Rome

If this rhetoric might seem cloudy, one could always try the aging Marinetti’s descants on “Fascist poetry,” written by way of an introduction to a 1937 anthology assembled by a Sicilian bard, Il Duce and Fascism in the Dialect Songs of Italy:

Just as religious poetry, martial poetry, etc., are not resolved in an assiduous exaltation of war or the Church, Fascist poetry is not to be explained as poetry in praise of Fascism. On the contrary … Fascist poetry is that which frames itself in the historical climate created by the Revolution and which means, prefigures, or explains the unifying political, moral, and economic ideas of the Fascist Corporate State, always constructing (or demolishing to construct), never turning back.… Fascist poetry is thus construction, construction of the Fascist spirit, which is realized in the fervor of fecund work, in human acts of salvation, material or spiritual, always altruistic and, whenever possible, universal. It is a poetry which turns against the orgiastic, the dionysiac, the pessimistic, against everything depressing, mortifying, and harmful to the individual as to the collective. It expresses the special state of grace indispensable to the politico-social intuition of the historical moment we are passing through.…

All was now as limpid as the bed of the Tiber.

Fascism’s way forward was the way backward—to an idealized, purified version of ancient Rome, and, equally, because it stood for the Future, it had to have the young, who were the bearers of the Future, on its side. Because it needed to enlist the young, it demanded martyrs and heroes. Fascism was a youth movement, above all else—a fact of which it was not considered proper to remind the young public, in the heady 1960s, with their insane admonitions to trust no one over thirty.

The totalitarian regimes of the last century had young men martyred for their virtuous loyalty to the Cause, like the child saints of earlier Christianity. The Nazis had Horst Wessel, a young Nazi activist supposedly killed by communists and the author of a hugely popular song, that of the Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts, which became Germany’s national anthem: “Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen fest geschlossen,” “Hold high the Flag, tightly close the ranks!” A Nazi-fomented legend had it that Wessel wrote both music and words, but in fact the tune came from a German naval song of World War I. The Stalinists had a repellent teenage ideologue who rose to cult status by denouncing his own father to the secret police for the crimes of disloyalty and deviationism, whereupon the outraged father killed the son; there used to be a bronze statue of this unsavory young martyr in Moscow, but it was torn down after perestroika.

Italian Fascism, which counted so much on its appeal to youth, had its own historical boy hero, too, although not much is known about him. Indeed, there is some doubt whether he actually existed, at least in the form Fascist propaganda gave him. His name was, or was said to be, Giovan Battista Balilla: the last name meant “Little Boy” and was allegedly the nickname of a pre-teen youth named Perasso. Supposedly a Genoese, he met his martyrdom during a revolt against the Habsburg forces that occupied Genoa during the Austrian occupation of 1746—a rising he allegedly started by throwing a rock at some Austrian artillerymen who were struggling to move a cannon stuck in a muddy street.

Many hymns were written by Fascist poetasters to the memory of this semi-legendary child, who came to symbolize Italian victories in World War I, so precious to Fascist hearts, and the future of Fascism itself, so dear to their hopes. He figured in illustrations, on posters, in murals (though of course nobody knew what he looked like, which hardly mattered, since nobody knows what Jesus looked like, either). He was the model for masculine Fascist youth. A typical effusion, which won a bronze medal at the Italian Song Festival of San Giovanni in Rome, in Anno XII, was included in Li Gioielli d’Italia, a collection of verse by the Roman dialect poet Pietro Mastini:

Bocce di rose

Fiori Italiani

Future spose

Madri domani

E pe la fede

Che sempre brilla

L’avrai da vede

Quanti Balilla!

“Mouths of roses/Italian flowers/Spouses of the future/Tomorrow’s mothers/And for the faith/That always shines/You will see before you/So many Balillas!”

This child martyr was rewarded with a special distinction: lots of machinery bore his name. A popular line of low-cost autos—Italian equivalents to the German Volkswagen, though hardly as well engineered—was named after him, and so were several submarines. Mussolini appointed a former ardito, Renato Ricci, to create an Opera Nazionale Balilla, intended to train Italian youth “from a moral and physical point of view,” and Ricci went to England to seek out the founder of the English scouting movement, Robert Baden-Powell, whose ideas were a more peaceable model for this militaristic movement of teenagers. Their essential beliefs were summed up in the “ten commandments” of the Fascist militia:

Remember that those fallen for the Revolution and for the Empire go before your columns of march.

A comrade is a brother to you: he lives and thinks with you, and you will have him at your side in battle.

Italy must be served everywhere, always, with all your means; with work and with blood.

The enemy of Fascism is your enemy: give him no quarter.

Discipline is the sun of armies; it prepares and illuminates the victory.

If you go to attack decisively, victory is already in your grasp.

Total and mutual obedience is the legionary’s strength.

There are no great or small matters; there is only duty.

The Fascist revolution has counted and still counts on the bayonets of its legionaries.

Mussolini is always right.

This last phrase, “Il Duce ha sempre ragione,” pervaded all Italy and her African colonies. Painted on walls, chiseled in stone, chalked on blackboards, even laid out in pebbles in school playgrounds by Ethiopian peasants, it was the unvarying leitmotif of Fascism, and the vestiges of it were still to be seen in parts