When visitors arrived at Rome’s Exposition Center (Palazzo delle esposizioni) on October 28, 1932, for the opening of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (MRF), they faced an overwhelming image of the regime’s power. Four copper fasci littori rose twenty-five meters into the air, and three massive entryways beckoned them in to experience the height of Fascist cultural and political supremacy.1 According to the Italian observer Ercole Di Marco, the building itself appeared to be “a monolithic block from which one idea springs: the ideal and authentic unity with which today the Italian people feel connected.”2 Marking both the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome—the Decennale—and the influence of the Fascist Revolution as a whole, the dramatic exhibit displayed the finest of Fascist propaganda. The government commissioned more than twenty artists and architects to fill twenty-three rooms with photomontages, sculptures, collages, sound clips, and quotes that surrounded visitors with visions of the Great War and achievements of the Fascist movement. As historian Marla Stone has explained, the displays “played out a cycle of crisis, redemption, and resolution” that embodied recent Italian history.3 Fourteen rooms illustrated the state’s imagining of the Italian success in World War I, the postwar crises that led to the rise of Fascism, and the Fascist Party’s successful seizure of power. The remaining rooms depicted the historical, cultural, and political elements that united Italians and that, with Fascism at the helm, would lead the race to international glory.4
Mussolini deliberately opened the exhibition shortly after he inaugurated the nearby and newly created Via dell’Impero, or Imperial Road (now the Via dei fori imperiali), which had required the removal of forty thousand cubic meters of earth to reveal the surrounding layers of the city’s rich history. This central example of Mussolini’s plans for the reorganization of the Eternal City passed from the Coliseum, directly over and through the ancient Roman forums of Trajan, Augustus, and Nerva, and ended in the Piazza Venezia, home to both the Vittorio Emanuele II monument and the Duce’s office.5 Its construction and subsequent use as a primary route for party parades literally connected the remains of ancient Rome to the symbol of the Risorgimento and the heart of the Fascist state.6 Together with the MRF, it established a foundational narrative of Fascism’s power and illustrated the strength and unity of the Italian race.
It is not surprising why the MRF and its surrounding celebrations have been the subject of much scholarship since its 1932 opening; to Fascists, observers, and subsequent historians, the exhibit, as the famous Italian journalist and art critic Margherita Sarfatti argued, was not so much “an exhibition” as “a demonstration” of the Fascist Revolution.7 It was also an interactive lesson in the ways Fascism was rejuvenating the grandeur of the Italian race. Di Marco explained in his article that Mussolini envisioned this showcase as “the most lively school of Fascism that would teach Italians, particularly the young generations—to whom we will have to entrust the light that was lit in October 1922—how much blood the success of our new life cost; that there is no victory without sacrifices; that, when necessary, one must willingly sacrifice one’s life for an idea; and, finally, that the heroic spirit of our razza is as native to us as the sun is to our lands.”8 His portrayal of the exhibition as a school designed to expose all Italians to both the fundamentals of Fascist italianità and the more general lessons of the Fascist state is critical to the MRF’s importance in the history of the ventennio. No longer were Italians simply to memorize facts and figures; no longer were they to learn solely within a classroom. The limited instruction of the elite within yesterday’s school was transformed into the holistic education of the race through Giovanni Gentile’s principles of organic and active learning.
The Duce made this vision most apparent with his measures to encourage as many people as possible, especially students, to visit the show. The government closed schools from October 24 to November 5 so that entire families could view the MRF in its opening days; and with subsidies from the Fascist Educational Association (Associazione fascista della scuola), it offered elementary schools numerous incentives to visit an “exhibition that gathers the documents and relics of a period of history so full of events that contribute to the glory of Italy” throughout its two years on display.9 Additionally, train fare to the capital was reduced for everyone, and publicity abroad urged tourists to come see the restored birthplace of the Italian race and the successes of the revolution.10 Over the course of its showing, almost 4 million people visited the Palazzo delle esposizioni and took in not only the magnificence of the gallery but also the grandeur of Fascist Rome.
