Jamie Mackay writes:

At the dawn of the 20th century, Italian patriots were struggling to overcome a profound inferiority complex. Ever since 1861, when Giuseppe Garibaldi unified the country’s disparate regions into a nation-state, politicians and intellectuals had been anticipating the arrival of a glorious new era. Decades on, however, the economic, diplomatic and cultural results were wanting. Nationalists knew they needed a new mythos to boost public confidence, something to make Italy seem strong and competitive on the world stage. Several options were on the table. Some saw religion as a source of potential unity. Others pointed to the Renaissance, and the long tradition of democratic republicanism as admirable blueprints. After much debate, however, most statesmen came to settle on ancient Rome. The classical legacy, so they reasoned, while admittedly rather distant, was a moment when the peninsula had been at the centre of European and, arguably, world affairs. They set out, quite consciously, with this history in mind, to tell their fellow citizens a new story: that they would make Italy great again.

What this meant in concrete terms was imperialism. In 1912, to demonstrate its global aspirations, Italy launched a ferocious attack against Ottoman Libya. As the bombs fell over Janzur, the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Songs of Our Exploits Overseas’, in which he conjured up the spirit of Vittoria, the Roman goddess, to call on all patriots to re-connect with the ‘eternal memory’ of the ancient past, and overcome the stifling ‘crust of centuries’ in order to set out again, under a new flag, to dominate the world. Other nationalists followed suit. The essayist Alfredo Oriani’s 1889 tract describing the need for the country to ‘sail once more on its sea’ as the ‘bringer of a new civilisation’ was republished in 1912, while the journalist Enrico Corradini went as far as to suggest that there was a hidden Roman road concealed under the Mediterranean Sea that linked the modern Italian nation to the African colonies over which it had a ‘historic claim’. Notably, all of these writers referred to the water by its ancient Roman name, Mare Nostrum (‘Our Sea’).

Like all modern colonialism, Italy’s propagandising had racist overtones. In fact, one of the main reasons that the country’s intellectuals were so anxious to present themselves as a homogeneous group was, ironically, a byproduct of their nation’s Mediterranean geography. Over generations, people from both sides of the sea, from Tangier to Istanbul, had mixed with one another to the point that the Italian peninsula’s inhabitants couldn’t feel certain of their ethnic ‘purity’. In response, in the 1920s, philosophers such as Julius Evola posited esoteric theories about an Aryan ‘super-race’, a kind of spiritual nobility that had apparently always existed in Italy since Roman times, and which gave the ‘true’ Italians the moral right to dominate non-Europeans. These strands of thought combined in the ideology of fascism. [Continue reading…]