When we see authoritarian movements gain in popularity, when openly extremist parties play a role in government, when xenophobic language leads to shocking acts of violence, we might ask ourselves what ghosts continue to haunt the present? We might wonder whether dictatorship, ethnically based persecution, or colonialism are phenomena that belong exclusively to the past? Or whether we risk the possibility, perhaps in a disguised form, of their re-apparition?
In the words of Rome’s former prefect, Giuseppe Pecoraro, the ‘ghosts of the 20th century are still dangerous.’
In the specific context of contemporary Italy, it is a matter of urgent necessity to reflect on the nature of fascism, on the principles on which it was based, on the effects of its policies, and on the surreptitious continuation of its worldview and values. It is more important than ever to understand why aspects of fascism appealed to so many people for such a long period of time; to understand how fascism exerted a hypnotic power by grafting itself onto preexisting structures of thought and belief; and to understand how its legacies continue to play out in people’s processes of thought and action.
The sentence of the philosopher and writer, George Santayana, that ‘those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ is often quoted. But the point is not that we should simply look at the past, assuming that we are free from its influence. The point is rather that deliverance from the spectre of having to relive the horrors of preceding decades or centuries comes at the cost of constant inquiry into the ways in which apparently surmounted motivations and practices are imbricated in the way in which we think and feel.
It may be difficult, if not impossible, to give an all-encompassing account of the meaning of Italian fascism because of the length of time that the regime was in power, because of the evolving nature of its ideology, and because of the sheer extent of its sphere of activity. But it is essential to develop a knowledge that goes beyond a narrative account of the events that occurred during the 1920s and 1930s. To identify, that is, the conceptual structure behind the world that fascism attempted to create. And to understand how the logic of the regime determined the roles that Italians were meant to perform – creating material and psychological legacies that are with us to this day.
The Metaphysics of Fascism
The most important feature of Italian fascism was that it did not propose merely to promote alterations to an already existing order. Its aim, much more fundamentally, was to refashion both the socially constructed world and the inner subjectivity of Italians. The eschatological purpose of fascism was, that is, to coerce the Italian population as a whole to participate in its vast project of renewal. Under fascism, the notion – essential to liberalism – that society functions primarily as a means to enable the individual to fulfil, independently, his or her potential was reversed. Under fascism, the individual, rather than being seen as separable from society, was equated with society.
This is a point that is made with startling clarity in the definition of ideology of the movement, jointly written by Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini for the Enciclopedia Italiana, where we read: «Per il fascista, tutto è nello stato, e nulla di umano o spirituale esiste […] fuori dello stato. In tal senso il fascismo è totalitario […] vuol rifare non le forme della vita umana, ma il contenuto, l’uomo, il carattere, la fede. E a questo fine vuole disciplina, e autorità che scenda addentro negli spiriti, e vi domini incontrastata»
[For the fascist, everything is in the state, and nothing that is human or spiritual exists […] outside the state. In this sense, fascism is totalitarian […] it intends to remake not the forms of human life, but its content, the human being, their character, their faith. And to this end it requires discipline, and authority that descends into the spirit of everyone where it dominates unopposed] (Gentile, 1932, vol. XIV, pp. 835-840). [1]
There is no ambiguity here about the coercive role that the state was intended to perform or about defining fascism as a kind of religion or “una concezione religiosa” [religious conception]. The function of the state was to reform all elements of the human being according to its conception of the spirit of the national community. The individual, by placing his or her identity within the life of the nation, would begin to experience an altered state of consciousness and a truly collective existence.
The thesis of the contemporary historian, Emilio Gentile, is that fascism should be seen as a “secular religion” which sought to transform Italians into a strong and unified community capable not only of meeting the challenges of the modern world but of revivifying the spirit of ancient Roman greatness.
Gentile points to the sense of unity and purpose, of sacrifice to the ideal of the nation that early adherents to the movement took from the experience of the First World War. He exposes, however, that the body of ideas regarding the “sacralisation of politics” had a far longer history. He refers to the origins of the deification of the nation in the work of the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the crystallisation, during the French Revolution, of the concept of the state as the educator of the people in the cult of the nation. And he refers to the development of the theory of the nation as a sacred entity in the various currents of thought that fed into the Risorgimento and on which Italian fascism drew.
