9
La Parola al Piccone
Demonstrations of Fascism at the Imperial Fora and the Mausoleum of Augustus
STEPHANIE ZEIER PILAT
Although Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) and Italian Fascism (1922–1943) are linked to the city of Rome in our collective consciousness today, the relationship between the regime and its capital was not always a straightforward one. Mussolini initially fashioned himself a political outsider, the leader of a band of angry revolutionaries who opposed the political culture and bureaucratic institutions of Rome. When he founded the Fascist Party in 1919, the First World War had weakened an already fragile state. Inflation, a decrease in factory production, rising unemployment, and the thousands of soldiers returning home from war fostered a volatile social climate in the years following the war. Throughout 1921 and 1922, successive prime ministers formed and dissolved governments—often after just a few months in office. Mussolini’s Fascist Party was envisioned as a counter to the existing political culture, a new movement that channeled the anger of the disaffected. Just as Republican Turks sought to distance themselves from the culture of Istanbul when creating a capital in Ankara or American Tea Party activists rail against the perceived corruption and stagnation “inside the beltway” of Washington, DC, the Fascists pointed to Rome as the root cause of the nation’s problems, not as the potential solution. As a 1925 article entitled “Rome in the thought of Benito Mussolini” explained, “Until recently, it was a sign of a strong spirit to speak ill of Rome: parasite of other regions, beggar of the state, at the service of employees, city of slackers and boarding houses.”1 References to the government, state employees, and the physical city of Rome were almost interchangeable in this early Fascist rhetoric. Revolutionary action, according to Fascists, was necessitated by what they perceived as a feeble and ineffective central government in Rome. Despite this antipathy toward the physical and cultural landscape of the capital, taking control of Rome and her institutions was, from the beginning, a central goal of the Fascists. Rome was still the famed historic capital of the peninsula and they never seriously imagined creating a new capital elsewhere. Indeed, on October 24, 1922, at a gathering of 40,000 Fascists in Naples, a plan was hatched to march on Rome the following week. Mussolini, fearing that the plan would fail, did not take part in the March on Rome. When the rather unorganized and ill-equipped Fascists did enter the capital on October 28 a weary King Vittorio Emmanuelle III (1869–1947) did not direct the army to act against them; instead the King invited Mussolini to Rome and asked him to form a new government as prime minister.
The Fascists’ ascendance to power created a dilemma for the three-year-old movement: how could the young and idealistic men who were drawn to Fascism by its radical rhetoric avoid being corrupted by what they perceived to be a stagnant and bureacratic capital? For a force so vehemently opposed to the government to assume leadership of that very government was problematic; the vast power of the institutions of the capital threatened to dilute and defile the strength and character of the anti-establishment movement. The Fascists had to devise ways to resist succumbing to the capital’s influence or at least ways to demonstrate that they were transforming the culture of Rome and not the other way around. Moreover, as the angry young men who marched on the city in 1922 grew into middle-aged family men with secure government jobs, the problem worsened. As Christopher Duggan describes the situation in the 1930s, “The fascist party was a corrupt clientelistic machine, run by dull middle-aged placemen; the bureaucracy was inefficient; and everywhere cynicism and indifference seemed rife.”2 Because the Fascists had evolved into the very type of authority they had so strongly opposed, the need to distinguish themselves from their predecessors became increasingly important. As a consequence, over the more than two decades of Fascist rule, the urban landscape of the capital became a canvas upon which the regime sought to express its revolutionary roots. Physical interventions in Rome’s urban fabric became a central means through which the regime demonstrated that it was still aggressively and even violently acting on Rome. A broad range of construction, demolition, and renovation projects were undertaken in the capital during the Fascist era including roads, rail lines, post offices, ministry buildings, administrative offices, a new university, and a new sports complex, the Foro Mussolini. New neighborhoods, such as the Garbatella, and villages outside the city center, like Primavalle, were built to house the influx of Italians seeking work in the capital as well as those displaced by the many construction projects in the historic center. While all of the projects effectively demonstrated Fascist action, certain projects had particular symbolic and political associations.3
Among the most important sites for demonstrating the regime’s revolutionary streak were those connected to the city’s imperial legacy, particularly the Imperial Fora and the Mausoleum of Augustus, where large swaths of urban fabric were removed in order to “liberate” the ancient ruins below. Not only were the two sites of international interest and centrally located, they enabled archaeologists and architects to symbolically connect the imperial ambitions of the Fascist state to the Roman Empire. Mussolini played an active role in shaping the final designs and promoting the work at both sites as signs of progress, but such politicization of imperial sites was hardly new. As Gregor Kalas explains in chapter 2 of this volume, third-century reconstructions in the forum had provided a means for the reigning tetrarchy to connect themselves to Augustus.4 Moreover, through building projects in the forum, the tetrarchy sought to “vanquish the immanent decay inherent in the passage of time,” just as the Fascists sought to renew the capital both physically and culturally centuries later.5 Given the vested political significance of imperial sites and the Fascists’ use of them in the modern era, an examination of how the work at the two sites was represented presents an opportunity to consider the question posed by Adam T. Smith:
How do polities emerge as landscapes—as experientially discrete territories, as places perceived to evoke enduring commitments of people to land and as imagined accounts of the sources of enduring attachments between subjects and regimes rooted in space and time?6
How, in other words, did the Fascists reshape the historic landscape of their capital city as a means to inspire dedication and attachment to the regime by those Italians hungry for an aggressive approach to transforming Italy?
