548 Valentina Follo
were to be expressed byRomanitas. These values, it turns out, did not remain constant.
Analogous to Rome’s changing roles and status under the Fascist regime, the meanings
to be conveyed through the use ofRomanitaswould align themselves with new agendas
and shifts in the contemporary situation.
Under Italian Fascism, “Rome was an idea, an aesthetic and a location with infinite pos-
sibilities and identities” (Stone 1999: 220), and so, too,Romanitasbecame an ephemeral
word that conveniently suited varying contexts and political messages. For this reason,
it may be more appropriate to adopt the wordRomanitateswhen discussing the Fascist
period, in order to capture more fully the range of nuances that it gathered during the 20
years of Mussolini’s regime. As Marla Stone has rightly stated (1999: 205): “Romanità
in Fascists hands, was an extremely malleable and changing ideological construct. The
meanings and uses of romanità shifted, as political and cultural conditions varied between
1922 and 1943.”
It was precisely Rome’s remarkable adaptability and versatility that enabled Fascism
to back up practically any of the initiatives it wished with a Roman precedent: from
the March on Rome and the demographical policies to the colonial wars. Moreover,
the regime adapted history in order to reaffirm, legitimize, and exalt its own successes,
which—accordingly—became the end result of an uninterrupted historical continuum
that had begun with the Rome of the Caesars and culminated in Mussolini’s Rome.
At first, these references to the past were only sporadic, but they soon received system-
atic implementation accompanied by a nearly obsessive repetition from the start of the
Ethiopian campaign of 1935 onward. Not unlike the war against Libya in 1911, the con-
quest of a new territory lent itself to historical re-enactment in which the Italians played
the part of the Romans, and—this time round—the English, who opposed their conquest
of Ethiopia, represented the new Carthaginians (Mussolini 1926). The Ethiopians were
not cast as the new Carthaginians by dint of their indigenous status (Falasca-Zamponi
1997: 162–82; Munzi 2001).
The invasion of Ethiopia precipitated a breach in Italy’s relations with the League of
Nations, the international organization created after the First World War. Member states
had pledged themselves not to go to war before submitting their disputes with each
other, or with states not members of the League, to arbitration or enquiry. The League
Council declared that Italy was the aggressor nation in the Ethiopian affair and moved to
impose sanctions on Italy on October 11, 1935 (enacted only on November 15, 1935).
Unsurprisingly, the Italian response to the sanctions was, first, to ignore them, and then
to use them as an excuse to assert Italy’s absolute autarchy.
The new Italian empire was declared on May 9, 1936, when Mussolini himself
announced from the balcony of Piazza Venezia before a sea of followers that Italy had
finally acquired its empire.
Marla Stone has noted that, as a result of the declaration on May 9, there was a dramatic
escalation in the appearance of forms and motifs based on Roman art. The process of
cultural appropriation involved:
...Roman forms, such as mosaics, murals, bas-relief and monumental public statuary,
[which] often took Roman themes, especially readings of Roman history and myth which
coincided with Fascist priorities. According to many fascist bureaucrats, officially sponsored
competitions for “Roman” art forms symbolized a regeneration based on national traditions
(Stone 1999: 212).