The ethnonationalist order that fascism endowed with the properties of the sacred could be apprehended by contemplating the territorial extent of the Roman empire, its duration through time, and the surviving evidence of its presence. The constant references to Rome, the presence of ancient designs in modern constructions, the suggested meanings of official dress and ceremony all served to upset a distinction between antiquity and modernity. To weld them together so that each was seen through the other and both were seen as part of an entity, the true nature of which lay beyond habitual perception.
The point is not that the regime fostered belief in a metaphysical world, evident in its architectural projects, its extensive rituals, its rigid codifications of behaviour. The point is rather that the rationale of fascism was to induce society to conform to the principles of the order that it posited. If the First World War had enacted the beginning of the nation’s rebirth – its “palingenesis” to use Roger Griffin’s term – then fascism aimed to ensure the continual renewal of the nation. The ultranationalism of the movement was not elitist but popular since all strata of society were insistently led to believe that they were active participants in the colossal process of regeneration, or to use historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s term ‘reclamation’, that the regime had set in motion.
Understanding of the multiple roles that ritual served during the ventennio enables an essential part of the creation of the material world of the interwar years to come clearly into focus. The gargantuan scale on which the regime refashioned Italian towns; tore down whole districts in the heart of Rome; built new communities in previously unoccupied parts of the country; isolated and restored ancient Roman monuments is widely known. The building projects provided physical evidence of the path towards order and prosperity, instances of the rationalisation of social processes, and the dominance of the regime in all parts of the lives of Italians.
But the purpose of the massive architectural projects of the interwar period was also to create nothing less than a new reality – intended to act back on its original producers, infiltrate an inner sense of their relation with the external world and, by the materiality of its existence, perform an intimidating function in making people believe that the world of which it provided objective evidence constituted the very reality in which they lived.
The Empire from Construction to Collapse
The monumental structures that are to be found in almost every Italian town or city are concrete indications of the new reality that Italian fascism sought to build in the 1920s and 1930s, physical statements of the futural logic of the regime. And yet, in themselves they offer an incomplete picture of the material and conceptual world that the regime sought to create. Integral to fascist ideology was the plan to extend the borders of Italy, to create an expanding imperial dominion, and to rival the territorial possessions of the major democratic powers. In the words of one commentator, it was overseas that Italians needed to confront “the hard path of [their] new history”.
It is true that expansion of the Italian nation did not begin with the regime. Eritrea and large parts of Somalia came under Italian rule at the end of the 19th century, while Libya was acquired as a result of the Italo-Turkish War between 1911 and 1912. The ‘re-conquest’ of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica – or the forceful establishment of Italian authority beyond the coastal towns of the territory – was set in motion from 1921.
But the essential difference between liberal and fascist expansionism was that Mussolini was prepared to use armed force more systematically than previous administrations and more than other colonial powers were prepared to do during the same period. From 1925 onwards, fascist Italy, through its increasing manipulation of the media, gave a prominence to colonial themes that would – in the words of historian Nicola Labanca – have been unthinkable under liberalism. The emphasis on expansionism was part of the “new politics” of the regime in which the whole armoury of the state was deployed in a mobilisation of public consciousness that was aimed not simply at encouraging greater awareness of, and therefore commitment to, the imperial ambitions of the regime but at promoting belief in the mythologizing narratives – such as the “return” to what were once the possessions of ancient Rome or the founding of a new civilisation – that supposedly legitimated expansion.
The operation to “re-conquer” Libya was not concluded until 1932. In October 1935 Italy launched its invasion of Ethiopia. Although victory was celebrated with Mussolini’s declaration of the re-apparition of the Roman Empire in May 1936, resistance to Italian occupation continued until the fall of fascism. In 1936 Italy sent troops to support Franco in Spain and they remained there until the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 Italy annexed Albania and in 1940 it invaded Greece and southern France. Italy entered the Second World War on the side of Nazi Germany with the expectation that it would make substantial territorial gains across Africa and the Middle East.