Spiro Kostof and Italo Insolera have documented the modern history of planning and construction at the two sites.7 Kostof argues that Mussolini’s interest in reclaiming and restoring ancient sites in Rome was connected to his imperial ambitions as well as growing out of the perceived need for “better circulation, slum clearance, and the curbing of unemployment.”8 In what follows, I build on Kostof and Insolera’s work through a close reading of the ways in which the process of demolition and reconstruction at the Imperial Fora and mausoleum were represented in journal and newspaper articles. Using Smith’s analytical categories of experience, perception, and imagination,9 I highlight how interventions at the Imperial Fora and Mausoleum of Augustus sites became central to a campaign of the imagination as the Fascists sought to display their aggressive and active nature. In other words, while shaping experiences and perceptions were certainly key drivers of the work, an analysis of the representations of the work reveals how exploiting the imaginative potential of the projects grew increasingly important as the Fascists sought to continually demonstrate their revolutionary character.
In the case of Fascist Rome, the maintenance of power and legitimacy was secured not simply by building new palaces or institutions, but also by reshaping the existing landscape of the historic capital. In this sense, work in Fascist Rome paralleled similar developments in Tehran in the 1930s as detailed by Talinn Grigor (chapter 10, this volume).10 In both cases reconstruction and demolition became influential vehicles through which authority was translated into an imagined understanding of history and progress illustrating how, as Smith argues, “authority is practiced through rather than within landscapes.”11 In the case of Rome, one of the reasons the demolition and reconstruction work at historic sites took on such importance for the regime was because they were able to help bridge some of the ideological contradictions of Fascism by reflecting both conservative and progressive tendencies. As Jeffrey Schnapp argues, it was precisely the need to paper over the philosophical poverty and internal contradictions of Fascism that made cultural representations of critical importance to the regime:
Neither monolithic nor homogeneous, Fascism’s aesthetic overproduction relied upon the ability of images to sustain contradiction and to make of paradox a productive principle. Hence the rhetorical figure that (perhaps inevitably) lurks at the core of every analysis of the Fascist phenomenon: oxymoron.12
It was this lack of a clear and precise meaning in aesthetic productions that enabled the Fascists to present themselves as both modern and traditional as well as progressive and conservative. The meaning of the remaking of the landscape of Rome was not simply embodied in the projects themselves but equally in the ways in which the work was staged and represented. Tracing the evolution of representations over the course of the work at the Imperial Fora and Mausoleum of Augustus illustrates how the balance between the conservative and the progressive strands of Fascism shifted as the regime matured. By the late 1930s, the modern and destructive side of the work often overshadowed the ancient value and historic significance linked to resurrecting the Empire. As a case study of how a political power is manifest in capital landscapes, this examination of the interventions undertaken at Rome’s imperial sites in the 1930s illustrates the importance that process and representations can have in terms of framing and clarifying the meaning of demolition and reconstruction projects in the collective imagination.
The Imperial Fora
When Mussolini was appointed prime minister in 1922, the site of Rome’s Imperial Fora, located between the Capitoline Hill and the Colosseum, was buried beneath a working-class neighborhood and cow pasture. The area north of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine had been built up with a maze of narrow streets and dense urban fabric much like that still found today in the Monti area nearby. Beneath the neighborhood lay the ruins of the Imperial Fora of Caesar, Augustus, Nervi, Trajan, and Vespian. The adjoining stretch of land, site of the Roman Forum, was largely an open field. The lack of new development in the area was not due to a shortage of ideas on the part of planners and politicians. Between 1871, when Rome became the capital of the newly unified Italy, and the Fascist ascent to power in 1922, planners had regularly proposed to clean up and reorganize the city in order to make it once again fit to serve as a national capital.13 Master plans published by the city in 1873, 1883, and 1909 generally focused on minor alterations to the Imperial Fora area, such as widening streets and rebuilding select dilapidated structures. The concept behind this type of intervention, diradamento (“thinning”), called for preserving as much of the urban fabric as possible while making small and calculated interventions where necessary.14 Initially, leading architects supported this approach and the first plan for the Imperial Fora area completed under Fascist rule in 1925–1926 reflected the diradamento concept.
The contextually sensitive approach to the Imperial Fora area did not last long under Fascism. In the second version of the 1925–1926 plan a dramatic shift in concept is evident: planners proposed demolishing the entire neighborhood atop the Imperial Fora. Demolition work began shortly thereafter, despite the fact that the 1925–1926 plan never became law. In 1932 a detailed plan for the area was published; it proposed the demolition of a wide swath of urban fabric to make way for the reconstruction of the Imperial Fora and the construction of a new avenue designed to link Rome to the hills beyond, the Via dell’Impero.15 Much of this demolition work was, however, already complete. In all 5,500 dwellings were destroyed when the area was cleared. Certain ancient monuments, such as the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine and the Markets of Trajan, were singled out for preservation or reconstruction. Three churches, however, were included in the demolition plans.16
Ultimately, the concept of diradamento did not guide urban interventions into the imperial landscape of the capital. Instead, a new approach, sventramento (“disemboweling”) empowered designers and archaeologists to remove massive chunks of the urban fabric in order to maintain or resurrect other structures. Instead of a careful assessment of the existing urban fabric and localized interventions, sventramento allowed grand visions for the Fascist capital to guide designs. The demolition of the existing neighborhood was followed by the rapid construction of the new Via dell’Impero. Many of the relics of ancient Rome, which had only recently emerged from beneath the earth, were almost immediately buried under the dirt and paved over for the new road.
Adam T. Smith defines the experiential sense of the term political landscape as “an experience of form that shapes how we move through created environments.”17 In the case of the Imperial Fora, the experience of this newly transformed landscape was dominated by the enormous modern road running through the historic site, reflecting a particular appraisal of history. Through their shaping of experience, the Fascists expressed which periods and parcels of history were valued—the ancient and especially the imperial—and which histories were viewed as disposable—the medieval and the working class. Their approach gave preference to modernization projects at the expense of preserving the urban fabric and, in certain places, at the expense of preserving antiquity. The route and size of the new Via dell’Impero illustrates this privileging of modern traffic needs most clearly, as it was designed largely irrespective of the existing neighborhood it replaced or the monuments of ancient Rome below it. As Spiro Kostof has noted, the path of the Via dell’Impero cuts diagonally across the orthogonally arranged fora. Furthermore, the new road was vast; it was 30 m wide and 900 m long, and it covered between half and three-quarters of what was initially excavated on the site. Both the existing neighborhood and the ancient monuments were to submit to the new Rome, not the other way around.18 The experience of the Fora area today is still dominated by the vastness of the road, which plows directly through the archaeological sites.
