
180–2 47, 52, 54, 56, 71, 79, 88, 91, 98,
families, 39, 128, 181 108, 110, 121, 134, 137, 148, 150,
identities, 96, 97, 125–9, 170, 171, 175, 178, 196, 197
204, 208, 215 libro di stato, 62–4, 66, 69, 70, 141,
‘problem’, 126, 130, 144 142, 155, 199, 207
writers and journalists, 97, 135, Libya, 121, 124
148, 157, 226 Lipset, Seymour Martin, 23, 214, 232
Jews, persecution of, 2, 19, 90, 102–3, Lombardo Radice, Giuseppe, 52, 58–9,
168, 181–2, 189, 211 62, 70, 199, 219
Joyce, James, 136, 196 Lombroso, Cesare, 119
London Film, 93
Kant, Immanuel, 69, 162 London, Jack, 205
Kesselring, General Albert, 165 Longanesi, Leo, 88
Klein, Gabriella, 175, 231 Luchini, Alberto, 144
Kochnitzsky, Leon, 170 Lupi, Dino, 55
248 Index
Luzzatto, Sergio, 108, 110, 120 Modigliani, Giuseppe Emanuele, 126

Mondadori (Milan-based publishing
Maccari, Mino, 136 house), 61, 63, 64, 67
Maciste, 18, 123, 173 Mondadori, Alberto, 98
Maffii, Mafio, 43 Mondolfi, Dino, 128
Maggiore, Roberto, 11 Montale, Eugenio, 154
Maida, Bruno, 88 Montanelli, Indro, 113
Malaparte, Curzio, 7, 114, 116, 136, Moravia, Alberto, 92, 95–8, 134, 137,
211, 223, 228 155, 201, 221, 226, 228, 233
Malgeri, Francesco, 100 Morgagni, Manlio, 26, 39–40, 43–5,
Mambrini, Renzo, 36–8 77, 217, 222
Manchester Guardian, 144 Morgari, Oddino, 126
Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 53, 133 Mosse, George L., 16, 213, 224
Mann, Thomas, 156 Murialdi, Paolo, 42, 215, 216, 217,
Manzoni, Alessandro, 96, 137 221
March on Rome, 39, 59, 80, 88, 105, Mussolini, Arnaldo, 26, 39–41, 43, 62,
110, 112, 113, 150, 175, 213, 224 102, 192, 217
Marchini, Mario, 46 Mussolini, Benito,
Marcucci, Alessandro, 61 assassination attempts, 33, 93
Margulies, Rabbi Samuel Zvi, 129 finance, 39–41
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 8–10, identity, 12, 16–18, 109–14, 124–5
12, 21–2, 101, 111, 132–3, 135, police intelligence, 34–8, 72–6,
152, 156, 206, 211, 212, 223 167–8
Marino, Emanuele Valerio, 15, 116, Mussolini, Edda, 128, 225
212, 221, 222, 224 Mussolini, Rachele, 128
masculinity, 16, 115, 174 Mussolini, Vito, 28
Massarotti, Vito, 119 Mussolini, Vittorio, 28, 95
Matteotti, Giacomo, 28, 30, 33, 34,
39, 41, 42, 132, 133, 210, 215, Napoleon, 109, 113, 206
216 Nationalism, 9, 16, 19, 70, 203
Megaro, Gaudens, 155 NAZI Germany, 1–2, 3, 19, 46, 62, 80,
Melchiori, Alessandro, 62, 219 82, 90–1, 97, 102, 104, 107, 117,
Methodists, 176–7 120, 126, 127, 130, 179, 180, 194,
MiCup see Ministry for Popular 197, 205, 208
Culture Nesci, Tommaso, 35
Mila, Massimo, 38 Nesti, Gustavo, 44
Minculpop see Ministry for Popular newsreels, 15, 18, 72, 107, 109, 110,
Culture 115, 152, 160
Ministry for Popular Culture, 6–7, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 127, 154
18–19, 77, 89, 97, 101, 102–3, Nievo, Ippolito, 96, 137
106, 120, 139, 142, 144, 147, 148, Nitti, Francesco Saverio, 214
150, 154–7, 185, 190, 211, 213, Non Mollare, 31
214, 221, 222, 225, 227, 232 Noventa, Giacomo, 154
Ministry for Press and Propaganda, 6, Nuova storia contemporanea, 52
18, 19, 83, 89, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102,
115, 119, 139–42, 150, 153, 179 Oggi, 95–6, 98
miscegenation, 121, 124, 148 Ojetti, Ugo, 33, 43, 153, 169, 170
Mix, Tom, 227 Omodeo, Adolfo, 56
Modernism, 111, 196 Opera nazionale Balilla, 72, 73, 117–8
Index 249
Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia Pius XII, Pope, 46

