Abstract
On October 28, 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III invited Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fascist Party, to form a government. It was a triumphant moment for Mussolini, who had founded the fascist movement only three and a half years before with a few hundred followers in Milan. The movement had taken off by 1920, attracting thousands of adherents, especially veterans of the Great War. Mussolini transformed the movement into a political party that offered Italians a hypernationalism and promised to give Italy new life through a program of internal unity and external strength. Fascism promised its own revolution, but one that would produce a new Italy and new Italians while saving the nation from class warfare and a bloody Bolshevik-style revolution.
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Notes
Robert C. Fried, Planning the Eternal City: Roman Politics and Planning Since World War II (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1973 ): 32.
On the Institute and the cult of romanité see the article by Antonio La Penna, “Il culto della romanità, La rivista ‘Roma’ e Istituto di studi romani,” Italia Contemporanea 217 (December 1999): 605–630.
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Emil Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (Boston: Little, Brown, 1933). The original edition in German appeared in 1932, as did the Italian translation, Colloqui con Mussolini ( Milan: Mondadori, 1932 ).
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© 2005 Borden Painter
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Painter, B.W. (2005). Mussolini’s Obsession with Rome. In: Mussolini’s Rome. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976918_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403976918_1
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