Becoming Roman Again 549Cloaked inRomanitas, state art sought to make allusions of an ideological nature clear
and legible to large swaths of the population, while allowing for a greater superimposition
of an ideal with the idealized common past. Thus, the newly created generation of Italians
was to be raised on the myth of Rome. After all, as Agnew (1998: 229) notes, “National
identity requires a common memory that is shared by people who do not know one
another, but who think of themselves as having a common history.”
Making New Italians
This new national awareness, particularly among the younger generations, was strenu-
ously encouraged by the Fascist regime. Mussolini himself spared no effort in promoting
youth policies (Koon 1985: 33–59). He personally saw to it that a series of provisions
for children were carried out, not the least of which were the prolific erection of schools
in Italy and the colonies, a large-scale anti-malaria campaign, and the founding of two
national institutions—theOpera Maternità ed Infanzia, whose purpose was to protect
indigent mothers and their children; and theOpera Nazionale Balilla(ONB), an Italian
youth organization (Koon 1985: 90–115; Santuccio 2005). Each of these undertakings,
it was hoped, would collectively shape future generations into a corps of Italian citizens
who would remain unswervingly loyal to the regime; and every opportunity was seized
to forge true Italians who incarnated Roman values par excellence, or at least as these
values were construed through the Fascist lens.
To the same desired effect, the entire scholastic system was reformed. In the words
of Mussolini (quoted in Koon 1985: 33): “The Government demands that the school
be inspired by the ideals of Fascism....it demands that the school at all levels and in
all its instruction train Italian youth to understand fascism, to ennoble itself through
fascism, and to live in the historic climate created by the Fascist revolution.” Starting with
the Gentile reform of 1923, the Fascist indoctrination (fascistizzazione) of schools was
further propelled by an ambitious series of laws and decrees intended to enable the party
to infiltrate the entire scholastic system. This culminated in 1939 with the Carta della
Scuola Bottai (Bertone 1975; Isneghi 1979; Charnitzky 1996). It is no wonder then that
schools soon figured among the most conducive breeding grounds for producing entire
generations of Italians—ex novo—given their centralized organization, over which the
state exercised direct control. To achieve its aims, the state deemed it necessary to revise
school curricula thoroughly. Starting from elementary school, the revision entailed, for
example, the introduction of Mussolini’s own mottoes and speeches to Italian language
instruction, and, in an effort to instill a stronger sense of belonging to a glorious imperial
past, history was added to the subjects to be taught during the third year in elementary
school. As Koon (1985: 72) has demonstrated, history under the Fascists was deployed
in the construction of the myth of Italy as a civilizing force, a mission revived by the
Fascists that explicitly authorized imperial expansion:
Italy was portrayed as the cradle of civilization (the contributions of the Greeks were mini-
mized or overlooked entirely) and the conqueror of the Western world. Ancient history was
Roman history, meaning military history and studies of heroic figures such as Caesar and
Augustus.