Smith defines the perceptual sense of political landscapes as “a sensibility evoking responses in subjects through perceptual dimensions of physical space.”19 Perceptions of the Imperial Fora area were shaped in part through the staging of events on the site. On October 28, 1932, the tenth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome, Mussolini inaugurated the Via dell’Impero. Fascist troops, who had first entered the city ten years earlier, marched in triumph down the new road constructed at the behest of their leader. For those who may not have immediately read the ongoing work as an illustration of Fascist action and power, the anniversary march and rallies such as that celebrating Hitler’s 1938 visit served to frame understandings of the work and explicate meanings. The coupling of the transformed landscape and the human action on site became a powerful means through which the regime sought to solidify the connections between themselves and the historic legacy of the city. Such events in and of themselves, however, reached a limited audience; only through representations in the media were these events broadcast to an international audience. Newsreels and newspaper accounts communicated the Fascist events at the Imperial Fora to the world, planting the seeds for the interconnectedness of the regime and its construction site: the capital.
Leading up to the inauguration of the site, another type of event featured prominently in press accounts: the demolition and reconstruction work itself. The way in which the process of transforming the capital was showcased in the press reflected the regime’s attempt not only to shape perceptions of the site but also to define the relationship between the ancient Roman Empire and the Fascist regime in the collective imagination. It is in these representations of the process that Smith’s third analytical category, imagination, which he defines as “an imaginative aesthetic guiding representation of the world at hand,” comes into play.20 An examination of these representations shows that although it would be easy to read the work at the Imperial Fora as primarily guided by desires to shape visitors’ experiences or perceptions of the sites, characterizing the nature of the regime in the imagination was equally important. The shifting and relative importance of preserving antiquity, providing for modern traffic needs, and staging Fascist action was illustrated in articles published in the journal of the city of Rome, Capitolium, throughout the 1920s and 1930s.21 Over a period of fourteen years (1927–1941), accounts in the journal evolve from a documentary approach to a propagandistic framing of the work. In both the early and late articles the historic significance of these two sites is evident; what changes over this period is the increasing focus on showcasing the work itself as a demonstration of Fascist aggression.
One of the earliest articles about the work at the Imperial Fora is the November 1928 story entitled “Un Visita di S.E. il Capo del Governo ai Lavori in Corso per la Grandezza dell’Urbe,” which documented Mussolini’s annual visit to the ongoing works at the Fora.22 The visit was also the occasion for Mussolini’s announcement of a broader vision for Rome, one that would be driven not only by necessity, but also by grandeur.23 Photographs show Mussolini walking among the ruins with government officials and workers (figure 9.1). The photographs highlight the process of reconstruction by capturing the site with men at work amidst piles of construction materials. Overall, however, the 1928 photos have a documentary quality rather than a fully propagandistic tone about them. They appear less staged and more natural than those that follow. Although both imperial history and Fascist action are present, the meaning could be subject to different interpretations.
Figure 9.1. Mussolini’s visit to the work at the Imperial Fora. (From Capitolium, 1928)
Four years later the November 1932 issue of Capitolium was entirely dedicated to the construction of two new roads, the Via del Mare on the opposing side of the Capitoline Hill and the Via dell’Impero. These two roads had originally been conceived of as twins, both leading directly from the heart of Rome, the Piazza Venezia, out to the sea and the surrounding hills. Instead of the usual handful of articles in each issue, the November issue included just two articles. The first, “La Via dell’Impero e La Via del Mare,” by Antonio Muñoz, was thirty-five pages long and included fifty photographs of the ongoing work.24 While some of the photographs were of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine or views from the Via dell’Impero, the majority of images in the issue depicted the ongoing work and included half-demolished buildings and piles of rubble and construction materials (figure 9.2). At first glance, it is difficult to see the photos of the ongoing work as illustrations of progress, for the photographed area looks as if it has been violently ripped apart or bombed. In fact, however, the glorification of violent destruction, which had roots in Italian Futurism, was part of the ideological foundation of Fascism.
Figure 9.2. Demolition underway at the Imperial Fora. (From Capitolium, 1932)
Recalling the creed of Italian Futurism helps shed light on the destructive underpinnings of Fascism as related to aesthetics. Started in 1909 by the poet Fillippo Marinetti, the Italian Futurist movement sought to propel Italy forward through the violent destruction of the past. From the beginning, Marinetti and the Futurists linked aesthetics and violence celebrating, for example, “war as the only true hygiene of the world.”25 Marinetti joined Mussolini’s Fascist Party after the First World War and shared with it a similar understanding of how to advance Italian society.26 According to this shared concept of progress, the obsession with the past in Italy was preventing the nation from advancing. In order for society to move forward, Marinetti called for the destruction of all vestiges of history writing: “Away and set fire to the bookshelves! . . . Turn the canals and flood the vaults of museums! . . . Oh! Let the glorious old pictures float adrift! Seize the pickax and hammer! Sap the foundations of the venerable towns!”27
Futurists’ and Fascists’ bonds were formed in part by their shared belief in the positive potential of violence and destruction. The Fascist concept of progress differed, however, from Marinetti’s in that not all of history had to be destroyed in order to move the nation forward; but rather select parts of the past warranted destruction while others warranted recovery and resurrection.28
The Futurist aestheticization of violence and its connection to Fascism help us make sense of the curious depictions of the work at the Imperial Fora. Instead of celebrating the final product or designs, the photographs of the work showcase the process and aftermath of demolition as a sign of progress. This glorification of destruction can be seen in a pair of “before” and “during” photographs included in the 1932 article (figure 9.3). The “before” photograph shows a clean and orderly piazza with buildings neatly lining the edges. The “during” photograph depicts a huge pile of rubble spilling into the Piazza out of a partially demolished building. Whereas people are absent in the first photo, in the second photo, people and cars are busy moving about the site. These two photographs illustrate that the traditional “before and after” pairing has been subverted; the “after” here is not an improved, orderly, or finished piazza but is rather one actively being destroyed.