Ultimately, then, the MRF embodied the political and cultural moment Italians found themselves in at the beginning of the 1930s; the party maneuverings of the 1920s had successfully transformed the Fascist movement into a one-party regime. In an address delivered to the overwhelmingly defunct Camera dei deputati on May 26, 1927, known as his Ascension Day speech, Mussolini simply put into words the reality that measures of his first seven years in power enabled: “Opposition is foolish—pointless in a totalitarian regime such as the Fascist regime.”11 Moreover, what separated Italian Fascism from a number of other popular movements in Europe at the time, according to Mussolini, was its refusal to become “complaisant” and its gradual but ever-increasing “radicalization” of policies and practices.12 It was the development of the Fascist concept of totalitarianism that most profoundly defined the ambitions of the regime in the first half of the 1930s: by 1929 the government had banned all political parties other than the PNF; had drastically censored the press; had overseen the expansion of the economic and agricultural campaigns for autarky; and had established many of the state institutions aimed at merging the public and private spheres of Italian society.13
As part of this totalitarian transformation, Mussolini had even officially resolved the acrimonious relationship between state and church that lay in the bedrock of Italian unification. With the signing of the Lateran Accords in the summer of 1929 came the creation of the autonomous Vatican City and the establishment of Catholicism as the official state religion. In return, the Holy See formally recognized the sovereignty of the Italian nation.14 In brief, Mussolini had successfully allied the state with the church for the first time since the kingdom’s creation in 1861, giving the image of a unity of purpose and allowing the majority of Italians to feel they could legitimately engage in national politics while remaining faithful to the church.15
All these efforts to create a totalitarian state convinced a majority of Italians of Mussolini’s authority—or at least of the impossibility of successful resistance to his regime—and led to perceived political calm in the early 1930s.16 As one former Balilla member wrote in his memoir, “For children of my age in those years, to be Fascist was the natural state, like being Italian or having white skin.”17 Between 1929 and 1934, despite the arrival of increased fiscal limitations that resulted from the global depression, the state used its temporary but valuable hegemony, as well as its increasingly totalitarian policies, to focus its efforts on transforming the population into New Italians and preparing to conquer a new Roman Empire. In other words, it focused on Fascistizing the Italian nation. And the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution illustrated the political culture and vision of italianità that was to infuse every aspect of life in a Fascist Italy.
One of the fundamental ways the state worked to Fascistize its campaign for bonifica umana was by creating a totalitarian racial education for the youngest members of Italian society. In essence, the efforts such a project entailed emphasized the message that Italian racial ideals were the same as Fascist ideals; to embody the ideal Fascist was to embody the ideal Italian. The state articulated its vision for a Fascistized society in this period through a series of reforms, most notably mandating national textbooks and transforming the Ministry of Public Instruction (MPI) into the Ministry of National Education (MEN). These changes, along with the continued expansion of state efforts to maintain a presence in all aspects of daily life, ensured that ever-growing numbers of Italian children had access to the lessons required to Fascistize the Italian race.
What did it actually mean to “Fascistize” the Italian population during this period? In the same speech that Mussolini declared Fascism a totalitarian regime, the Duce expressed the primary targets of his Fascist Revolution as comprising three categories: first, improving the demographic situation in Italy, both in terms of enhancing the physical health and increasing the overall numbers of Italians; second, expanding the administrative infrastructure of the nation; and third, clarifying the political directives for the future of the state.
It is notable that the first of the Duce’s concerns was the health of the race, both in terms of quality and quantity. In the most sweeping terms, Mussolini announced his intention to increase the Italian population from 40 to 60 million by midcentury.18 He joined Italian demographers and politicians in voicing a growing concern about the decrease in the Italian birthrate and its impact on the nation’s ability to fulfill its moral, cultural, and political obligations. By increasing population numbers, Fascists argued, the stronger race could direct the salvation of Italian and European civilization.19
In order to reach its desired population numbers, and with them biopower, Mussolini enacted a series of pronatalist incentives.20 Already in January 1927 the regime announced a tax on all bachelors over the age of thirty-four. This tax was doubled the following year and increased by another 50 percent in 1934.21 The revenue from these taxes, Mussolini declared, would be used to fund other pronatalist policies, such as reduced train fares for honeymooners.22 Longer prison sentences were also established for any individuals performing or seeking abortions.23 And though government debates over the regime’s legal stance on homosexuality ended with the decision that it was outside the purview of secular law, historian Lorenzo Benadusi has clearly shown how surveillance and punishment of suspected “pederasts” increased in late 1920s and 1930s.24 Additionally, Mussolini borrowed from Italy’s Catholic tradition of Mothering Sundays to demarcate December 24 as the Day of Mother and Child (Giornata della madre e del fanciullo) beginning in 1933. Coinciding with the celebration of Christianity’s most sacred mother and child, the Fascist holiday called for ceremonies to award demographic honors to the most prolific families in each province and region.25 The voice of the ONMI, Motherhood and Childhood (Maternità ed infanzia), explained that December 24 was a day marked for “the solemn spiritual exaltation of the supreme values of the stirpe.”26 More explicitly, another journalist wrote that it was a celebration of “the mother, the sublime creature and giver of life . . . the eternal smile of the earth, the joy of the family, and the unyielding hope of the nation.”27 That same year, the Fascist Union of Prolific Families established its official journal—The Fascist—a monthly periodical that was “to protect the fundamental virtues of the razza.”28 In short, the protection of mothers and children provided for the life, renewal, and future of the Italian race by preparing abundant, healthy, and vigorous generations of New Italians. As Emilio Alfieri wrote, “All that we do for the defense of motherhood and the protection of childhood ensures the life of the stirpe, and supports its development, strength, and splendor.”29