(OMNI), 161, 166 Pizzuto, Antonio, 37, 162–5, 185, 196,
Orano, Paolo, 144 216, 229, 230
Oriani, Alfredo, 66 Polezzi, Loredana, 125, 225
Orlando, Vittorio Emanuele, 25 Political Police (divisione polizia
Orzalesi, Vito Benedetto, 67 politica), the, 34–8, 92–4, 129,
OVRA, 37–8, 75, 126, 157, 162, 166, 157, 162–3, 166, 179, 221, 229
181, 182, 200, 211, 216, 225, 231 Polverelli, Gaetano, 80–2, 84, 89, 100,
111, 117, 122–3, 137, 139–40,
Pagine libere, 127, 225 144, 146, 159, 205, 220, 225, 227
palingenetic myth, 9–11, 16, 111 Porro, Eliseo Antonio, 40
Paoletti, Armando, 67 Prampolini, Enrico, 112
Papacy, the, 177–8 Press Office (Ufficio stampa), the, 6,
Paravia (Milan-based publishing 18, 27–30, 33, 38, 45–6, 79–80,
house), 67 82–7, 97, 99, 102, 106–7, 112,
Pareto, Vilfredo, 10 115, 117, 137, 139–41, 144, 146,
Parri, Ferruccio, 31 153, 156, 159, 198, 199, 205, 207
Partito nazionale fascista (PNF), 34, 46, Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 17, 59, 92, 134,
56, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80, 91, 92, 94, 137, 153, 155, 213
96, 105–6, 113, 115, 127, 136, Primato, 137
138, 146, 153, 167, 173, 184, 226, Principato (Milan-based publishing
228 house), 67
Partito popolare, 21, 52, 69, 134 Protestantism, 68, 175–90, 219, 231
Pascoli, Giovanni, 219
Passerini, Luisa, 16, 110–11, 207, 211, Quilici, Nello, 41, 217
212, 213, 223, 233 Quota 90, 60, 89
Paulucci de’ Calboli, Giacomo, 106–7,
222 Race Laws, 1, 96, 97, 130, 226
Pavolini, Alessandro, 77, 89, 97, 98, racism, 12, 16, 94, 116–18, 121,
103, 113, 142, 144, 157–8, 159, 124–5, 147–8, 157, 179, 181–2,
190, 224, 227, 229 203, 205, 207, 221, 224, 226, 227
Pavone, Claudio, 4, 5, 211 Radio Londra, 190, 192, 232
Paxton, Robert O., 1, 210, 223, 226 Radio Mosca, 190
Pellecchia, Emilio, 35 Radio Stefani, 45
Pentecostalism, 176–80, 231 Repubblica sociale italiana (RSI), 67,
Perfetti, Francesco, 52 80, 103, 158
Peukert, Detlev, 120, 224 Resistance, the, 3–4, 52, 211
phone tapping, 6, 14, 24–5, 41–2, Reuters, 43–4
109, 198–9, 201, 206, 215, 222 Riefenstahl, Leni, 107–8, 123
Piazza San Sepolcro, 8, 13, 21, 28, 43 Risorgimento, the, 17, 54, 56, 70, 198
Piccialuti Caprioli, Maura, 191, 232 Rizzi, Loris, 7, 14, 186, 211, 212, 222,
Pincherle, Gastone, 98 231, 232, 233
Pinkus, Karen, 16, 120, 213, 224 Roberts, David D., 11
Pinna, Gaetano, 9 Rocco Laws, 26, 35, 175, 200, 229
Pinocchio, 51 Rocco, Alfredo, 19, 160, 171, 174,
Pirandello, Luigi, 132 175, 200, 229
Pitigrilli (Dino Segre), 95, 157 Rochat, Giorgio, 68, 175, 177, 180,
Pittaluga, Stefano, 145 203, 219, 231
Pius XI, Pope, 47, 74, 88, 110, 161 Romanità, 80, 127, 135, 178, 203
250 Index
Romano, Michele, 61 Smith College, 97