Figure 9.3. Photographs of the Piazza Montanara before (top) and during (bottom) demolition. (From Capitolium, 1934)
The national newspaper, Corriere della Sera, also covered the work at the Imperial Fora. Watercolor illustrations of the site graced the front covers of the paper’s Sunday supplement, La Domenica del Corriere, on both the ninth and twenty-third of October 1932. The fact that the work would feature so prominently in the national press during the weeks leading up to the tenth anniversary of Fascism indicates that it was to be perceived as one of the major accomplishments of the regime. The October ninth cover, for example, depicts robust men hauling buckets, shoveling dirt, pulling wheelbarrows, and swinging pickaxes (figure 9.4). The caption describes the work:
The final work at one of the most significant projects that will be inaugurated in Rome on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The new street that traverses the imperial forum leading from the Vittoriano to the Colosseum joins the monument of the new Italy to the most famous monument of ancient Rome.29
Figure 9.4. La Domenica del Corriere cover from October 9, 1932.
Despite the mention of the Imperial Fora and the Colosseum in the caption, there are no remnants of antiquity pictured in the illustration. The foreground and middle ground of the image depict a flat plain of dirt, free of the pieces of gigantic columns and bits of ancient walls one might have expected to see. In the background the enormous white Vittoriano stands out among a grouping of smaller buildings in shades of brown. Looking at the picture, what grabs the viewer’s attention is not the architecture or site at all, but rather the bodies in action. Whereas the dirt is a washed-out cream color, the sky is light blue, and the buildings are muted tones, the working men wear bright colors: one wears a bright yellow shirt with a red bandana, while others are in hot pink and bright blue. This color scheme draws the eye first to the contrasting colors the men are wearing and second to their active bodies. Instead of portraying the work at the Imperial Fora as a resurrection of Rome’s ancient heritage by showcasing the relics of that past, the cover illustration highlights the Fascist accomplishments at the site: the ruins of antiquity are absent, allowing the workers’ bodies in action to take center stage.
The Domenica del Corriere cover illustration from the twenty-third of October, just days before the inauguration of the Via dell’Impero, is also a watercolor painting (figure 9.5). Mussolini stands among a group of construction workers on the site, looking to his right side at a construction worker who is standing on higher ground with one arm raised. Other workers in the foreground have their right arms raised in a salute as well. The crowd behind Mussolini is a sea of arms and shovels protruding up into the air. Further in the background more men stand with arms and shovels raised amid the backdrop of the Colosseum. The title reads:
The periodic visit of Mussolini to the grandiose works of renovation in the capital, undertaken according to his will, raised the enthusiasm of the workers. Days ago the laborers working to pave the great street next to the Colosseum gathered, cheering around the Duce and improvising a warm demonstration.30
Figure 9.5. La Domenica del Corriere cover from October 23, 1932.
The caption focuses on the people involved, the Colosseum, and the new road but does not mention the Imperial Fora on the site. Unlike the earlier cover illustration, this one clearly draws attention to the historic significance of the site by placing the Colosseum in the center of the background. Yet, whereas the buildings and ground are muted tones, the workers are once again in active poses and dressed in bright colors, with six of the most visible workers in colorfully striped shirts. The Colosseum stands silent and passive in the background acting primarily as a means of orienting the viewer to the site.
The visibility of the workers’ bodies in these depictions brings to mind David Horn’s account of how, through the rise of the social domain and its attendant technologies such as censuses, social work, and urban planning, the bodies of individual subjects became sites of intervention and control for the Fascist government. The body of the state and the individual became interdependent and were often imagined and discussed almost interchangeably. “Organismic and corporeal metaphors,” according to Horn, “permitted a productive slippage among the discourses of the biological sciences, social sciences, and nationalism, and a blurring of the boundaries of their objects: the biological individual, the population, society, and the nation.”31
The development of the social sciences during this period thus enabled a newfound connection between an individual body and the nation through the concept of the social body. Managing individual bodies in terms of disease, hygiene, housing, and reproduction became a potential responsibility of government, and employment was among the social interests that government could influence. In fact, creating jobs was one of the key justifications for the construction projects undertaken in the capital. Fascist power was being translated into individual bodies at work, which came to symbolize a productive nation moving forward. Furthermore, Mussolini’s presence among the workers reminds us that it is through his authority that reconstruction occurs.
Together the published images of the work at the Imperial Fora in both Capitolium and Domenica del Corriere demonstrate that the depictions of the work gradually focused more on the process of demolition and the human action on the site than on the historic value of the ruins being recovered. At the Imperial Fora, the need to stage and glorify Fascist action had begun to outweigh preservation concerns even when it came to the most significant archaeological sites. The imaginative potential of the site as a means to represent “the world at hand” and Fascist identity in that world had begun to be realized.32 This approach would grow more intense at the Mausoleum of Augustus as the Fascists turned their attention toward an expansion of their empire and a celebration of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus.
The Mausoleum of Augustus
Located near the Tiber River on the northern side of the historic city center, the Mausoleum of Augustus, built starting in 28 BCE, is a massive set of stacked cylindrical forms. By 1922, the area around the mausoleum was made up of a mixture of early modern and nineteenth-century buildings, including three churches. During the long span of time between Augustus’s death in 14 CE and the era of Fascism, centuries of additions and reconstructions had left the original structure of the mausoleum barely visible. Over the centuries, the mausoleum had housed a circus, hanging gardens, a bullring, and finally in the nineteenth century one of Rome’s largest concert halls, which was built directly on top of the cylindrical base. The ground plane of the city of Rome rose over the centuries, leaving the original floor level of the mausoleum well beneath the streets and sidewalks of the modern city that grew around it.