Encouraging the birth of increasing numbers of healthy Fascist babies would not do the fatherland any good without the assurance of their survival through childhood, however.30 Mussolini began his urgent call for Fascism to address the physical aspects of the race’s health, exclaiming, “Someone long ago argued that the state should not worry about the physical health of the people. . . . This is a suicidal theory. It is clear that, in a well-ordered state, the care of the physical health of the people must be the first priority.”31 As one might expect, the ONMI played an important role in the reduction of child mortality rates. Billed as “the most powerful instrument of the ingenious demographic policies” of the regime,32 the ONMI worked “to create a social and sanitary education among the masses that continually reinforces the structure of the razza materially and morally.”33 With the encouragement of the central government, the ONMI continued to expand its programs for public health and hygiene in the form of mobile health clinics, outdoor schools and camps, mothering courses, and nursery schools.34
Of course, the movement to support maternity and encourage higher birthrates had been an integral part of the Fascist project for bonifica umana since the Duce’s rise to power and, moreover, was prevalent throughout western Europe and North America. However, rhetorical and “scientific” shifts took place among Fascist officials, pedagogues, and medical professionals during the 1930s that emphasized growing concern not just for the quantity of Italians produced but also for their “quality.”35 Mussolini believed that the racial situation was bleak, suggesting that social diseases—seemingly pervasive ailments, such as tuberculosis and alcoholism, that threatened the fabric of Italian society as a result of moral degeneracy and bureaucratic limitations—were on the rise. He called for the state “to look out for the destiny of the razza, . . . to heal the razza, and to begin to do so from motherhood and infancy.”36 It was not surprising, Mussolini continued, that the rise of social diseases was accompanied by a rise in urbanization and industrialization. Urbanization sterilized the population, he cried. “I do not acknowledge any healthy industries in Italy; those industries that are healthy come from agricultural and maritime work.”37 Italians needed to embrace their roots and strengthen the race in part through the historically Italian occupation of agricultural labor.
Leading Fascists of the early 1930s who supported such arguments were particularly taken by the racial theories of Nicola Pende—public intellectual, national senator, endocrinologist, and, most recently, Italian guardian of the medical field of “constitutionalism.” This rather short-lived pseudoscience held at its core the theory of orthogenesis—that is, the notion that one can influence the evolution of a species through the development of specific characteristics within individuals—and claimed to utilize the fields of anthropology, sociology, and pathology to understand and ideally fix abnormalities in human physical and psychic growth. One of the field’s principal tenets was that environmental factors played a crucial role in the development of the human constitution.38 For example, if children grew up in healthy, disciplined environments, they would grow up to enjoy discipline, work, and devotion.39 This argument led to Pende’s special interest in constitutionalism’s potential success among the various “ethnic” populations of Italy to create a population that adhered to a more uniform identity.40
In support of Pende’s theories, the regime maintained that the majority of Italian children had the potential to become ideal Fascists. More to the point, administrators still did not want to abandon those children who were institutionally termed “abnormal.” In 1933 the ONMI’s president Sileno Fabbri broke down the general concept of juvenile delinquency into four subcategories, each characterized by a different degree of “recoverability” (or compatibility with Fascism): psychologically abnormal children; morally and materially abandoned children; homeless children; and actively delinquent children (investigated, condemned, or liberated from prison). Fabbri believed that improving and controlling the environment in which children lived could curtail juvenile delinquency, particularly among those children categorized in his second and third groups. The projects and personnel of his organization, Fabbri maintained, addressed the needs of these delinquents—those who had the greatest potential for eventually contributing to the Fascist project.41 By the mid-1930s, in fact, the leadership of the ONMI demanded greater care for these children because of their potential threat to society if the firm hand of the Fascist administration did not supervise them.42 Those children who were considered “uneducable abnormals”—primarily classified in Fabbri’s first and fourth categories—were largely confined to classes and activities designed particularly for their supposed needs. It is unclear, however, to what extent even these delinquents were selected because of legitimate developmental or intellectual disability or because they were the objects of social, physical, or psychological bias that had nothing to do with their intellectual or physical capabilities. One memoir written by a teacher of a third-grade class of such “exceptional” students indicates that perhaps only one of his thirty-one students was developmentally disabled; the others came from “unstable” families or lived on the streets, with little money and no enthusiasm for school.43 Regardless, the education ministry and the ONMI were remarkably proud of the ostensible measures undertaken to leave no child behind, with the image of the Fascist state embracing and training all children of the fatherland to be active members of Italian society.
