Fascism - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

Among the many ‘founding myths’ of Italian Fascism such as those regarding its relationship to the First World War, one element stood out as key to both its quest for absolute dominion over the Italian peninsula and its historically based self-concept and representation: the idea of present-day Italy as incarnating the spirit and virtuousness of Roman (late Republican and early Imperial) antiquity, creating the image of a Terza Roma, of a ‘third’, Fascist Rome. This concept was omnipresent throughout the entire period within which Mussolini dominated Italian politics. This very specific use of the historical past is discussed in this article, tracing its presence in various parts of the cultural and intellectual field, identifying the manifold ways in which history can meet contemporary, and ‘futural’, prerequisites. In so doing, it is inspired by recent scholarship underlining the futural, temporal thrust of Fascism and romanità, rather than its traditionally reactionary, backward-looking dynamic. As seems, at least to a certain extent, to have been the case in Nazi Germany, for the Fascists, antiquity indeed was no faraway, dusty past, but a lively source of inspiration and energy revealing the regime’s modernist, revolutionary ambition to build a ‘Third Rome’ which, literally and figuratively, made visible the earlier layers of Roman heritage.

Although the site of the ancient Circus Maximus was one of the most loaded spaces of the Fascist ‘Third Rome’, it has received limited attention as a privileged site where a dizzying array of myths and illusions were entertained, simulated, and deposited as new Fascist layers on Rome’s urban and mnemonic palimpsest. Previously a decayed, ‘unsightly’, and overcrowded hodgepodge of layers of life, history, and memory, it was substantially restored, ruthlessly emptied of its previous life, and then used for a multitude of Fascist rituals and projections (parades, celebrations, exhibitions, mass spectacles). In this article, I explore the diverse facets of the circus’s transformation in the 1930s and argue that the site was used as a prime space of enacting and simulating the full thrust of the Fascist regime’s regenerative repertoire, involving erasure and disruption of layers of the past, new additive elements and spatial practices, as well as a multitude of projections of a decidedly modern Fascist new order and temporality.

The conference ‘Revolution and Eternity – Fascism’s Temporality’ discussed the complex and meta-historical topic of ‘time and temporality’ with regards to the fascist experience of time, and ways of temporal thinking and acting with reference to German National Socialism, and fascism in Italy and Romania. The various papers examined specific national forms of fascism from the perspective of the concepts of political order and temporality (e.g. fascist interpretations of temporal dimensions – future, present and past). The conference revealed that the fascist view of time was based on specific (chrono)political practices (archaeology, filmmaking etc.) and that the inhumane politics of fascism were embedded in temporal paradigms that combined contradictory ideas of revolutionary acceleration with the eternal standstill of time.