Rosmini, Antonio, 69 Socialism, 3, 8, 10, 21, 28, 40, 47, 75,
Rosselli, Carlo, 31, 93, 95, 126, 132, 81, 127, 167, 172, 178, 196, 197,
165, 216, 225 210, 214, 228
Rossellini, Roberto, 210–11 Solari Bozzi, Giuseppe, 46
Rossi, Angelo, 193 Solaria, 153, 205, 207
Rossi, Cesare, 28–30, 38, 77, 80, 84, Soldati, Mario, 91, 92–5, 98, 134, 154,
215, 216 155, 221, 229, 232
Rossi, Ernesto, 31 Somalia, 121, 221
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67 Sorel, Georges, 10–12
ruralism, 106 Spackman, Barbara, 16, 17, 213, 224
Russia, 106, 107, 190, 194, 196 Spanish Civil War, 1, 2, 8, 76, 89,
144, 158
Saitta, Giuseppe, 56 Spinetti, Gastone Silvano, 84, 221
Salandra, Antonio, 25 Spinoza, Baruch, 69
Salgari, Emilio, 118, 122, 207 squadristi, 3, 8–10, 12, 13, 19, 22, 27,
Salvemini, Gaetano, 31, 134–5, 155 29, 34, 141, 197, 211, 212, 213,
Salvi, Francesco, 92–3 214, 215, 218
Sambadù, amore negro, 125 Staglieno, Marcello, 3, 210, 215, 217
Sandron (Palermo-based publishing Starace, Achille, 80, 113, 139, 142
house), 67 Steinbeck, John, 194
Sani, Roberto, 70 Stone, Marla, 16, 111, 212, 223
Sansoni (Florentine publishing Storia contemporanea, 84, 221
house), 65, 67 Stracittà, 136
Sarfatti, Margherita, 39–41, 110, Strapaese, 136
129–30, 157 Stringher, Bonaldo, 128
Sarfatti, Michele, 2, 210, 225 Sturzo, Don Luigi, 29, 42, 134–5, 137,
satire, 12, 87, 151, 218 169, 226
Schnapp, Jeffrey T., 16, 212, 223, 227, Suster, Roberto, 46
228 Syndicalism, 19, 22, 28
Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 223
Scialoja, Vittorio, 30 Tacchi Venturi, Padre Pietro, 67, 69,
scuole complementari, 56 176
scuole elementari, 48, 49, 56, 64 Tempo, 98, 108
scuole medie, 64, 65, 66, 220 Terragni, Giuseppe, 112
scuole normali, 57 The Times, 32
Segre, Dino see Pittigrilli Theweleit, Klaus, 16, 213, 224
Sei (Turin-based publishing house), Toeplitz, Giuseppe, 39–42, 130
67 Toeplitz, Ludovico, 93
Sejum, Ras, 120 Togliatti, Palmiro, 74
Seldes, George, 155 Torre, Andrea, 43
Senise, Carmine, 35, 149, 165, 179, Torrès, Maurice, 129
180, 216 Toscanini, Arturo, 169–70, 230
Serrati, Giacinto Menotti, 9 Toscanini, Walter, 169–70
Servizio speciale riservato (SSR), 25–6 totalitarianism, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 18,
Settimelli, Emilio, 21, 47, 111, 133, 217 19, 22, 23, 105, 165, 184, 195,
Shakers, 177–8 201, 212, 223
Siciliani, Luigi, 52 Tranfaglia, Nicola, 7, 84, 88, 210, 211,
Sironi, Mario, 17, 112, 212, 213, 223 214, 215, 216, 221, 222, 224, 225
Index 251
Traquandi, Nino, 31 Victor Emanuel III, King, 15, 18, 23,