The education system played a vital role in the campaign to form generations of Fascist Italians; it accordingly shared in both the shifts toward totalitarianism and the greater focus on the quality of Mussolini’s children. The institutional and didactic changes that had taken place in the MPI and its auxiliary institutions during the 1920s saw their foundations in Gentile’s idealism and Western pedagogical views at large. However, beginning in 1928 and 1929, fundamental changes in pedagogical language, methods, and goals separated the Italian system more significantly from Gentile’s original project and broader Western trends. Legislation in 1928 proclaimed the educational system in charge of a “total” education of the Italian youth, emphasizing the importance of collaboration between schools and auxiliary organizations so that, together, they could ensure that Fascist principles reached children at all times.44 Specifically, the reforms to establish nationalized elementary textbooks and to change the name of the Ministry of Public Instruction to the Ministry of National Education emphasized Mussolini’s demands for greater control over the development of his children. Additionally, many of the organizations that had been established with discrete goals, such as the ONMI and the ONB, began to share more responsibilities, reflecting the idea that the spiritual, physical, and biological aspects of each Italian could not be divided but rather had to be approached holistically. Through these modifications, the government transitioned from instructing young Italians how to be successful, fit citizens to educating young Fascists to embody the ideals of italianità and fulfill the supposed destiny of the race and fatherland.
As always, at the head of this project was Benito Mussolini, whom the party depicted as the nation’s father and teacher who began “the true era of education in Italy, for the formation of the true Italian, capable of building the new life of the nation.”45 In turn, the daily workings of the national education system required leadership that would unceasingly pursue the Duce’s aims. It turned out that this necessity resulted in a fair amount of turnover throughout the ventennio, reflecting, among other things, Fascism’s continued struggles to define its system of Fascistization. After Giovanni Gentile left the MPI in the summer of 1924, Alessandro Casati, a staunch supporter of Benedetto Croce’s spiritual philosophy, headed the ministry for six months. However, by January 1925, in the aftermath of the Matteotti Crisis, Casati’s allegiance to Crocean philosophy and politics led him to resign and subsequently withdraw completely from politics. Much to Gentile’s dismay, Pietro Fedele—a trained historian and devoted Catholic who, according to Gentile, supported a much more dogmatic approach to education—next headed the ministry. Discussing Fedele’s appointment in a letter to his friend and colleague Ernesto Codignola, Gentile exclaimed that it was clearly a betrayal of Mussolini’s trust in him and his more organic approach to education.46 Despite Fedele’s regular clashes with Gentile over pedagogy, however, his tenure from 1925 to 1928 did not signal the complete dismantling of the Gentile Reform. Still, it was clear that a vast majority of Gentile’s supporters had left the regime by the end of the 1920s; a new line of academics who largely did not have a background in education policy, but overwhelmingly supported the move toward a totalitarian system, came to the fore.
Giuseppe Belluzzo, the minister of public instruction from the summer of 1928 to the fall of 1929, was the first appointee truly to indicate the regime’s shift toward prioritizing Fascistization over Western pedagogical innovation. Unlike the regime’s first three education ministers, Belluzzo had absolutely no background in pedagogy, or Crocean or Gentilian philosophy. Instead, Belluzzo came to the post in July 1928 as a former Nationalist and an engineer who showed much greater interest in—and qualifications for—the expansion of Italy’s economy than its education. He was an avowed “productionist” who believed that Italy’s industrial and agricultural growth would only come with a concerted effort to develop new technologies. Appropriately, he played a significant role in Fascism’s early efforts at autarky as the head of the Ministry of National Economy between 1925 and 1928. Then suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, he was tapped to head up the increased Fascistization efforts in the state education system.
In spite of his obvious lack of appropriate credentials, Belluzzo embraced the challenges of his new position; the minister soon approached Mussolini with a list of concerns about the Gentile Reform that he wanted to tackle to create a more Fascist system and more-Fascist children.47 He focused these reforms primarily on areas that would most directly influence his own national priorities—in particular, the greater funding and oversight of trade schools in postelementary education—but he also championed the expansion of the rural and preelementary educational infrastructures and declared that the elementary experience needed “to educate children’s spirits and conscience, to monitor their moral and physical development, and to form the future citizens of a fatherland that is strong and aware of its destiny.”48
It was largely in the service of these goals that Belluzzo announced the first of the major institutional reforms heralding a new phase of totalitarian instruction at the elementary level: the development of state-mandated national textbooks. It was clear that the textbook selection committees of the 1920s had not solved the problem of standardizing the curriculum. In 1928 alone, there were 2,491 author submissions, and 338 were approved.49 This obviously represented a much smaller number of acceptable textbooks than were available at the start of Mussolini’s rule, but a truly Fascist education of the population required a single, national curriculum that unified the population and garnered support for the Fascist project.50 Discussions about commissioning state textbooks, led by Minister Belluzzo, started in the fall of 1928.51 The result of these deliberations was that textbooks for the transitional school year 1929–30 would need to conform to a strict set of written criteria that met the “historical, political, legal and economic demands clarified by October 28, 1922,” and the first edition of comprehensive national textbooks would be ready for use the following year.52 A subsequent article in the national newspaper People of Italy (Popolo d’Italia) reported the ministry’s three goals for the commissioned textbooks as
a. To not keep children closed up in an artificial world without any relation to their lives, but instead to give them contact with reality . . .
