Mussolini's Nature

Mussolini's Nature
Author: Marco Armiero
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2022-12-13
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262544717

This exploration of the environmental practices of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime invites readers to consider the ecological connections of all political projects. “We might think we see a mountain while it was a war; a forest can actually be an engine; a monument to workers might reflect the violence of a colonial empire.”—extracted from Mussolini’s Nature In this first environmental history of Italian fascism, Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg reveal that nature and fascist rhetoric are inextricable. Mussolini’s Nature explores fascist political ecologies, or rather the practices and narratives through which the regime constructed imaginary and material ecologies functional to its political project. The book does not pursue the ghost of a green Mussolini by counting how many national parks were created during the regime or how many trees planted. Instead, the reader is trained to recognize fascist political ecology in Mussolini’s speeches, reclaimed landscapes, policies of economic self-sufficiency, propaganda documentaries, reforested areas, and in the environmental transformation of its colonial holdings. The authors conclude with an examination of the role of fascist landscapes in the country’s postwar reconstruction: Mussolini’s nature is still visible today through plaques, monuments, toponomy, and the shapes of landscapes. This original, and surprisingly intimate, environmental history is not merely a chronicle of conservation in fascist Italy but also an invitation to consider the socioecological connections of all political projects.

Mussolini's Concentration Camps for Civilians

Mussolini's Concentration Camps for Civilians
Author: Luigi Reale
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Antisemitism
ISBN: 9780853038849

Analyzes the systematic imprisonment and torture of 'hostile' civilians, including Jews, Slavs, and dissidents. Using case studies and comparisons with the Nazis, studies the persecution and sometimes mass murder of Italians by their Fascist compatriots.

Fascist Spectacle

Fascist Spectacle
Author: Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2023-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520926153

This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.

Mussolini's Nation-Empire

Mussolini's Nation-Empire
Author: Roberta Pergher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108419747

The first exploration of how Mussolini employed population settlement inside the nation and across the empire to strengthen Italian sovereignty.

Mussolini's National Project in Argentina

Mussolini's National Project in Argentina
Author: David Aliano
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2012-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611475775

During the 1920s and 1930s, Mussolini’s fascist regime attempted to promote fascist Italy’s national project in Argentina, bombarding the republic with its propaganda. Although politically a failure, this propaganda provoked a debate over the idea of a national identity outside of the nation-state and the potential roles that citizens living abroad could play in their country of origin. In propagating an Italian national identity within another sovereign state, Mussolini’s initiative also inspired heated debate among native Argentines over their own national project as a nation of immigrants. Using the experiences of Mussolini’s efforts in Argentina as its case study, this book demonstrates how national projects take on different meanings once they enter a contested public space. It details how both members of the Italian community as well as native Argentines reshaped Italy’s national discourse from abroad by entangling it with Argentina’s own national project. In exploring the way in which nations are imagined, constructed, and recast both from above as well as from below, Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina offers new perspectives on the politics of identity formation while providing a transatlantic example of the dynamic interplay between the Italian state and its emigrant communities. It is in short, a transnational perspective on what it means to belong to a nation.

Mussolini's Dream Factory

Mussolini's Dream Factory
Author: Stephen Gundle
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1782382453

The intersection between film stardom and politics is an understudied phenomenon of Fascist Italy, despite the fact that the Mussolini regime deemed stardom important enough to warrant sustained attention and interference. Focused on the period from the start of sound cinema to the final end of Fascism in 1945, this book examines the development of an Italian star system and evaluates its place in film production and distribution. The performances and careers of several major stars, including Isa Miranda, Vittorio De Sica, Amedeo Nazzari, and Alida Valli, are closely analyzed in terms of their relationships to the political sphere and broader commercial culture, with consideration of their fates in the aftermath of Fascism. A final chapter explores the place of the stars in popular memory and representations of the Fascist film world in postwar cinema.

Mussolini's Italy

Mussolini's Italy
Author: R. J. B. Bosworth
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 740
Release: 2007-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 110107857X

With Mussolini ’s Italy, R.J.B. Bosworth—the foremost scholar on the subject writing in English—vividly brings to life the period in which Italians participated in one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political experiments. Il Duce’s Fascists were the original totalitarians, espousing a cult of violence and obedience that inspired many other dictatorships, Hitler’s first among them. But as Bosworth reveals, many Italians resisted its ideology, finding ways, ingenious and varied, to keep Fascism from taking hold as deeply as it did in Germany. A sweeping chronicle of struggle in terrible times, this is the definitive account of Italy’s darkest hour.

Mussolini's Cities

Mussolini's Cities
Author: Federico Caprotti
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Between 1930 and 1939, the Pontine Marshes became the target of massive national investment, internal migration (often non-voluntary), and engineering work. Written by an Oxford University professor, this book explores the architectural and urban planning aspects of the totalitarian minds which devised and built the new cities.

Mussolini's Theatre

Mussolini's Theatre
Author: Patricia Gaborik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1108830595

A vividly written portrait of Benito Mussolini, whose passion for the theatre profoundly shaped his ideology and actions as head of fascist Italy This consistently illuminating book transforms our understanding of fascism as a whole, and will have strong appeal to readers in both theatre studies and modern Italian history.

Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919–1935

Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919–1935
Author: Robert Mallett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2018-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316368653

Mussolini in Ethiopia, 1919–1935 looks in detail at the evolution of the Italian Fascist regime's colonial policy within the context of European politics and the rise to power of German National Socialism. It delves into the tortuous nature of relations between the National Fascist Party and the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), while demonstrating how, ultimately, a Hitler-led Germany proved the best mechanism for overseas Italian expansion in East Africa. The book assesses the emergence of an ideologically driven Fascist colonial policy from 1931 onwards and how this eventually culminated in a serious clash of interests with the British Empire. Benito Mussolini's successful flouting of the League of Nations' authority heralded a new dark era in world politics and continues to have its resonance in today's world.