546 Valentina Follo
placement of the goddess Roma was carefully calculated for the center of the monument,
beneath the statue of the king himself.
In the ensuing years, Italy would find itself engaged—for the first time as a nation—in
the First World War. Vittorio Zucconi (2009: 73–4) has insightfully pointed out how the
war immediately revealed the limitations of this tenuous national unity, for the moment
soldiers were sent to the front line they encountered formidable language barriers. Their
commanding officers spoke in a dialect so distinct from their own that orders became
unintelligible.
Mussolini and Romanitas
Italy’s entry into war marked a radical change in attitude on the part of one major public
figure who would eventually elevate the myth of Rome and the concept ofRomanitasto
a central place among the elements that constituted the Italian identity. That figure was
none other than Benito Mussolini. Official biographies on Mussolini, particularly the one
penned by Margherita Sarfatti (1926: 42), underscore how the myth of Rome provided
their subject with his source of inspiration and guiding principle:
The adolescent’s stern face had learned to bow over his father’s books as he translated Latin.
He was spellbound by Caesar’s memoires, Tacitus’s knowledge, and Aeneas’s poem. The
many fables about a once remote village of bandits in the hills of Latium whetted his bur-
geoning fascination for the myth of Rome as it became the center of a world, to which it
bestowed a body of laws and ensured well-being.However, this passion for and knowledge of the Latin language and culture were not
always as cultivated as one might have us believe. In fact, Mussolini’s familiarity with
the Latin language was limited, and, according to Nelis (2007: 396), his “knowledge of
classical Rome was very narrow and influenced by eighteenth-century Enlightenment and
nineteenth-century revolutionary thinking.” Nevertheless, the image of Rome loomed
large, and Nelis notes that, despite a lack of genuine erudition, for Mussolini, “Roman
history was always present in the background and was considered a direct and privileged
heritage of Italy” (Nelis 2007: 397).
The prominence that Rome came to possess in Mussolini’s thinking, or at least his
public expressions, may have owed a great deal to Sarfatti, who, in addition to writing
an enormously popular biography of Mussolini, which was reprinted 17 times, was also
Il Duce’s mistress. Well educated and wealthy, Sarfatti was in love with Rome. A number
of authors have hypothesized that Mussolini’s attitudes toward Rome—especially ancient
Rome—changed thanks to both her influence and that exerted by specialists in antiquity,
among whom was Pietro De Francisci, the founder of the Institute for Roman Studies
and author of the tellingly namedSpirito della civilità romana(1940) (Visser 1992;
Falasca-Zamponi 1997: 51; Belardelli 2002; Salvatori 2006; Argenio 2008).
Up until 1914, Mussolini’s speeches depicted Rome in negative terms. For instance,
in 1910 he had declared, “Enough with this stupid prejudice that everything and any-
thing must be concentrated in Rome in the name of unification. Rome is a vampiric