544 Valentina Follo
Capitalizing on the cultural patrimony that Italy had inherited from ancient civilizations
to imprint a national identity on the minds of Italians required not only effective and
standardized national policies that protected these resources from dispersal, but also the
institution of museums. This period witnessed, in fact, the creation of Italy’s first national
museums, such as the Museo delle Terme in Rome and the Royal Archeological Museum
in Florence, which were to embody a shared history (Barbanera 1998; Arthurs 2007;
2012; Massari 2011). “History,” in fact, became the operative word in the newly devised
school curricula. In particular, the study of ancient Roman history was emphasized, and
Italian history was viewed as its continuation, indeed, to the point that the terms “Rome”
and “Italy” were used interchangeably as synonyms in schoolbooks.
The myth of Rome was appropriated once again in 1911 in service of the war against
Libya, which was widely held as a renewed dominion over the Mediterranean (Petrici-
oli 1990; Munzi 2001). Mazzini himself in 1871 had already interpreted the defeat of
Carthage as the birth of the Roman Empire, claiming that when “the flag of Rome flew
atop the Atlantis Mountains as Carthage lay overthrown, the Mediterranean was called
Our Sea” (Salvatori 2006: 765; Cofrancesco 2009). The rhetoric of the period asserted
Italy’s historical, almost natural, claim on the continent of Africa. Two main reasons were
offered up in support of this sense of entitlement: first, Africa’s geographical position,
and, second, the idea that its lands had not been fruitful since the time of the ancient
Romans. On the occasion of the war against Libya, an eminent Italian poet named Gio-
vanni Pascoli delivered a nostalgic, imperialistic speech in favor of this intervention on
November 21, 1911 (Pascoli 1911):
large numbers of working class members [to be understood as Italians] have found a place
of their own: a vast region made wet by the waves of our sea...and towards which our great
island juts out impatiently; this immense region that had once been replete with water and
verdant with trees and gardens thanks to the labors of our ancestors, is now, and has been for
some time, mostly desert owing to the inactivity of the nomadic and slothful populations.Harking back to Rome’s glorious past thus provided justification for a military campaign
in Libya, whose barren lands were to prosper once again with the return of a so-called
civilizing power. Pascoli’s repeated reference to the possessive “our” was a direct appeal
to his Italian readers. Through an illusion that relied just as heavily on exclusion as it did
on inclusion, Pascoli attempted to create a sense of shared interest among his readership,
constituting them as a community bound by their shared history and patrimony while
simultaneously distancing them from “the others.”
The year 1911 was unlike any other year. It marked the fiftieth anniversary of Italy’s
unification. Among the events deemed worthy of the occasion, a festival was planned
that was intended to surpass all others in its scope so as to document Italy’s evolution
into a nation (Massari 2011: 9). Originally, two international exhibitions were organized:
one in Turin, the kingdom’s first capital, and the other in Rome. To these, a third was
subsequently added, in Florence, which had been the capital prior to Rome.
Amidst the cultural happenings, the Regional and Ethnographic Show held in the
Piazza d’Armi, situated in present-day Rome’s neighborhood of Prati, constituted the
main attraction. The exhibition’s express purpose was to convey to a large, general pub-
lic contemporary concepts such as “unity and multiplicity” (Massari 2011: 12), and, by