b. To give children a sense of Fascism’s magnificent renewal of italianità.
c. To form a Fascist education that isn’t ephemeral or superficial, but that spontaneously springs from real life.53
According to one article reviewing this decision, the administration had “settled on regulations for the creation of state textbooks in order to give each elementary class the necessary instrument for the spiritual formation of the new Italian, eliminating the inconveniences that come with having to review and adopt textbooks.”54
The law, formally signed on January 7, 1929, provided for a single textbook to be used in the first and second grades, while the third through fifth grades would each have a discrete text. Additionally, the ministry would appoint a triennial commission to review and update the texts as needed.55 Nevertheless, many of the textbooks would already see a second edition in the 1931–32 academic year in an active attempt by the commission to comply more fully with national Fascistization efforts.56 According to one journalist, “it was absolutely necessary to bring forth new books permeated by the spirit of the times and devoid of the old and outdated mentality.”57 Simultaneously, and a bit contradictorily, the ministry had also to keep in mind the textbooks of other “civilized” (Western) nations, continuing the Fascist tendency to compare Italy to, and theoretically triumph over, other Western powers, despite the ostensible desire to separate the Italian nation and race from all others.
The ministry first circulated the new, state-mandated textbooks in the 1930–31 academic year after a commission of eminent scholars and authors from various fields wrote and approved them.58 One 1930 article in the state-run Annals of Elementary Instruction (Annali dell’istruzione elementare) explained that “this collection of state textbooks, we are confident, will work to secure valuable educational tools for our nation to help form the New Italian that the Regime and its Duce desire.”59 To such ends, the books contained a much more significant amount of original text than those of the 1920s. They still had some external passages—excerpts taken from famous authors, politicians, and other national heroes—but the great majority of the content was new, presumably to graft Italian ideals that had been emphasized in the 1920s onto an increasingly Fascist image of the Italian race and society. Consequently, Fascism was dramatically more visible in these books. Instead of the limited references to the revolution and the Duce of the previous decade, authors wrote and illustrated these new resources to instill a clear sense of both the nature and permanence of Fascism in their readers. In particular, the administration used the 1932 Decennale to highlight the accomplishments of the party and the state in school resources. Vignettes highlighted the most familiar Fascist policies and values; contained numerous references to the future of Italian civilization; and, most notably for this study, emphasized the superiority of the Italian race under Fascist leadership.
Belluzzo may have fronted the national textbook project, but he would not last long enough at the head of the ministry to see its launch in 1930. Despite his championship of Mussolini’s Fascistization measures, his pedagogical conflicts with Gentile—who still worked as a close advisor to the Duce—and other educational idealists pushed him from the position in the fall of 1929.60 In his stead came the medieval historian, affirmed Fascist, and Gentilian educationalist Balbino Giuliano. Even in this period of increased inflexibility, Giuliano’s three-year tenure simultaneously proved Gentile’s continued influence and the ever-present need for compromise in the Fascist regime.
Giuliano’s inauguration as minister also accompanied the second major institutional reform of the late 1920s: changing the name of the Ministry of Public Instruction to the Ministry of National Education. This makeover indicated two important trends in Fascist education after the party’s consolidation of power.61 One trend was to focus on education as opposed to instruction. Instruction, as Mussolini explained in a 1936 textbook, “could be considered a private undertaking,” one that focused on teaching simple material lessons in reading and writing and arithmetic. The new ministry title would instead, according to the same text, “reaffirm a principle in an explicit way: that the state does not simply have the right, but rather the obligation, to educate the people and not only to train the people.”62 Fascist education entailed developing the entire person and creating a New Italian in the image of the Fascist racial ideal. The regime therefore determined to incorporate and educate the physical, intellectual, and emotional characteristics of the Italian student in every aspect of daily life.63
Equally important to the change in ministry title was the insertion of the word national. This amendment highlighted the priority of unifying the system—throughout all the Italian regions—under one authority. More progress toward this goal was made at the start of 1934, when the ministry, under the leadership of the historian and lawyer Francesco Ercole since the summer of 1932, took administrative control of all elementary schools. This measure responded to what administrators deemed “a preeminent political necessity” and conformed to “the totalitarian and united concept of the Fascist regime.”64 No longer was the administration of elementary schools dispersed among state, state-associated, and private organizations. The Fascist regime controlled all laws and regulations regarding national elementary education. Such measures, the administration posited, could only improve the regime’s efforts to create a New Italian and a New Italy in Mussolini’s image.