It was in the colonies that the fascist project of rupturing the existing social order to pursue a dramatic and violent process of world creation was taken to its logical extreme. The environment that was brought into existence, first through the massive exertion of military force and then through the deployment of a vast workforce of Italian and African labour, was made to seem – through newsreels, photographic reportage, and through film – as nothing less than the prodigious fulfilment of the promise of a new society.
Italian East Africa was presented as a mirror of national life under fascism and as a site where the power of the state could be experienced to the full. This is a point made by the many exhibitions on the Italian mainland. In Libya, as in the Italian peninsula, the remains of Roman buildings and monuments were restored and used repeatedly for their propagandistic value. In all parts of the Empire, Roman architecture was imitated while major building projects, such as EUR, were presented as blueprints for the ideal colonial city.
And it was in the colonies that the principles behind the creation of the new reality of fascism became most apparent. Apparent in the rigid imposition of a system of governance; in the exploitation of the resources and labour of the countries that were occupied; in the hierarchies that were established between settler and subject populations. And apparent, most starkly, in the relentless use of force to quell any form of opposition to Italian rule; in the violence used to suppress resistance in Libya and in Ethiopia.
Despite the huge investment of resources, however, and despite the massive use of force in its creation, the Italian Empire was a hastily constructed edifice that came crashing down with extraordinary speed. By 1942 Allied troops had moved into most of Italy’s former territories. The demise of Italy as a colonial power was to be confirmed in the settlement of the country’s possessions in Africa. In 1949 Libya gained the right to form an independent state while Somalia was placed for 10 years under the trusteeship of Italy. In December 1950, the UN approved a settlement whereby Eritrea became an autonomous state federated to the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie.
The Afterlife of Empire
The belatedness of sustained inquiry into the history of the imperial phase of Italian fascism has meant that awareness of the legacies of empire is not as widespread as it should be. Those legacies concern the effects on the countries where Italy was the colonial power; the material remnants of the infrastructure that was built to support the imperial project; the nature of the lives that people have led in the north and east of Africa as a result of the years of Italian rule.
Even if we confine ourselves to the task of uncovering the legacies of expansionism that are present in contemporary Italy, the task is imposing. It is imposing because those legacies can be found in almost every area of life. And because we are not speaking merely about the discovery of traces of historical significance but about the active role of those legacies. It is, indeed, appropriate to speak of an afterlife of empire. To speak, that is, of the agency that material structures and patterns of belief or behaviour related to colonialism continue to exert long after the demise of empire. And long after the fact that colonialism should belong exclusively to the past. In speaking of an afterlife, one is referring to something that, though formally deceased, nevertheless exerts an unstable but diffuse influence – always at one remove from unequivocable identification.
The force of nostalgia for empire can be experienced both in real life occurrences and through print or visual culture. In the rallies that mark the anniversaries of fascism or in memorials to some its most prominent figures, Italy’s former identity as a colonial power is evoked through ritualistic demonstrations. Many groups and online communities testify to an unrepentant attachment to the narratives that nourished expansionism and to the certainties that supposedly once governed the way in which the world functioned.
But the afterlife of the Italian Empire is far from being contained within the activities of fringe groupings. No one would argue that it is not possible to trace elements of thinking that characterised the fascist worldview in statements that are occasionally made in public life or, for example, in the reluctance of certain politicians to state their allegiance to the concept of “anti-fascism”. In precisely the same way, one can see remnants of colonial thinking in the use various kinds of visual imagery; in the willingness of groups or individuals to espouse views that depend on hierarchical distinctions between cultures; in statements that imply that Italian identity is fixed and exclusive rather than the result of the meeting and mixing of a multiplicity of cultural influences. Equally, imperial resonances are encoded in the architecture of given sites, in the vision of nationhood that they communicate, and in the authority that they confer on key principles behind expansionism.
