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50 Chapter 3 History and Hygiene in Mussolini’s Rome, 1925–1938 At the Istituto di Studi Romani, the regime and classical scholars had come together to recast the relationship between the Roman past and the Fascist present. This new “historic imaginary” (in the words of Claudio Fogu) was not confined to intellectual production; it was also meant to be actuated materially, through the transformation of the Roman landscape.1 The classic statement of the regime’s ambitions for the capital remains Mussolini’s speech installing the new governor of Rome in December 1925. Speaking “in the Roman style, its concision befitting the solemn romanità of this ceremony,” the Duce laid out his vision of a capital renewed by the dynamic forces of Fascism’s new Italy.2 Within five years, he announced, the regime would create a city that was “a marvel to all the peoples of the world: vast, ordered, powerful, as it was during the first empire of Augustus.”3 This transformation would be accomplished through an ambitious program of urban renewal and archaeological excavation. Besides creating new streets, parks, and gardens and making hygienic improvements, Fascism would rescue the monumental remains of antiquity “from the oblivion of silence.”4 Mussolini called upon the governor to liberate the trunk of the great oak from all that still constrains it. Create space around the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Theater of Marcellus, the Capitoline,the Pantheon. All that has grown up over the centuries HISTORY AND HYGIENE IN MUSSOLINI’S ROME 51 of decadence must disappear. Within five years, the dome of the Pantheon must be visible from Piazza Colonna, through a great passage. Also liberate the majestic temples of Christian Rome from parasitic and profane constructions. The millennial monuments of our history must loom in necessary solitude.5 The valorization of the city’s ancient monuments, and their “liberation” from the excrescence of the centuries, were key ingredients in the larger project of creating “a monumental Rome of the twentieth century . . . to be renewed continually,in order to transmit it to future generations as an inheritance from the Fascist era.”6 But what was this “twentieth-century Rome” meant to look like? How would the modern age be inscribed upon an urban fabric produced over thousands of years? Would the new Rome resemble the great metropolises of Europe and America, or would it express a distinctly Italian conception of the contemporary city? And how would the capital be not only modernized but Fascistized—how would it reflect the rejuvenated spirit of Mussolini’s “New Italy”? These questions are complex, and have provoked voluminous scholarship. The classic account remains Antonio Cederna’s Mussolini urbanista (1979), which diligently chronicled the clearing and gutting, the clumsiness and single-mindedness, that marked archaeology and urban planning under Fascism .7 Later analyses from Borden Painter and Emilio Gentile emphasized the use of architecture in the courting of popular consensus and the promotion of the regime’s “political religion.”8 Most recently, Paul Baxa has advanced a novel interpretation that connects Fascism’s urban vision to the landscape of the Italian front in the First World War.9 What follows in this chapter is not a systematic survey of the regime’s projects in Rome, nor a detailed analysis of these initiatives from the perspective of architecture and urban planning—all of which have been ably accomplished elsewhere. Instead , I am interested in the nexus between Rome-as-idea (that is, romanità, particularly as synthesized at the Istituto di Studi Romani in the twenties and early thirties) and Rome-as-place, as a physical landscape to be shaped. This connection was mutually constitutive:Fascism’s revolutionary,anti-historicist conception of history would be articulated in spatial terms, and leave a permanent imprint on the fabric of the city, while new urban realities helped reinforce and further elaborate romanità as a central tenet of Fascist ideology. Building the “monumental Rome of the twentieth century” therefore involved a reckoning with history,a recasting of the relationship between the city’s past, present, and future. To understand this negotiation, a useful distinction can be made between three different Romes defined both by space 52 EXCAVATING MODERNITY and time:10 Roma nuova, the “new” Rome redeemed and remade by Fascism; Roma antica, the Rome of classical antiquity, and even more specifically the city at the apex of its development during the imperial period;and Roma vecchia , “old Rome,” comprising all aspects of the city that dated from the...

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