In order to improve the quality of the Italian race, the regime needed to make sure that children were uniformly exposed to the most-effective lessons in the Fascist way of life; efforts to educate adults in the skills necessary to be successful parents—the center of any child’s moral education—were proving inadequate in the eyes of the government. The private family sphere could not be trusted to effectively impart the characteristics of Fascism’s New Italians. In the early 1930s, pedagogues published studies linking increased school attendance to a reduction in juvenile delinquency, and government-sponsored studies of the early 1930s found that a majority of the areas with high illiteracy rates also suffered from the nation’s highest mortality rates due to pulmonary tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases.65
Therefore, the national school system, the ONMI, and the ONB had the task of intervening and counteracting any real or potential threats to the Fascist lifestyle and the Italian race; they were essential to both decrease the nation’s child mortality rates and provide healthy environments for the Italian youth in the absence of stable, or at least reliably Fascist, families. In response, the regime more rigorously enforced school attendance. And because public health officials maintained that juvenile delinquency was a predominantly urban problem, they urged the greater emphasis on the national ruralization and physical education movements.66 However, state initiatives could not stop there. One pedagogue of the period wrote, “I would say that if the ONB wants to help reach its predetermined goal, which is to make the little citizen of today the New Italian of tomorrow, the ONB must begin to study the best way to physically improve the individual in order to physically improve the razza.”67 In order for children to be physically fit, they needed to be healthy; the ONMI and the ONB took particular interest in training teachers to educate children about hygiene and social and personal health, distributing medicines in rural schools, and organizing exhibitions and conferences on these topics. In other words, by 1934 the state school system, the ONB, and the ONMI were collectively seen as the primary social prophylaxis against juvenile delinquency through their development of the intellectual, moral, and physical strength of the Italian youth and, therefore, the future of the Italian race.
Having administrative control over the educational system was not enough, however; if the school system was to have such a great influence on the moral, spiritual, and physical formation of New Italians, then its teachers needed to be the purest examples of Fascist morality and the Italian race. It was imperative for Fascism’s messengers to adhere to and exemplify the Fascist principles and behaviors they were to instill in their impressionable pupils. As in the mid-1920s, officials called for the greater involvement of men in the profession, particularly as some observers began to refer to educators as an army fighting for Italy’s moral protection.68 Furthermore, in 1928 the government dismissed significant numbers of teachers in Italy’s border regions who supposedly did not adequately speak standard Italian.69 Likewise, teacher transfer requests to those regions were denied if the administration believed the applicants were not Italian enough to be appropriate role models.70 And by 1929 Mussolini required all teachers to swear an oath of loyalty to the regime.
In an aspiring totalitarian society, it was also not enough simply to embody the New Italians in the classroom: the MEN also began making demands on the private lives of its teachers. Both male and female teachers needed to lead “pure” lives, which necessitated either celibacy or marriage.71 By 1933, Minister Ercole announced that during the school year teachers were to spend Sundays “as a brief truce from normal activities,” but certainly not as a time for relaxation. Occupying one’s time in that way, in the words of the official bulletin, implied “idleness and the wasting of energies.”72 Additionally, Ercole required teachers to divide their time equally over school vacations between their own families and the activities orchestrated by the ONB.
So all teachers had to personify the New Italian, but such a requirement entailed even more rigorous standards for Italy’s female teachers. In a 1929 ministry circular, Belluzzo demanded that female teachers (and their female students) needed to “dress themselves with the moral seriousness and discipline that Fascism encourages in the life of the nation.” In all respects, female teachers needed to be “an example and model of moral austerity, of feminine restraint, of the highest correctness, so that young girls can have faith in them and can see the high ideal of maternity” that was the ultimate aspiration of any Fascist woman.73 As an even broader measure, in 1931 the state Press Office demanded that all newspapers eliminate female images that were “too thin” or “masculine”—characteristics of what popularly became known as the crisis-woman (donna-crisi). Such women, who invariably worked outside the home and engaged in other supposedly degenerate activities, became synonymous with sterility and were therefore the most perilous type of woman to the Italian race.74 It bears mentioning that no such decree was made regarding the physical appearance of male teachers or students.
