“Rome of travertine/Remade in cardboard/Salutes the housepainter/Its next master.”
The mass media of Italy, which were tightly controlled—one needed a state-issued license to practice as a journalist of any kind, even a fashion reporter, under Mussolini, and he personally appointed all editors—greeted the arrival of the Fuhrer with an automatic ecstasy. A good, though minor, example was a cartoon in whose first panel we see a Nazi officer (no mustache, so he cannot be Hitler himself) throwing a Nazi salute at the Capitoline she- wolf and her two foundling babies, Romulus and Remus. In the second panel, the she-wolf, overcome with doggy joy, has come down from her pedestal and is fawning all over the Nazi, while the temporarily abandoned but delighted infants are returning the salute and calling “Heil Hitler!”
It is impossible to say what effect Hitler’s architectural opinions may have had on Mussolini’s changes to Rome. In some respects, especially at the end of the 1930s, the two men thought so much alike that there is no disentangling their ideas. However, one project in particular which Mussolini inflicted on his capital stands out for its Hitlerian character of axial straightness and dumb clarity. This was the approach avenue to the Piazza San Pietro, Bernini’s overwhelmingly rich symbolic site in front of the basilica. Before Mussolini, the visitor coming from the Tiber approached Saint Peter’s along the Spina dei Borghi, or Spine of the Borgo, a pair of more or less parallel roads that ran into the piazza but did not open up the view of the basilica in a suitably spectacular way. But in 1937, the year before Hitler’s first visit to Rome, Mussolini decided to convert this comparatively gradual revelation into pure, one-point-perspective melodrama. Whether he planned to impress Hitler with this is hard to say; on balance, it seems likely. The result was a giant avenue in the manner of Albert Speer, driving straight for the Vatican Obelisk, Maderno’s facade, and the dome. Surprise, once so vital a part of the approach to the great basilica, was now eliminated. The name of the avenue, the Via della Conciliazione, commemorates the 1929 agreement under the Lateran Treaty, whereby the Vatican—hitherto opposed to Fascism because of Il Duce’s anti-clerical bias— recognized the Fascist government of Italy while Fascism granted the Vatican complete territorial independence. This would permanently shape relations between Italy’s church and state, whose “conciliation” the new avenue symbolized.
In the process of the reconciliation of art and state, every dialect bard from Lake Como to Capo Palinuro, it seemed, was busy telling Italian children to emulate their savior:
“Pure soul, go to school, study hard, learn, and pledge true faith to our Duce.”
The Duce’s appearance evoked paeans of awed praise from dialect poets all over Italy. Here is a Nando Bennati, writing in Ferrarese dialect, around 1937, addressing his leader simply as
“The head, a hard and massive nut / Hewn with a pruning hook, which makes one shudder / The high wide forehead, which is the home / Of a large and weighty brain / The eyebrows, like two ancient Roman arches / Which, if lowered, make even his friends tremble / Two eyes which project like two spikes / And read all thoughts, good and bad / The nose like an eagle’s beak, which moves / To sniff the air, and see if anything new has come— / The voice that strikes like a whip / And pierces the soul like a dagger-stab.”
And so on, for several verses, until the moral is spelled out:
Not only was Mussolini returning the state to its primal dignity, but he was seen as the man to save Italy from shortages, the one who gave back to Italian food its primordial and sacramental character. Such was the content of