The problem, then, is that if the debris of the conceptual and material complex that once constituted Italian imperialism is present at the level of imaginings, frameworks, unconscious identifications, then it is not immediately apparent. If, consequently, this imperial debris exists at a level below plain sight then it is difficult to uncover the agency that it exerts, and expose that agency to scrutiny. The danger of not doing so is that certain modes of thought become built into the way in which the world is perceived. And they are allowed to function as a legitimate point of reference in responding to the manifold social and political issues that impinge upon the present.
The question is, therefore, through what means can one see how far elements of the past continue to cast their shadow over the present? What, in other words, are the media that enable us to develop an enhanced perception of the afterlife of empire? And how can the insights that they provide be brought together to understand how aspects of the colonial world continue to exercise a presence and an agency in our lives?
Architecture
What would Italy look like today if the country had not participated in the Second World War and if Mussolini had remained in power until the 1960s or 1970s? The centre of most Italian towns would, no doubt, be characterised by a refashioned square of impressive proportions, by institutional buildings constructed according to rigid geographical patterns, by statues fixing human form in martial poses. As things stand, it is appropriate to see many of the buildings of the interwar period as a kind of ruin. A ruin because the edifices have survived beyond their original setting and they convey messages in the present that – depending on your perspective – seem obsolete, discordant, and disconcerting.
The very materiality of the institutional buildings of the 1920s and 1930s make them one of the most potent reminders of fascism and its manifest imperial dimension. The massive building projects on the Italian mainland such as EUR or the area in Naples that once housed the Mostra dell’Italia Oltremare were intended as a reflection of the building projects undertaken, on a vast scale, in Italy’s colonies. Architectural forms, whatever the nature of their aesthetic qualities, are far from innocent. They can, in the words of Peter Freidl, play a major part in ordering the world along ethnonationalist lines. All such sites convey explicit and subliminal messages. They present an aggressive notion of nationhood that is oddly discordant in a republic whose founding narrative is resistance to fascism.
It may be true that such sites are too pervasive, too firmly entrenched, ever to be removed. But it is only by identifying the purpose and effect of the signs that they communicate and by subverting their original meanings that one can ensure that the power that they exert is exposed. In this regard, public art projects like that, for example, of DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, perform a highly significant function in drawing attention to the semiotics of the buildings and involving local communities in reflecting on their meanings. The role that architecture performs in processes of perception and association is thus shifted from the unconscious to the conscious.
Museum culture
The materiality of the building projects of the interwar period is shared by another medium through which one can come face to face with the ideological components of fascism as well as sense the lingering presence in today’s world and that is the exposition of artefacts from the period in museums.
The depository of Rome’s Museo delle Civiltà houses the collection of the former Colonial Museum, founded during the 1920s and intended as a vehicle for expansionist propaganda. The collection comprises objects from Italy’s former colonies, expressive of difficult and disputed memories: busts of soldiers and politicians of the period; works of art, paintings, sculptures, and architectural models from regions of northern and eastern Africa; objects that express the violence of colonisation; objects that have a very strong value for formerly occupied societies and that, in many instances, are the subject of requests for restitution.
The sensitivity of the curatorial task is rendered acute by the ethical necessity of documenting the provenance of the articles that comprise the collection and of assessing the degree of violence that was involved in their procurement. One of the most graphic indications of the extent of this work is the fact that the collection contains many casts of the faces of inhabitants of different regions of Ethiopia that were made by the Italian anthropologist Lidio Cipriani in the late 1930s.
A further issue is how elements from the collection can be displayed to audiences in such a way that they do not replicate, however unintentionally, the values of the original Colonial Museum and demonstrate instead the racialised systems of thought on which the whole expansionist enterprise was based. This task that is made all the more difficult by the fact that the museum is located within the EUR district, the very centre of the massive exhibition complex of the regime, and the presence of which is everywhere apparent.
Over the last ten years, the collection of the former Colonial Museum has been the subject of national and international research initiatives which have led to the realisation of site specific installations and performances by groups such as the contemporary dance company MK, and by artists such as Delio Jasse, Luca Capuano – Camilla Casadei Maldini, and Leone Contini, an artist and anthropologist who has followed the collection since before it came to the Museo delle Civiltà.