The area surrounding the Mausoleum of Augustus was regularly the target of development plans in the early decades of Rome’s modern reign as capital.33 As with many other proposals for the rapidly growing city, the twin justifications for intervention were usually characterized as traffic and “hygiene”—meaning slum clearance. Early plans, published in Capitolium, proposed calculated interventions: demolishing select buildings surrounding the mausoleum, cutting new arteries through the dense urban fabric to connect nearby streets, and renovating rather than removing the concert hall. The first official plan completed after Mussolini’s ascendance, in 1925–1926, maintained this considered approach, focusing on traffic and clearing away select buildings. Marcello Piacentini, a leading Roman architect, was involved in the 1925–1926 plan for the site and designed a renovation proposal for the auditorium inside the mausoleum.34 Thus, in the early years of Fascist rule it was not evident that Augustus’s tomb would ultimately be returned to its original state; it was after all a functioning auditorium.
One of the earliest indications that political perception was to play a greater role in the design of the site was the first officially Fascist design of the area by the Federazione Fascista dell’Urbe (figure 9.6). Designed by Enrico Del Debbio, the plan diagram depicts ideal viewing points and cones of vision using dashed lines, revealing that the architect was carefully considering how the monument would be best viewed. Thus by 1927, the mausoleum was beginning to be conceived of as a meaningful monument, which would necessitate careful staging. It was around the same time that the idea of removing the concert hall and returning the mausoleum to a ruin began to be discussed by archaeologists such as Gugliemo Gatti and Antonio Colini.35 The desire for reconstruction of the ancient monument as a symbol of empire was beginning to take precedence over the usefulness of the concert hall, which had been in use since the nineteenth century. In other words, desired perceptions were dictating the experience of the site. As a consequence, Del Debbio envisioned the mausoleum as an object in space to be viewed by spectators from particular points. The perceptual and symbolic importance of the site was further illustrated by a 1932 plan, which departed from earlier designs in two significant ways. First, it proposed returning the mausoleum to a ruinous state. Second, while previous designs left some of the buildings that surrounded the Piazzale virtually untouched, the 1932 plan proposed a more sweeping intervention: for the first time the whole area of the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore was envisioned as a sort of Fascist stage set for the emerging ruin of the mausoleum. At a minimum, new façades for surrounding buildings were to be constructed so that all of the buildings would appear compositionally unified. Many of the surrounding buildings were to be demolished and replaced by new ones. The only exceptions were the three surrounding churches.36 Thus the design of the area reflected a desire to shape perceptions of the site by surrounding the ancient tomb with modern Fascist constructions, thereby joining the two moments in history.
The architect Vittorio Morpurgo developed the final changes to the design with suggestions from the city government and from Mussolini himself. Morpurgo retained much from the previous plans, including the scope of the area plan and the goal of returning the mausoleum to a ruin. He also investigated numerous solutions regarding which direction the site would face, but it was Mussolini who ultimately decided that the site should face the river, requiring the demolition of a block between the mausoleum and the site, which had only recently been constructed. Mussolini later further instructed that the Augustan altar of peace, the Ara Pacis, be relocated to the site adjoining the river.37 The ancient altar commemorated Emperor Augustus’s victorious conquests and framed these ancient conflicts as necessary for and leading to a period of peace. Since the late 1920s Mussolini had asserted that colonial expansion was necessary in order for Italy to deal with its own overpopulation. The more visible location of the Ara Pacis chosen by Mussolini provided a tangible illustration of Mussolini’s own attempts to connect colonial expansion to peace through the site design. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, for example, was promoted as a means for the nation to achieve peace and stability, an argument echoed by the ancient altar commemorating peace won through war. The visual emphasis on the ruin of the mausoleum framed by Fascist buildings and the addition of the Ara Pacis to the site highlighted the ways in which the project was being used to frame understandings and shape perceptions of the relationship between Fascism and the imperial history of Rome.38
The press coverage of the demolition and reconstruction work at the Mausoleum site was more far reaching, reflecting an aim of defining Fascism in the collective imagination as violent and assertive. In addition to documenting the planning process, the press coverage highlighted the demolition and construction process at the mausoleum from 1935 to 1941, when the work was completed. Depictions of the project reveal how carefully constructed images enabled the Fascists to embody and reflect the paradoxical nature of Fascism. Official newsreels and the journal Capitolium concocted this recipe using three primary imagery types: depictions of demolition and reconstruction underway; wistful and hazy images of the partially recovered mausoleum; and architectural drawings and models of the project.
Mussolini inaugurated the demolition of the buildings surrounding the Mausoleum of Augustus on October 22, 1934. The two-minute-long newsreel of the event, “Inizio delle demolizioni per l’isolamento del Mausoleo di Augusto,” focused on the hidden monument and the action of the men on the site.39 The newsreel began with views through the narrow streets surrounding the imperial tomb. Glimpses of the mausoleum are captured beneath the layers of buildings that developed around it. Mussolini then arrives on the scene and gets to work by first removing loose roof tiles by hand. He then takes up his pickaxe and begins his violent attack on the structure encasing the mausoleum. Close-up footage of Mussolini swinging a pickaxe is interspersed with that of dozens of men swinging their pickaxes and debris falling the long distance to the ground below. Mussolini’s speech at the site did not mention the new buildings that would be constructed around the mausoleum; rather he focused his attention almost exclusively on the demolition. He introduced the theme by reciting the long list of streets that were erased a few years before to make way for the Via dell’Impero and then continued with the corresponding list of those that would be lost with this new demolition project, disparagingly referring to the buildings on the site as “local color.” Mussolini cited the usual concerns of “hygiene” and traffic as well as “beauty” as justification for the destruction of 120 houses.40 The improved flow of traffic was cited as evidence that the project was not purely motivated by archaeological concerns but also by a desire to meet the needs of modern life. The short film reflects the Fascists’ developing talent for using reconstruction projects in the capital to showcase their violent actions toward the landscape of the city; taking center stage is their leader at work.
