Abstract
Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2010; 232 pp.; 9780802099952, £35.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
This book presents an engaging discussion of the mythical role roads played in the fascist imaginary. By focusing on fascism’s urban planning approach to the Roman landscape, Paul Baxa advances the original argument that Mussolini’s regime elevated roads to the status of monuments and took roads to be symbolic carriers of fascism’s cultural values and beliefs. Contrary to past interpretations that analysed fascism’s construction works as examples of the regime’s poor urban planning in the face of ideological dictates, Baxa looks at the regime’s new roads through the optic of fascism’s cultural understanding of landscape. He suggests that roads constituted rich semiotic signs for the fascists and expressed their deep-seated love for speed, danger and death. Building on the cultural approach to fascism pioneered by George Mosse, Baxa thus examines the regime’s urban intervention in the capital as a manifestation of fascism’s modernist impulse and as linked to the apocalyptic event of the First World War. A crucial element in this interpretation is the foundational role of the war in the regime’s approach to the Roman landscape. According to this analysis, the veterans’ ‘lived experiences’ in the trenches were at the origins of fascism’s cultural representations of space. More specifically, the Carso, a rocky plateau in northeastern Italy where the most wearisome phase of the Italian army’s war of position against the Austro-Hungarians took place, shaped the fascists’ attitudes towards Rome’s cityscape.
This first part of the book, which sets the tone for the analysis of fascism’s practice of construction/destruction, is quite fascinating, although its conclusions, even if persuasive, are mostly suggestive. Baxa provides an intriguing discussion of the influence the lunar, harsh landscape of the Carsican region exercised over the soldiers who survived the war. Impressed in their memory was the savage, forbidding, and inhospitable nature of the area mixed with the war’s brutality. Ruins and a hostile terrain challenged the soldiers’ understanding of life and death and blurred the boundary between civilization and barbarism. In contrast, the open spaces of the plains came to represent to the soldiers an elusive normality that they associated with the ideas of movement and freedom.
After 1918 the search for open spaces away from the brutal and inaccessible landscape of the Carso became a legacy of the war experience. For the blackshirts and the war veterans that filled their ranks, open roads represented a mythic place that allowed them to drive a modern vehicle par excellence, the truck, and pursue punitive expeditions against the socialists. The blackshirts’ love for roads also went hand in hand with their critique of the bourgeois and negative evaluation of old cities with their tortuous streets and piazzas. As the fascists identified urban life with comfort and cowardice Rome came to epitomize to them the decadence of old Italy. Within this context, the regime’s decision to change the Roman landscape through urban works fitted fascism’s self understanding as a new, forward-looking movement. A modern city needed to emerge from the past, albeit through a return to primordial greatness, that is, the ruins of mythical imperial Rome.
New large boulevards where automobiles could zip by at high speed would achieve this goal even if that meant demolishing layers of the city’s history. Indeed, the destruction of nineteenth-century Liberal Rome was the welcome target of the regime’s restructuring. The elimination of such history allowed for a sharper valorization of ancient Rome’s ruins, the part of Italian history that the fascists privileged. Through destruction, fascism reaffirmed its warlike, violence-prone identity first born on the Carso. At the same time, boulevards such as via del Mare and via dell’Impero befitted fascism’s new empire. Roads were monuments to the regime and allowed Italians who travelled them to be aware of Rome’s ruins in ways that exalted action (looking at ruins while on a car ride) rather than contemplation. Through an examination of the master plan for Rome and the competition for the construction of the new Palazzo Littorio, as well as a recounting of Hitler’s 1938 visit to Rome, Baxa also makes the case that the transformation of Rome carried out by the regime’s urban politics showed fascism’s underlying paganism and its inclination towards spectacular politics. Ultimately, roads and ruins were fascism’s testament to its own glory.
The book provides an original exploration of fascism’s cultural landscape against the (physical) background of the war. Although the critical role of the Carso in the fascist imaginary needs to be more grounded, and some of the author’s inferences seem at times far-fetched and would benefit from more evidence, the allusions to the war and the Carsican landscape are thought-provoking and suggest the importance of doing further work in this area. New research could shed more light on the thread linking fascism to the war experience. This said, Baxa offers a unique and stimulating contribution towards reassessing fascism’s origins, both in terms of its actual historical beginnings with the blackshirts and squadrismo, and with regard to its cultural mythical identity built on the foundational experience of the First World War.