Una capitale per l’Italia. Per un racconto della Roma fascista

But how fascist was Fascist Rome? How did mass society and modern culture establish themselves and become confused in the contradictory reality of Mussolini’s regime? Rome was the place where the 20th-century atmosphere dressed up in fascist garb had its greatest public manifestations, where the regime permeated works and dreams, streets and squares, sports fields and film studios, suburbs and cultural institutions, newspapers and university classrooms. Put back forcefully at the centre of national life, the urban scene of the capital was the scene of fascism par excellence. Now that the twenty-year period is ideologically and politically over, even the Rome of the Duce can finally be seen not only as a panorama of archaeological and urban crimes, but also in its relationship with the great cultural and artistic currents of the twentieth century and as the birthplace of a new bourgeois society destined to establish a sort of “Roman hegemony” over the future democratic Italy.