Treves, Claudio, 40, 126, 129 27, 55, 65, 74, 106, 109–10, 139,
Trizzino, Antonio, 102, 222 148, 158, 192, 197, 210
Turati, Filippo, 40 Victor Emanuel, Prince, 168
Turi, Gabriele, 52, 218, 220 Vidari, Giovanni, 70
Villa, Mario, 46
Ufficio tecnico di propaganda nazionale Viminale, the (HQ of Ministry of the
(UTPN), 40–1 Interior), 30, 38, 83, 185
Ulysses, 162, 196 virility, 16–17, 109, 115, 119–20,
Undersecretariat for Press and 123–4, 174, 195
Propaganda, 83, 89, 99, 102, 117, Vita nuova (propaganda film, 1925), 106
139–40, 146, 205 Vittorini, Elio, 153, 157, 158, 211,
Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 111, 223 227, 228, 233
Volpi, Albino, 34
Vallardi (Milan-based publishing Volpi, Maria (‘Murà’), 125
house), 64
Vallecchi (Florentine publishing Waldensians, the, 175–6
house), 65 Wall Street Crash, 2, 85
Valori, Aldo, 43 Weber, Max, 17
Vassar College, 97, 153–4 Weimar Republic, 90
Vatican, the, 18, 46, 47, 55, 67–9, Wilson, Woodrow, 21
176, 179–80 Wolff News Agency, 43–4
veline, 6, 83–8, 107, 115, 117, 119, Woolf, Virginia, 136
130, 146, 206, 211, 214, 221, 222,
227, 232 Zacchi, Dr Osvaldo, 177, 180
Venice Biennale, 132 Zanichelli (Bologna-based publishing
Venturi, Lionello, 92, 93 house), 64, 67
Verga, Giovanni, 96, 137 Zola, Emile, 148
Versailles Treaty, 1, 21, 30, 204 Zurlo, Leopoldo, 149–52, 165, 228

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Censorship in Fascist Italy,

ESSAYS IN ITALIAN LITERATURE AND HISTORY IN HONOUR OF

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying or transmission of this

1. Fascism–Italy. 2. Censorship–Italy–History–20th century. 3. Politics

List of Abbreviations viii

2 Consolidating Power and Silencing Opposition 21

3 Giovinezza: Education for the Ethical State 48

5 The Duce’s Image 105

Other bodies 116

6 Culture Wars 132

7 Censorship, Secrets and Lies 159

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of staff at the Archivio centrale

George Talbot, Hull, November 2006

ACS Archivio centrale dello Stato (Rome)

UCI Unione cinematograﬁca italiana

Historiography, politics and the idea of commonsense

The legacy of Fascism continues to cast a shadow over modern Italy.

not an inevitable consequence of the social, cultural and economic

mystiﬁcation of a civilizing mission, which could be interpreted with

as a civil war and how it should be commemorated. Claudio Pavone, in

Discussion of the Resistance risked sinking into indifference.

In the intervening decade plans have been brought forward by gov-

mind when watching and listening to what has been characterized by

from the Italian Fascists. Patient sifting of documents in the Archivio

Culture, myths and deﬁnitions

Censorship inhabits an intersection between culture and politics.

A study of twentieth-century culture, particularly in its relations

He illustrated this proposition with the example of ﬁlm production.

One, two, three, twenty, thirty revolver shots. A volley of stones

The cordon of carabinieri breaks up and disappears. […] Leaving us

In Marinetti’s vivid account, this could be the treatment for a movie

drew on the rhetoric and shared experiences of trench warfare. In 1919

The precondition of the national rebirth was […] a revolution in

There are some fairly obvious dangers in taking a text such as

The ofﬁcial, authorized, vision of the Fascist state, the palingenetic

Whereas in common parlance myth is a form of fable, or an histor-

Without some appreciation of Giovanni Gentile’s philosophy of

Myth is especially tricky, because even Sorel’s concept is widely

This is a valid distinction, but while there might be heuristic value in

Censorship and surveillance

The regeneration of Italians was, for Mussolini, a genuine obsession

According to this view, Fascism’s ‘totalitarian pedagogy, its propa-

record. To be fair to Gentile he has also accepted in his writings that

more extreme situations a letter might be suppressed altogether. This

Censorship is not just repression and a prohibition on speech,

This qualitative interpretation of censorship came to be used by

The third strand of censorship is the productive one, in which censor-

Methodologies and intentions

How then does ‘commonsense’ relate to censorship and propaganda?

‘sacralization’ of power. Following in the wake of Emilio Gentile there

For Fascism, the push towards empire, national expansion, is a

Consciously implying an afﬁliation with the Risorgimento in his use

The cults of youth, of duty, of sacriﬁce and heroic virtues, of

We recognize in that characterization the various still photographs,

In the early twenties, Sironi still depicts Mussolini as an earthbound

Clearly we could multiply the illustrations of this point almost to

(or religious) leadership is to be found either in the outstanding indi-

itary censorship of the armed forces. Therefore in theory, and often in

The chapters which follow address different aspects of Fascist censor-

Dismantling the Liberal state

point about the squadristi smashing up of the Avanti! ofﬁces, however, is

Our violence is different in its intention from that of the others:

To most of us, this is an assault on commonly-accepted meanings of

They have joined up with Fascism just as yesterday they were