Living among the Duce’s words: the visual materialization of political rhetoric in Italian public space Q46 , from the Risorgimento to Fascism MARIA ELENA VERSARI 5 Abstract This article is devoted to the use of political inscriptions in Italy from the Risorgimento to Fascism. More specifically, it addresses the way in which Fascism appropriated and reworked a tradition of civic and patriotic epigraphs established in the nineteenth century, during Italy’s struggle for independence and in its aftermath. By doing so, it aims to correct the common assumption that Fascism’s use of spectacular monumental strategies aimed at the mere dismissal of real political content through its aestheticization, and to clarify the way in which Benito Mussolini’s regime instead engaged in a cunning historiographical reassessment 10 of Italy’s recent past and its material history. Keywords Risorgimento, Fascism, architecture, iconoclasm, inscriptions, Benito Mussolini, Italy When, in the mid-nineteenth century, Prince Klemens von Metternich dismissed the possibility of Italian unification with his now famous quip: “Italy is merely a geographical expression,” little did he realize that a few decades later his remark would be 15 used to spur the country on to build a structured national identity. 1 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the divide between geography and mass identity, between space and culture, implied by Metternich, was overcome in the name of the nation. This article retraces the way in which, in the first part 20 of the twentieth century, Italian public space became the site of a visual strategy of indoctrination rooted in the tradition of nine- teenth-century civic epigraphy. It also reveals how this strategy progressively grew out of the customary formal constraints of inscriptions, producing new models of monumentality. Fascism 25 recognized the full pedagogical potential of visualized words. This awareness, in turn, led to innovative ways of integrating literary and political citations onto public buildings and contributed to a shift in the definition of the citations’ functions and typologies. Contrary to what is commonly assumed in scholarly circles, how- 30 ever, the monumental display of these inscriptions was not a mannerism specifically conjured up for the needs of totalitarian aesthetics, but rather found its roots in the meditated appropria- tion and elaboration of a pre-existing tradition. Following the lead of Walter Benjamin, several scholars have 35 recognized a process of “auraticization” specific to Fascism, interpreted as the “prevalence of form over ethical norms” and as “a position of absolute self-referentiality which inevita- bly led the Regime to privilege in its actions the value of aesthetic worth over claims of any other nature.” 2 While the 40 centrality of aesthetics in the totalitarian ideology of Fascism is not in question here, this article moves beyond the notion that Fascism functioned merely as a massive project of aestheticiza- tion, masking the demise of real political content. Fascism’s aesthetic efficacy, as I hope to demonstrate, was based on a 45 strategy of appropriating not only the visual forms but also the political and cultural content that had structured Italy’s own Q66 national identity. Material history and ideological epiphany The independence and unification of Italy under the Savoy 50 monarchy in 1861 (ultimately completed in 1870 with the con- quest of Rome) was accompanied by the construction of a narrative surrounding national identity that had to be codified and sustained in rhetorical, as well as explicitly visual, terms. The territory of the peninsula soon turned into a politicized 55 space marked by a set of visible presences, such as a series of monuments to the heroes of the Wars of Independence. The monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi erected in 1895 on the Gianicolo (Janiculum) hill in Rome, for instance, represented the appropriation of a public space that had remained, for a 60 millennium, under the absolute authority of the pope (figure 1). 3 On the Gianicolo, in 1849, Garibaldi had heroically fought Q15 the French Army in defense of the Roman Republic. The Roman population now interpreted his equestrian statue, visible from the pope’s apartments, as a memento of the new Italian state’s 65 sovereignty against the Vatican’s resurgent territorial ambitions. 4 In the parliamentary debates that led to the construction of the monument, Garibaldi’s long-time friend Francesco Crispi expli- citly revealed the political connection between monument and site. For him, monuments to “Italian glories” should be “con- 70 centrated in the capital as reminders needed in order to confront a past that has not yet completely disappeared and against which we still have to fight.” And, even more clearly, he also stated: The monument to Garibaldi in Rome is not solely a memor- ial to a great hero; it’s a permanent sign in a city that is not 75 only the capital of Italy, but also, as you all know, still today the capital of the Catholic world. 5 The new cult of heroes invested Q47 not only the visual space but also the linguistic identity of the Italians. The term Duce (leader, WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 34, NO. 3, JULY–SEPTEMBER 2018 251 https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2018.1436381 # 2018 Taylor & Francis