One of the most notable Capitolium articles about the work at the mausoleum is the coverage of these groundbreaking ceremonies of 1934, which carefully frames the events of the day in print media. The first page of the article on the inauguration of the work shows the Duce swinging a pickaxe next to the heading “La parola al piccone” (“Let the pickaxe speak!”) (figure 9.7). In an accompanying photo, we see dozens of men gathered around Mussolini and scattered across rooftops of the urban landscape, many of whom are swinging picks, actively destroying the “local color” of the capital (figure 9.8). Nowhere is the sense that Fascists are violently attacking the landscape of the capital more clearly articulated than in this photo. As the caption describes, “Il Duce makes the first strike of the pick for the liberation of the Mausoleum of Augustus,” once again reminding us that the work is accomplished through the authority and bodily presence of Mussolini.41
Figure 9.6. The first page of the Capitolium article on the inauguration of the demolition at the Mausoleum of Augustus, 1938.
Comparing the 1934 photograph of Mussolini swinging his pickaxe while surrounded by men engaged in demolition with the 1925 photograph of Mussolini surveying the work at the Imperial Fora illustrates the development in the use of imagery during the decade that separates the two photographs (figures 9.1 and 9.7). The 1925 image captures Mussolini in mid-stride, walking with a group of men in suits among the ancient ruins. The 1934 photograph portrays Mussolini in action with pickaxe raised in mid-swing, surrounded by men on the rooftops of the city. Whereas in the first photograph the group of men walks briskly as politicians might be expected to do, in the second photograph they are physically and violently demolishing the city. Rather than bureaucrats surveying the landscape, the 1934 image pictures revolutionaries attacking the capital. While the 1925 photograph focused closely on a particular scene, the 1934 image, in contrast, stages the Duce’s actions and those of the dozens of men among the unending rooftops of the capital. It is not simply a calculated intervention at a single site, the generic nature of this sea of rooftops suggest a violent assault on the physical landscape of the capital from above. These depictions of the work recall Smith’s description of Urartian monarchs who similarly presented construction as “episodes of conquest, advancing a claim to political legitimacy based on the power of the king to subdue the ‘wilderness’ and call forth an ordered landscape.”42 In this case, the “wilderness” being subdued was the devious and disorderly urban fabric of the capital. Images and newsreels of Mussolini leading a band of Fascists swinging pickaxes were evidence of the Duce’s power to discipline and order the landscape of the city.
Figure 9.7. Mussolini center stage swinging the pickaxe to demolish buildings around the Mausoleum of Augustus. (From Capitolium, 1938)
While such portraits of the demolition were perhaps the most obvious indications of the destructive and revolutionary nature of the regime, other types of imagery communicated different facets of the broader message—that Fascism was advancing a dramatic transformation of Italian political culture. The 1937 article, “Augusteo Romantico,” for example, includes a series of somewhat hazy photographs of the mausoleum with piles of rubble and partially demolished buildings (figure 9.8). People are absent from the photographs, creating an eerie sense of timelessness. Other depictions of the process provide similar hints of the human action involved without including any actors. A photograph published in 1937, for example, shows the site with a pile of rubble or debris in the foreground, cranes in the background and stacks of building materials in the center (Figure 9.9). These atmospheric depictions suggest that reconstruction of the mausoleum is indicative of greater cultural and physical shifts that were, in these suspended moments, quietly unfolding. By capturing the physical transformation of the historic city, the images recall the palingenetic myth of Fascism as defined by Roger Griffin, “At the heart of palingenetic political myth lies the belief that contemporaries are living through or about to live through a ‘sea-change,’ a ‘water-shed’ or ‘turning-point’ in this historical process.”43 The photographs capture sites frozen in time, suspended in a moment of pause as if the actors had just exited the stage. The evocative quality of such images transforms the project from a normal construction site into an allusion to an unfolding “sea-change” and projects this moment beyond the site as an imaginative tool.
Figure 9.8. The opening page of an article on the work underway at the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore. (From Capitolium, 1937)
Figure 9.9. Photograph of the work underway at the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore. (From Capitolium, 1937)
Other articles pointed more directly to how the work was to be interpreted by exploiting the symbolic potential of the site and overtly linking the ancient empire to the modern one. A 1938 article, for example, closes with these words, “a religious silence reigns on the isolated and high plateau of the sacred urn of the founder of the ancient empire where the people can gather together to listen to the words of the founder of the new Italian empire.”44 Through the decisive words and actions of Mussolini, “the founder of the new Italian empire,” the sacred site and its apparitions were being properly honored. By the late 1930s the decision had already been made to return the mausoleum to a ruin and there was no longer any mention of the functioning concert hall. In fact, the reconstruction was posited as a project to rescue the monument from grotesque accretions surrounding the mausoleum. Anna Notaro has analyzed the way in which the work at the mausoleum and the 1937 exhibition commemorating the bimillennial of Augustus were used to reflect the newly established peace with the Catholic Church.45 Indeed, the reverent and sacred overtones in such depictions illustrate how the representations of the work drew on religious traditions and sentiment to evoke a connection to a broader worldview in which the ancient empire was being resurrected through Fascism.
