L’Anno Santo (Holy Year) in Fascist Italy 1933—34

Between Easter 1933 and Easter 1934, Rome was the venue for two major and potentially rival efforts to seize history for popular use. The Roman Catholic Church, under the rule of Pope Pius XI, held a supernumerary Anno Santo, Holy Year or Jubilee, the first since the signature of the Lateran pacts with the Fascist regime in 1929. That agreement had formally ended the Pope’s ‘imprisonment in the Vatican’, permitting the Church publicly to deploy a greater array of Rome’s religious pasts than had been possible since the Risorgimento. Meanwhile, in October 1932, Mussolini’s dictatorship had opened its Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, there making with stridently modernist dynamism its own claims to carry Rome’s histories in its hands. Many ‘pilgrims’ in 1933—34 attended both Catholic and Fascist events. What, then, does this coincidence illustrate of the Fascist version of totalitarianism, to some historians a ‘political religion’ of span and depth, but one that was never able fully to master a Church that was at least as determined to claim that it best expressed transcendence and eternity?