Physical education was an essential, but complex, component of the campaign to perpetuate a sturdy Italian race and therefore required especially strong leadership training.75 On February 5, 1928, the MPI opened the first Fascist School for the Training of Physical Education Instructors (Scuola superiore fascista per la preparazione degli insegnanti di educazione fisica) at the Central Military Academy of Physical Education in Rome.76 That same year, and not very far away, Mussolini helped place the cornerstone of the Mussolini Forum (Foro Mussolini, now the Foro Italico, though very little has changed) just north of the Vatican, where the Duce imagined a new “sports city” would illustrate the centrality of physical education in his New Italy. Officials declared it would be the “biggest experiment in state education that history records,” and it was here in 1932 that party officials unveiled the new home of the male physical education training school as the Fascist Institute for Physical Education (Istituto superiore fascista di educazione fisica).77 In this grand complex that not only sanctified physical activity but also identified Mussolini as the heir to ancient Rome’s glory through its name and design, the school staged many of its classes in the Stadium of Marbles (Stadio dei marmi), where sixty marble statues of youthful athletes surrounded a track and, inside, a grand parade ground. This stadium became the focal point in a dramatic compound of athletic and party facilities at the Mussolini Forum that continued to grow until the Italian commitment to war in 1940. As a whole, the Mussolini Forum was designed to forge educators and political leaders united by an Italian—Fascist—sensibility about the past, present, and future of the race; as one ONB publication pronounced, “it is a monument that reconnects us to the imperial Roman tradition. It will also eternalize the new Fascist civilization for centuries.”78
The year the Fascist Institute for Physical Education moved to the Mussolini Forum, the state also opened the Fascist Academy of Physical and Youth Education for Women in the Umbrian town of Orvieto.79 Like its male-centric counterpart, this institution involved a two-year course to prepare its students to teach physical education to children in the public school system and the organizations of the ONB.80
Two details about the founding of these teaching academies particularly illustrate this period in the evolution of Fascist racism: first, it showed the increased weight placed on physical education and Fascist “teacher training” in the minds of Fascist officials; second, it further evinced more-rigid conceptions of gender roles in Fascist society.81 In 1930 the Fascist Grand Council, in conjunction with the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), announced the duty of Fascist organizations to limit the involvement of women in sports. While exercise was important for girls to maintain their form, lessons were to encourage the “mothers of the razza” to fight against the physical corruption that could result from too much activity.82 Such perversion was easily exemplified, once again, by the infamously scrawny crisis-woman. While the progression of this piece of Fascist doctrine was most likely a gradual one, the formal institutionalization of separate training programs for female and male teachers indicated an enhanced desire to regulate and control the physical development of Fascism’s New Italians. No longer were male teachers appropriate to train girls, and of course female teachers were not suitable to instill the values of strength and aggression in boys.
The regime’s heightened concern for the provision of adequate role models was especially focused on Italy’s rural communities. Praise for rural life—evoking the idealized values of a “traditional” peasant lifestyle and encouraging pride in a “simpler” existence—continued to be one of the primary themes in the elementary curriculum of the early 1930s. At the same time, pedagogues and politicians began to voice greater unease about the cultural, moral, and intellectual ignorance of Italy’s peasant population. Elementary education was declared the most valuable weapon to combat these fears. Specific versions of the state textbooks were published for rural schools; to address the specific needs of Fascistizing the rural population even further, the regime established the Rural Radio Corporation (ERR) under the auspices of the Ministry of Communication, with collaboration from the MEN and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Taking inspiration from the initial success of a variety of radio programming during the 1920s, the national radio association (EIAR) launched a series of experimental, educational children’s broadcasts in the spring of 1933. According to the press, the response was extremely promising, with an estimated 1 million listeners from all over the peninsula.83 The particular objective of the ERR, as the name suggests, was to help Fascist principles “penetrate and conquer the countryside” through radio programs, accompanied by teaching manuals designed for elementary classes.84
According to one report, the first program included a dramatic reading of Giuseppe Fanciulli’s “The Duce among Children” (“Il Duce tra i bimbi”), which, as the title indicates, depicted an interaction between Mussolini and some of his beloved children. The show continued with segments on Italian history, the Fascist Revolution, and national heroes.85 The press immediately reported the popularity of these programs among students. An article on this new project explained that teachers had to mediate the students’ interaction with each program at two points, before and after listening to the production: “Beforehand, in order to clarify the program for the child, and after, to relive that same broadcast so that it becomes a driving force and not an abstract lesson; that is, so that it is not reduced to a break in the day, without utility and application in school.”86
The regime considered the radio an especially promising tool for the Fascistization of Italians because it could spread a single national message on numerous regional stations without the inevitable variations that came from relying on thousands of individual messengers. Furthermore, this message was spread with a single national language, thereby promoting Italy’s linguistic unification.87 When the ERR school broadcasts began in earnest in 1934, they hit the airwaves three days a week for thirty to forty-five minutes. Of course, the challenge of this sort of project was that it required access to radios, electricity, and cooperative teachers. The ERR, therefore, was also responsible for distributing monthly bulletins advertising upcoming episodes and including supplementary materials, as well as radios, within many of the most rural communities in Italy.88 These measures, the regime hoped, would ensure or at least facilitate rural Italy’s exposure to Fascism and the Fascist racial campaign, both in and out of the classroom.89