Architectural drawings and models constituted a third featured type of imagery represented in the Capitolium articles. A 1935 article on the site included dramatic photographs of an architectural model of the project, showcasing the new piazza formed by the three churches.46 Publishing the models, sketches, and architectural drawings turned the process of design itself into an exhibition of Fascist visions and plans. These articles provided evidence that the Fascists were always simultaneously destroying, building, and planning for their next project. A new feature introduced in Capitolium in 1937 further indicated the ongoing importance of such architectural schemes: each issue began featuring a proposed plan of an area of the city as the last page of the journal. By concluding every issue with future plans, readers would have been given the clear sense that the work in the capital was never complete. Just as the Fascist revolution was supposed to be perpetual, so too were the Fascist actions on the urban landscape of the capital. In the collective imagination, the Fascists were always at work somewhere and, at the same time, planning their next attack on the city.
Conclusions
A 1933 New York Times article reveals that the goal of presenting the work in Rome as indicative of the nature of the Fascist regime was at least partially successful. In “Mussolini Builds a Rome of the Caesars,” Valentine Thomson explains, “work is Mussolini’s gospel. His creed, which is action, demands immediate and tangible results.”47 Thus for a time, the work undertaken at the two sites and the representations in the press were understood, even by outsiders, as a demonstration of the action-oriented character of the regime. Yet Smith reminds us that the modern relationship among landscapes and the bodies of subjects and rulers is often quite different than that portrayed through Fascist representations of demolition and construction.
Smith’s analysis of two depictions of authority—one ancient and one modern—illustrates the differences between modern and ancient means of constituting political authority through landscapes. Smith compares a reconstruction of Queen Puabi of Ur’s death pit (ca. 3000 BCE, reconstructed in 1928) to Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of an electric chair (1965). The queen’s death pit was filled with the sacrificed bodies of humans and animals surrounding the queen’s corpse; it illustrates the physical connection between the body of the ruler and those of the subjects. Moreover, the queen’s death pit concretely located authority both in space and in the body of the queen. Warhol’s silkscreen of the electric chair, in contrast, was eerily absent of any human activity or even bodies of subjects or rulers. As Smith explains, Warhol’s modern portrait of authority is “profoundly unlocatable, simultaneously nowhere and everywhere”48 in stark contrast to the firmly grounded ancient death pit. The clear differences between these two portraits of the relationship among authority, the bodies of subjects, and space highlight the ways in which the constitution of political authority has changed in the modern era. Warhol’s Electric Chair depicts a new vision of authority, which Smith characterizes as “a modernist vision of authority established by the absence both of the condemned . . . and of authorities.”49
The Fascist attention to demolishing and reconstructing the historic landscape of their capital as a means of establishing and maintaining their power has more in common with the ancient queen’s death pit than Warhol’s modern portrait of authority. In both the death pit and the Fascist representations of their work, the bodies of subjects, the body of the leader, and a locatable physical landscape are present. Moreover, as noted earlier, the presence of Mussolini among the workers in the representations of the process recalls the Urartian carvings discussed by Smith, which suggested that construction work by all was made possible through the leader.50 Comparing the Fascist representations of the process of demolition and reconstruction to Warhol’s Electric Chair and the queen’s death pit, we find that, one on hand, little has changed in terms of how authorities use landscapes to represent their power and their relationship to their subjects. On the other hand, Warhol’s Electric Chair highlights that profound changes in the constitution of authority were developing in the twentieth century and suggests why the pageantry of Mussolini swinging a pickaxe seems superficial and glib today. Fascist representations of their work in the capital fail to evoke the same sense of power and fear of the Electric Chair, which resulted directly from the sense that the authority it depicted was impossible to locate and bodiless.
The ways in which political authority was constituted changed in the twentieth century as global political power became less visible and the political landscape became more ubiquitous. During the Cold War, for example, technology increasingly allowed political authority to have an unlimited reach, irrespective of the bodies of leaders or subjects. As Tom Vanderbilt describes the American Cold War landscape:
Battlefields were everywhere and nowhere, an abstract space on wall-size screens in situation rooms, prophesied in emanating-ripple damage estimates on aerial photographs of cities, filtered down to backyards where homeowners studied government-supplied plans for bomb shelters...The Cold War was—and is—everywhere in America, if one knows where to look for it. Underground, behind closed doors, classified, off the map, already crumbling beyond recognition, or right in plain view, it has left an imprint as widespread yet discreet as the tracings of radioactive particles that blew out of the Nevada Test site.51
As Vanderbilt highlights, political authority in the modern era no longer maintains the strong connection to either precise visible markers of the physical landscape or human bodies of rulers and subjects. Thanks to technology, political authority is increasingly placeless and faceless in the modern era. Given this newfound construction of authority, the Fascists’ attempts to demonstrate their character and might through the violent destruction of their capital appears somewhat misguided, even naïve, in retrospect. The case of Fascist Rome illustrates that although authorities continue to use landscapes for their imaginative power, their ability to command respect and dominate subjects through the use of landscape may be more limited in the modern era as authority becomes increasingly reliant on technology, more anonymous, and ultimately disconnected from place.
Notes
1. “Fino a poco tempo fa era segno di spirito forte dir male di Roma: parassita delle alter regioni, pitocca dello Stato, attendamento d’impiegati, città di fannulloni e di affittacamere.” Alessandro Bacchiani, “Roma nel pensiero di Benito Mussolini,” Capitolium 1 (1925): 107. All translations by author unless otherwise noted. Return to text.
2. Christopher Wagstaff Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 230. Return to text.
3. For a more comprehensive history of the reshaping of Rome during the Fascist era see Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); Italo Insolera and Alessandra Maria Sette, Roma tra le due guerre: Cronache da una citta che cambia (Roma: Palombi, 2003); Borden W. Painter, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). Return to text.
