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4. The Totalitarian Museum: The Mostra Augustea della Romanità, 1937–19
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91 Chapter 4 The Totalitarian Museum The Mostra Augustea della Romanità, 1937–1938 Although the archaeological transformation of Rome had uncovered the traces of several different historical periods, it focused especially on one phase of the city’s development: the reign of Augustus, the founder of the empire. In his 1937 essay L’Italia di Augusto e l’Italia di oggi (The Italy of Augustus and the Italy of Today),published by the ISR, Giuseppe Bottai explained why Rome’s first emperor remained such an instructive and inspirational figure for contemporary society.1 Augustus had reformed the political institutions of an ailing republic while respecting the traditional authority of the Senate and the Roman people. He had brought peace to the empire and consolidated Italy into the regions that would eventually form the modern nation-state. He had added to the magnificence of the capital, finding it a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble. Looking back to Rome’s archaic past, he had revived the religious practices and piety that provided the foundation of Roman greatness. Bottai concluded his study by reflecting on his own times: We have thus arrived . . . at that which could be called “the modernity of Augustus,”not through forced propagandistic comparisons,but through some elements of his policies, objectively illustrated and considered ;which is also . . . our own “antiquity.”. . . For us,modern Italians , our history suffuses our understanding of current problems. . . . 92 EXCAVATING MODERNITY Behind the contemporary appearance of our political, social, and economic life, the same factors always loom in our consciousness and in our memory, however distant or remote in time.2 As we have already seen, Bottai believed that the study of history would invigorate present generations and help them to “discover precedents,anticipations and premonitions of our time in the events and figures of the past.”3 His reading of Augustus’s reign therefore meant to demonstrate both the anticipation of twentieth-century modernity in classical antiquity and the restoration of the eternal Roman spirit under the fascio littorio. A comparison between the emperor and the Duce revealed identical goals, methods, and values. Both Augustus and Mussolini had emerged from a situation of civil disorder to reform and renovate decaying political structures; both effected a radical moral transformation of their people while at the same time drawing inspiration from tradition. Crucially, this resemblance involved more than a series of convenient historical parallels. By the end of Bottai’s essay, the boundaries between the “Italy of Augustus” and the “Italy of Today” were completely blurred, any sense of distance in time or space overcome. Augustus was the modern, Mussolini the ancient. L’Italia di Augusto e l’Italia di oggi perfectly encapsulated the Fascist conception of Roman modernity, and it appeared at the moment in which romanità reached a dominant position in the political culture of the regime: the Bimillenario Augusteo of 1937–38, which commemorated the two thousandth anniversary of Augustus’s birth. The celebrations included the excavation of Augustan-era monuments around Italy, including (as seen in the previous chapter) the emperor’s mausoleum and the Ara Pacis in Rome;4 an international conference and scholarly publications organized by the Istituto di Studi Romani; the awarding of bronze statues to cities and towns founded by Augustus and his family;5 and even a series of postage stamps featuring Augustan images and quotations. The centerpiece, however, was the Mostra Augustea della Romanità (MAR, Augustan Exhibition of Romanit à),a vast archaeological exhibition in which,in the words of Mussolini, visitors could “bathe themselves in romanità.” It was a mobilization of state resources and scholarly energies without parallel, and recognized as such by contemporaries. While the past fifteen years had witnessed many reclamations of the Roman spirit, wrote one of the organizers in 1937, the Mostra Augustea would be “the grandest and most convincing expression of this most recent revaluation of romanità,” not only the fruit of scientific ardor or political will but itself an expression of the “continuity and greatness of our race.”6 THE TOTALITARIAN MUSEUM 93 The Augustan bimillenary and the Mostra Augustea are often considered emblematic of Fascism’s increasingly reactionary direction in the mid-1930s, and of the hegemony of classicism after the more adventurous aesthetic policies of the regime’s first decade.7 The exhibition is also critiqued as a travesty of historical science whose primary purpose was “not historical reconstruction , but recruiting the past for the present.”8 Its value as a holy space...