October 28, 2022 marks the centenary of the march on Rome. The armed mobilization of the paramilitary “action squads”, active since 1919, is one of the important components of the process that led to the appointment of Benito Mussolini to the presidency of the council (October 31, 1922), although not the only one. As documented by the many researches that have investigated its dynamics, the origins of fascism are a complex phenomenon, in which the climate of instability that followed the First World War (1914-1918), the crisis of the institutions and party organizations of the Liberal Italy and, last but not least, their difficulty in understanding and dealing with the political violence of the movement led by the future leader.
The conquest of power was the subject of an intense work of revision by the fascist regime, which over the years managed to convert it from a party celebration into a state holiday. Among the initiatives that concurred to build the myth of the march, the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution stands out, inaugurated at the Palazzo delle Mostra in Rome on the occasion of the tenth anniversary (28 October 1932). Its experimental installation, created by the main modernist artists and architects of the time, had the task of impressing and involving visitors, called to immerse themselves in the climate of the period between the outbreak of the great war and the beginning of the fascist era through one exhibition space made up of false ceilings, partitions, plastic installations, light effects, photomontages, documents and memorabilia.
The photographic reproductions of the twenty-five rooms of the event – preserved in the central State Archives and available online – still convey the modernity of the chosen style and its adherence to the principles of the new fascist policy. A policy that aspired to speak to the masses by mobilizing symbols and liturgies, leaving the parliamentary halls, breaking into the streets and squares, relying on the energy and communicative power of images. From the exhibition, according to the organizers’ intentions, the public would have emerged transformed: regenerated by the staging of the revolution and a participant in its victory, even if they had not been directly involved in it.
The approximately four million tickets sold in the two years of opening testify to the success of the event, which was promoted in Italy and abroad through a real tourist circuit: advertising, discounts, railway and naval concessions, in addition to visits imposed to members of organizations controlled by the National Fascist Party. Re-proposed in two successive editions, in 1937 and 1942, the exhibition fully accompanied the construction of the consensus. It provided the regime with an extraordinary display device of the fascist past converted into a founding episode in the history of the whole nation.
Maddalena Carli is associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Teramo.
M. Carli, See Fascism. Art and politics in the exhibitions of the regime (1928-1942), Carocci 2021