4. See chapter 2 by Kalas in this volume. Return to text.
5. Ibid. Return to text.
6. Adam T. Smith, The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 154. Return to text.
7. See Italo Insolera, Storia Moderna dei Fori di Roma (Roma: Gius, Laterza & Figli, 1983); Insolera and Sette, Roma tra le due guerre; Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome, 1870–1950: Traffic and Glory (Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1974); Spiro Kostof, “The Emperor and the Duce: The Planning of Piazzale Augusto Imperatore in Rome,” in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin (1978), 270–325. Return to text.
8. Kostof, “The Emperor and the Duce,” 271. Return to text.
9. Smith, Political Landscape, passim. Return to text.
10. See chapter 10 by Grigor in this volume. Return to text.
11. Smith, Political Landscape, 107. Return to text.
12. Jeffrey Schnapp, “Fascism’s Museum in Motion,” Journal of Architectural Education 45/2 (1992): 88. Return to text.
13. On the various plans see Virgilio Testa, “Attuazione del Piano Regolatore di Roma,” Capitolium (1933): 417–440. Return to text.
14. Kostof, The Third Rome, 18. Return to text.
15. Ibid., 50. Return to text.
16. Ibid., 60. Return to text.
17. Smith, Political Landscape, 10. Return to text.
18. Kostof, The Third Rome, 24. Return to text.
19. Smith, Political Landscape, 10. Return to text.
20. Ibid. Return to text.
21. On the Fascist use of the city as a stage for action see Diane Ghirardo, “Architecture and Theater: The Street in Fascist Italy,” in Events Arts and Arts Events, ed. Stephen C. Foster (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 171. Return to text.
22. A. M. Colini, “Una Visita di S.E. il Capo del Governo ai Lavori in Corso per la grandezza dell’urbe,” Capitolium 4/8 (1928). Return to text.
23. Ibid., 404. Return to text.
24. Antonio Muñoz, “La Via dell’Impero e La Via del Mare,” Capitolium 8 (1932): 521–556. Return to text.
25. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 286. Return to text.
26. On the connections between Futurism and Fascism see Richard Jensen, “Futurism and Fascism,” History Today 45 (1995): 35–41. Return to text.
27. Marinetti, The Foundation, 288. Return to text.
28. On the Fascist understanding of history see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991). Return to text.
29. “Gli ultimi lavori a una delle opere piu significative che saranno inaugerate a Roma nel Decennale della Rivoluzione. La nuova strada che, attraverso I Fori Imperiali, condurra dal Vittoriano al Colosseo, congiungendo il monumento della nuova Italia al piu famoso monumento della romanità.” “La Domenica del Corriere,” Corriere della Sera, October 23, 1932. Cover and caption reprinted in Insolera and Sette, Roma tra le due guerre, 80. Return to text.
30. “Le periodiche visite di Mussolini ai grandiosi lavori di rinnovamento da lui voluti nella Capitale, sollevano l’entusiasmo degli operai. Giorni fa le maestranze che lavorano a spianare la grande via presso il Colosseo si sono strette, acclamando, intorno al Duce e gli hanno improvvisato una calorosa dimostrazione.” “La Domenica del Corriere.” Cover and caption reprinted in Insolera and Sette, Roma tra le due guerre, 85. Return to text.
31. David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 18. Return to text.
32. Smith, Political Landscape, 10. Return to text.
33. On the various plans for the site see Virgilio Testa, “Attuazione del Piano Regolatore di Roma, Piano Particloareggiati di Esecuzione: La Zone del Augusteo,” Capitolium 9 (1933). The best source in English on the modern plans and developments at the site is Kostof, “The Emperor and the Duce.” Return to text.
34. For Piacentini’s renovation proposal see “La Trasformazione dell’Augusteo,” Capitolium 1 (1925): 24–27. Return to text.
35. A. M. Colini, “Il Mausoleo d’Augusto,” Capitolium (1928); Guglielmo Gatti, “Il Mausoleo di Augusto: Studio di Ricostruzione,” Capitolium (1934). Return to text.
36. Virgilio Testa, “Attuazione del Piano Regolatore di Roma, Piano Particloareggiati di Esecuzione: La Zone del Augusteo,” Capitolium 9 (1933): 107–128. Return to text.
37. For an analysis of the final changes to the design see Kostof, “The Emperor and the Duce,” 302–304. Return to text.
38. For an analysis of the relationship between Fascism, the Empire, and the Catholic Church as related to the reconstruction of the mausoleum and the 1937 celebrations of the bimillennial of Augustus’s birth, see Anna Notaro, “Resurrecting an Imperial Past: Strategies of Self-Representation and ‘Masquerade’ in Fascist Rome (1934–1938),” in The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2002). Return to text.
39. “Inizio delle demolizioni per l’isolamento del Mausoleo di Augusto,” (Italy: Luce, 1934). Return to text.
40. Benito Mussolini, “Per l’isolamento dell’Augusteo,” in Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini (Firenze: La Fenice, 1956). Return to text.
41. Antonio Muñoz, “La Sistemazione del Mausoleo di Augusto,” Capitolium 13 (1938): 491. Return to text.
42. Smith, Political Landscape, 160–1. Return to text.
43. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 35. Return to text.
44. “Un religioso silenzio regna nella isolata ed alta platea, ove su quella che fu la sacra urna del fondatore dell’impero antico, il popolo potrà raccogliersi ad ascoltare la parola del Fondatore del nuovo impero italiano.” Antonio Muñoz, “La Sistemazione del Mausoleo di Augusto,” Capitolium 13 (1938): 508. Return to text.
45. Notaro, “Resurrecting an Imperial Past.” Return to text.
46. Ermanno Ponti, “La Sistemazione del Mausoleo di Augusto,” Capitolium 11 (1935): 251–255. Return to text.
47. Valentine Thomson, “Mussolini Builds a Rome of the Caesars,” New York Times, March 19, 1933, SM6. Return to text.
48. Smith, Political Landscape, 3. Return to text.
49. Ibid., 2. Return to text.
50. Ibid., 162. Return to text.
51. Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 15–19. Return to text.