Radio programming was certainly not limited to the classroom, and its expansion into numerous afternoon children’s shows in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s illustrated the regime’s continued concern about its access to children outside the walls of elementary school. Likewise, the party initiated successive modifications to increase the influence of the ONB and the ONMI in children’s lives. Of particular note was the 1928 outlawing of membership in any youth organization other than the ONB (though membership to the ONB was still technically voluntary). There was one significant exception to this otherwise prime example of totalitarian action, however: the church’s youth groups of Catholic Action (Azione Cattolica) were allowed to remain in operation as long as they limited their activities to enhancing knowledge of and connections to Catholicism and the church.90
The following year, in October 1929, Piccole and Giovani Italiane were placed under control of the ONB. The fusion of the two branches—the boys’ groups of the Balilla and Avanguardisti and the girls’ groups of the Piccole and Giovani Italiane—under a single authority secured the ONB’s role as the party’s most valuable vehicle with which to instill a “virile awareness” in Italy’s male youth and feminine virtues in its female youth. The regime gave the ONB the responsibility of establishing a presence in every part of the peninsula, on the islands, and in the colonies as a representation of Fascism’s determination to rejuvenate the race. Invariably, these chapters included a Balilla Center (Casa del Balilla) that served as a youth community center and a model of Fascist culture. Decorated with traditional Italian arts, these buildings often included a gymnasium, library, and outdoor garden, all of which were to help inculcate essential characteristics and skills in Mussolini’s children.91 The ONB also demonstrated its primacy within Fascist youth education as it continued to construct a network of cinemas, libraries, and playgrounds for Italy’s children and to sponsor numerous rural schools and summer camps. As an example, ONB-sponsored rural schools grew from 477 in 1929 to 690 in 1930.92 The purpose of all these institutions was, as one journalist explained, “to represent a natural gathering place for all children where they strengthen healthy friendships, functionally and spiritually learn the rules that the Duce has indicated for the Italian people, and face their first hardships and physical challenges.”93 This expanded presence of the state and its continued emphasis on the collective over the individual theoretically allowed Fascism’s racial ideas to be reinforced time and again in Italy’s children.
ONB and ONMI camps could not accommodate all children during summer vacations, however, and the extended period of time away from the classroom especially threatened to loosen the grip of Fascist principles on the minds of the young generations. To help combat such perceived dangers—alongside special summertime ERR programs—the ONB published a new series of summer vacation textbooks in the early 1930s. As Renato Ricci, the head of the ONB—and now an undersecretary of state for physical education and youth—wrote in the introduction to one such book, “A book to read for vacation? Absolutely! Vacations for every good Balilla mean relaxation but not laziness. He needs to strengthen his body and mind in order to return to school healthier and more active.”94 These books, more uniform than those written in the 1920s, were dispersed to all students of ONB-run rural schools for free.95
Ricci’s opening message to the 1930 annual report of ONB activities encouraged the regime’s further reliance on the organization in all of these influential facets of youth education. He informed readers that the previous year had been “characterized by feverish and tenacious work and by the daily, noble sacrifice of the thousands and thousands of Fascist educators and organizers—both passive and active—as only those can be who are possessed by a great conviction: the Roman and Mussolinian future of the stirpe.”96 He concluded his introduction with the decisive statement that, finally, Italians had discovered the true function of physical education, “no longer . . . the futile movement of arms and legs of dubious utility.” Though children were urged still to enjoy physical activity, Ricci explained, it was important to understand that it also had “a particular influence in the spiritual formation of the youth,” which was undoubtedly a critical component of Fascism’s racial campaign.97
Carried by this apparent momentum, Ricci’s organization established nineteen new Balilla Centers, ninety-nine gyms, and thirty-seven playgrounds in 1931, indicating the continued growth of the ONB’s influence.98 However, Ricci explained in his official summary of the year’s work, “The rise in membership numbers . . . is more than the result of the work of expansion and propaganda; it is both the effect and the indicator of the increasing sympathy with which the Italian people regard the Opera Balilla.”99 He insisted in this report, as in others, that membership in the ONB’s groups indicated complete loyalty to the Fascist Revolution and its ideals. While no one can deny the fault in this logic, it must be conceded that the ONB’s infrastructural and educational presence, and prospective influence, broadened significantly in this period of Fascist totalitarianism. With this infrastructural expansion came the concomitant intensification of the Fascist racial project.
Mussolini had largely consolidated his political power by the end of the 1920s and saw the next phase of the process of national conquest in strengthening what he believed was his regime’s cultural and political hegemony and historical entitlement. He had convinced his enemies and followers alike that dissent was virtually impossible. It was time, then, for the regime not to remain complaisant but to persuade the Italian race that its characteristic italianità not only unified the nation but also marked its superiority over all others. Government projects such as the MRF and the creation of the Via dell’Impero indicated the overarching goal of educating the Italian population in these beliefs, encouraging bonifica umana in all aspects of public and private life. The transformation of the Ministry of Public Instruction from a state organ in charge of “training” to one responsible for “national education” was not simply nominal but rather further indicated this move to create a holistic and truly Fascist educational system. The elementary-education mission changed to create not only healthy and fit Italians but passionate and motivated Fascists who would support the more aggressive goals of the Fascist state. The function of Fascism was, as one pedagogue explained, to create an Italy “ready for all of the requirements and all of the conquests, and capable of recovering, from Rome, even against Paris and Moscow, its civilizing mission in the world.”100 Such an accomplishment would, in turn, reestablish the Italian race as the predominant global power.