Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy

Conclusion

151 Conclusion In the August 1943 edition of Roma, the Istituto di Studi Romani responded to recent dramatic events.1 The Allies had landed in Sicily in early July, and soon thereafter Mussolini was deposed and the Fascist regime dissolved. To Carlo Galassi Paluzzi, the Duce’s downfall was due to his failure to live up to romanità: How many times have the words “Rome”and “romanità”been invoked in proclamations, speeches, announcements, articles, notes, columns and footnotes (not to mention books, plays, even films)? How many times have these two words been pronounced, invoked and employed as an opening salvo or a final peroration? . . . [We] have often tried to warn in our writings, and document with facts, of the risk of falling into anti-historical rhetoric by invoking the idea of Rome and speaking of romanità, without fully realizing the value that these two words can and should still bear.2 Galassi Paluzzi’s attempt to distance the ISR from Fascism demonstrates the bind in which its members suddenly found themselves. The stain of collaboration now marked an entire generation of Italian classicists, archaeologists, and ancient historians. For many, the response was a return to the conservative political milieu whence they had originally come, and in particular to traditional Catholicism and monarchism. Galassi Paluzzi argued that the 152 EXCAVATING MODERNITY only way forward—for Rome and for Italy—was to close ranks around the king and the pope, and pray for the nation’s salvation. The essence of romanit à lay no longer in its revolutionary potential but in “the reverence due to the Throne and the Altar,the exercise of Liberty severely coordinated and subordinated to the supreme exigencies of Authority.”3 The reassertion of Rome’s Catholic character was facilitated by the prominence of Pope Pius XII during the latter stages of the war. As Mussolini’s regime fell apart, the pontiff emerged as a new defensor urbis (defender of the city), protecting Rome against the threat of aerial bombardment and later providing a moral center when it was declared an open city.4 The demise of Fascism and the restored primacy of Roma sacra also forced a reconsideration of romanità. As we have seen, the regime had posited the church largely as a conduit between the eternal values of antiquity and their reassertion in the modern world; after 1943, however, Catholic Rome became the final realization of the Roman spirit. There would be no “Third Rome.”5 This fact was acknowledged even by Giulio Quirino Giglioli,arguably the scholar with the closest ties to Mussolini’s regime. In a contribution to the 1953 volume Roma nobilis (tellingly, edited by Monsignor Igino Cecchetti , a leading figure in the Vatican’s seminary administration), he maintained that there were only two strains of romanità, deriving from classical antiquity and the Holy See. The task of classical studies was no longer to find premonitions or anticipations of modernity, or even to celebrate the glories of the ancients, but “to examine what might have been the virtues of the Latin people before Grace illuminated them, in order to make them worthy of this gift.”6 The monuments of ancient Rome were reinterpreted to emphasize the providential function of the empire. For example, the Ara Pacis—central to the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore, one of the regime’s most ambitious projects—was transformed from a symbol of pagan empire to an expression of the Pax Romana that permitted the birth of Christ, “a most fragile and exquisite monument . . . conserved thanks to a genuine intervention of Divine Providence.”7 With the fall of Fascism, then, Roma sacra definitively triumphed over Roma capitale and Roma Mussolinea. Perhaps because so many scholars quickly turned to conservative Catholicism , the de-Fascistization of their ranks was minimal.8 With the Allied occupation of Rome in 1944, Carlo Galassi Paluzzi resigned as director of the ISR and was replaced by the Christian Democrat and anti-Fascist partisan Quinto Tossati. In his 1947 report to the Ministry of Public Instruction,Tossati wrote that “once all the rhetorical and propagandistic layers of the old regime (in which the Institute was very much conspicuous) have been stripped away,” the ISR would remain a worthy and productive contributor to the CONCLUSION 153 field of classical studies.9 Tosatti’s efforts at “stripping away”the Fascist legacy were minimal; by 1951, the institute’s directing committee still included the likes of Antonio Maria Colini (second-in-command at the Mostra Augustea della Romanità and the...