Under the direction of Andrea Villari, the curators of the former Colonial Museum (Rosa Anna Di Lella e Gaia Delpino) together with Matteo Lucchetti (responsible for Museum’s collections of contemporary art and culture) have pursued a profound collaboration with contemporary artists, either through their residential programme (including projects with Maria Thereza Alves, Sammy Baloji, DAAR – Sandi Hilal e Alessandro Petti, Karrabing Film & Art Collective) or through the acquisition of works by contemporary artists.
The collaboration with contemporary artists has been key to the realisation of the exhibition, The Museum of Opacities, inaugurated in June 2022, in which part of the collection of the former Colonial Museum has been exhibited in critical dialogue with the work of artists, including Jermay Michael Gabriel, Francis Offman, Agegnehu Engida, Theo Eshetu, Balacciaw Yimar, Adelita Husni Bey, Luca Guadagnino, Peter Friedl, Rossella Biscotti, Bianca Baldi, Malak Yacout e Wissal Houbabi.
Stemming from a period of residence at the Museum as part of the European-wide initiative, Taking Care, Wissal Houbabi, together with Ismael “Astri” Lo and Toi Giordani, pursued a participative project with a number of Rome’s cultural communities which gave life to the installation, phonomuseum_rome, exhibited at the Museum of Opacities.
Literature
Another medium of exceptional power is literary communication. What has become clear over recent years is the ability of literature to draw public attention to episodes that belong to the history of fascism and colonialism. Writers use fiction as a means of understanding how events that seem to be distant in time continue to affect the experience of the present – both at the level of public discourse and at the level of individual subjectivity. By delving into episodes of family history, instances of archival research, developments in the political sphere, literary texts show how a knowledge of the past unsettles our habitual relationship with the reality that surrounds us. More profoundly still, writing can chart a movement from a stable notion of personal identity to an altogether more disturbing experience of everyday selfhood. Antonio Scurati’s tetralogy of historical novels on the life of Mussolini has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. Maaza Mengiste’s narration, in her novel The Shadow King, of the invasion of Ethiopia from the perspective of the Ethiopian resistance was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2020. Writers like Gabriella Ghermandi, Vittorio Longhi, Francesca Melandri, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel and Igiaba Scego have attracted large audiences as well as international recognition for their work in disseminating knowledge of a chapter of the past of ever more topical importance.
Conclusion
By drawing together the insights of curatorial and creative practice one can reach an enhanced understanding of the ways in which happenings that belong to the past continue to shape the world in which we live. By investigating the signs that the external world communicates; by recreating the context in which artefacts now housed in museums once assumed meaning; by listening to the voices that are captured through literature one can move between the visible and the invisible. Between, that is, the de facto material presence of cultural phenomena and the wider system of imaginings, psychological processes, and collective power structures of which they are a part. And in this historical moment, the need to find mirrors that facilitate our understanding of how the past is reflected in the present could not be clearer nor of greater urgency.
Notes
[1] This text was written specifically for a video-essay. The video, which will premiere in London on 21 May 2025, was edited by Professor Burdett in collaboration with two Italian curators, Viviana Gravano and Giulia Grechi. The video essay was filmed and edited by Isabella Gaffè, with sound design by Paolo Zappalà.
The video will feature images of works by Italian artists who have kindly granted permission for their work to be used. These images will form the visual accompaniment to this text, which will be read in the background by visual artist and performer Wissal Houbabi.
Charkles Burdett is Director of the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, and Professor in Italian Studies, and Branch Director, Bilingualism Matters London.
The principal areas of my research are literary culture under Fascism; travel writing; the Italian colonial presence in Libya and East Africa and its legacy; theories of inter-cultural and transnational contact; the representation of Islam and the Islamic world in recent Italian literature and culture. An important part of my work concerns the theoretical frame through which we consider transnational contact and the implications for the disciplinary field of Modern Languages of the study of cultural translation in all its forms.