1932

This dissertation aims to present and discuss a cross-section of Italian culture in 1932, a year that marked the tenth anniversary of the march on Rome (the decennale). I propose that the ideas and people associated with the March on Rome (by referring to Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ) possessed an aura that guaranteed authenticity, historical validity and cult value. The decennale, I argue, provided an ideal opportunity to restore, re-create and exhibit a revolutionary aura by consecrating ideas, initiating new members into the fellowship of the State and shocking the nation into a new narrative: a future march from Rome. The first chapter of 1932 focuses on youth as a recurring theme, the debate surrounding the new generation of fascists and the technical means employed at the Exhibition on the Fascist Revolution to transpose the rhetoric and aura of youth onto the new generation of fascists from one medium (literature) to another: a museum walk. The second investigates within official state textbooks the conferral of a radicalized revolutionary aura onto those children born after the March on Rome. The third chapter deals specifically with ideas: "writing" 1932 and the debate on the creation of an aura -based form of realism focused on fascist spirituality. Specifically, it considers the Word celebrated during the Decennale : the definition of fascism in the Enciclopedia Italiana and the manner in which this message was rendered in a new form of media: the film Camicia Nera. The final chapter presents strategies of opposition. It investigates implicit critical dissent in the pages of the literary journal Solaria as a response to the aura -reproducing mechanisms exhibited by the fascist State: Europe vs. cultural autarky, neo-humanism and the dignity of the individual, Myth. A case study of Elio Vittorini's Il Garofano Rosso follows: an assessment by a left-wing fascist intellectual and member of the Solaria network. In the novel Vittorini critically analyzes the first ten years of the fascist revolution and the reality exhibited before him during the Decennale by returning to a form of humanism, albeit of a populist type, with corporativist connotations specific to his experience in Solaria and the historical reality of 1932. Both the celebration of the Decennale and its critical assessment represent a distinct episode in the autobiography of the nation.