impossible capital

The Impossible Capital: Monumental Rome under Liberal and Fascist Regimes, 1870-1943Author(s): John AgnewReviewed work(s):Source: Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 80, No. 4 (1998), pp. 229-240Published by: Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and GeographyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/491051 .Accessed: 04/11/2012 17:36

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THE IMPOSSIBLE CAPITAL: MONUMENTAL ROME UNDER LIBERAL AND

FASCIST REGIMES, 1870-1943

by John Agnew

Agnew, John 1998: The impossible capital: monumental Rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870-1943. Geogr. Ann., 80 B: 229-240.

ABSTRACT. Every nation-state has a capital city from where the central government's institutions operate and where the past of the nation is remembered monumentally. Following unification in 1870 Rome became the capital of the new Italy. Turning it into a singular site to represent the aspirations of the regimes that came to power, however, proved an impossible task. Not only did the Liberal and Fascist regimes of the period 1870-1943 have contradictory intentions and goals, they also ran up against the com- plexities of Rome's own history in trying to establish their own. This paper contends that there are important similarities between the two regimes in their approaches to making Rome a capital for the new state and that contemporary cultural analysis of the Fas- cist regime misses this continuity when it takes the regime's claims to aesthetic novelty and architectural innovation at face value. In the end, Rome resisted attempts at using its monumental space to symbolically unify a country that remained materially and culturally divided.

Key words: Italian unification, Rome, capital city, monumentality.

National identity requires a common memory that is shared by people who do not know one another, but who think of themselves as having a common history. This identity relies on forgetting as much as remembering; reconstructing the past as a trajecto- ry to the national present in which to make a radi- cally new future (Gillis, 1994, p. 9). At one and the same time, therefore, new nations require ancient pasts that can be mined for commemoration yet which do not totally obscure the achievements of the present. This is the burden borne in part by the "monumentality" of capital cities and other sites of national commemoration or lieux de memoire such as key battlefields, the birth- and resting-places of national heroes, and other national shrines (Nora, 1984). They replace or challenge the myriad mi- lieux de memoire in which people's daily lives are saturated with particular place memories that do not privilege "national" events or history. In particular, a capital city's physical layout and the scatter- ing of monuments celebrating national history pro-

vide not only a legibility to the city itself but also a physical means of representing the nation in the city as the city represents the nation. To Moshe Safdie (1984), for example, monumentality refers to the spatial and architectural arrangement of sites designed to convey the political meanings embedded in the location and iconography of the specific sites both separately and taken together as an en- semble. The architects of monumentality endeavor to impose on the spatial form of the city a singular set of meanings, a perceptible order and sense of hi- erarchy among sites and connecting routes, that both commemorates and celebrates the common history and evolving brilliance of the nation. The past is thus represented geographically as coeval, without any necessary historical sequence or chro- nology, within the capital city.

After the occupation of Rome in 1870 by the forces of the risorgimento, one of the challenges facing the new regime was to turn the ancient city into a capital worthy of their project. With an in- credible heritage of buildings, ruins and artefacts to draw on this might seem to have been an easy task. Surely establishing places of memory to commem- orate the achievement of a united Italy would require only the token ritualization of already famil- iar and beloved sites and scenes? This was not how it worked out, however. On the contrary, it proved impossible to turn Rome into a capital on a par with other European capitals such as Berlin, Vienna and Paris. There were too many different memories encapsulated in the city to effect a successful transi- tion to just an "ordinary" capital for an ordinary country. In the end, Rome defied all attempts at turning its historic center into a site of commemoration and ritual for the new Italian state.

Making a capital for a nation? When Rome was annexed to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870 it was only the fifth city of the new

Geografiska Annaler - 80 B (1998) - 4 229

JOHN AGNEW

state, exceeded in population by Naples, Milan, Genoa and Palermo. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, Rome had shrunk in both population and political-economic importance. The city survived largely as a result of its ecclesiastical role in Christendom and as the seat of the Pope's terri- tories in central Italy (the Papal States). As the new capital city it grew vigorously from 212,000 inhabitants in 1871 to 660,000 in 1921. By then only Na- ples and Milan were larger. It overtook Naples in 1931 and Milan in 1936. With well over 2.5 million inhabitants , Rome is easily the largest city in Italy today, though the metropolitan area is second in size to that of Milan. Unlike Paris or London in their respective states, Rome is by no means a dominant metropolis within Italy as a whole. Nor has it ever been. Milan is still more important economically. As Italy's self-named capital morale, Milan has also been seen by many Italians as a clear other or total alternative to Rome; until the crisis of tan- gentopoli in 1992 it represented everything Rome was not. Only in its immediate hinterland and in parts of the south has Rome ever been politically and culturally predominant. Italy has a diffuse and fragmented urban system that reflects the long history of political fragmentation in the peninsula.

As Italian political unification proceeded between 1859 and 1870, a critical question concerned the selection of a capital for the new kingdom. As early as 1861, although not yet part of the new state, Rome was declared the capital. The annexation of Rome and its surrounding region not only provided the last chunk of the national territory then claimed by Italian patriots but also a "neutral city" not associated, as were Turin, Milan and Florence, with the local elite groups which had taken hold of the process of Italian unification (Caracciolo, 1956, p. 16). In other words, as Birindelli (1978, p. 23) puts it, Rome "became the capital not for the qualities that it had but for the ones it was missing". This, plus the obvious association with the glories of the ancient Roman Empire, gave Rome a crucial ad- vantage over its competitors. Rome's international visibility also counted. Italian unification was more the result of international diplomacy than of nationalist revolt. Consequently, attracting outside support was crucial. By way of contrast, German unification during the same period was more internally oriented. The choice of Berlin as a capital for the new Germany reflected both Prussian dominance of the new state and the Prussian state's prior com- mitment to economic and military growth as man- ifested in the growth of Berlin itself. Rome was so

different. Rather than being a center of national prestige or strength, Rome was widely viewed as a "parasitic" city that consumed and did not produce (Scattareggia, 1988, p. 43). But the choice still made considerable sense. In the first place, in the movements for unification the city of Rome was itself a unifying force. If there was a single tradition that the population of the peninsula held in common it was that of ancient Rome. Across all the ideological currents of Italian unification this was the one integrating element. The myth of a unified past underwriting a unified future was particularly important to the liberal aristocracy which took control over the process of national unification under the auspices of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Rome pre- sented the image of a strong center for a powerful group worried that the new Italy might be too de- centralized for their political and economic interests. Second, as noted above, Rome was not seen as a threat to the interest of dominant groups in existing capitals such as Turin, Florence and Naples. Its ruling class was subservient to the Pope and it was economically weak.

As Italy's political-symbolic capital, Rome posed no immediate threat to Turin's administrative functions (as the seat of the dominant political unit, the Kingdom of Sardinia), to Milan's economic importance, to Florence's cultural and geographical centrality or to Naples's demographic weight in It- aly as a whole. Yet very quickly most roads once again led to Rome. The new Italy proved to be an ex- tremely centralized state as the royal court moved into the Roman Quirinale palace, the military high command, the Parliament, ministries, and the high- est courts of law took over former papal and other ecclesiastical properties in the historic center. As a result, by 1890 Rome had become the place of work and residence for a national governing class. The city was now the fulcrum of national life under a strongly centralized government. As Scattareggia (1988, p. 45) expresses the new role: "Through may- ors and prefects the directors of central authority, located in the capital, imposed taxes on the smallest and most distant provinces of the kingdom".

The new government found itself in a city without much of an economic base other than its ecclesiastical functions. Industrial growth was next to nothing and remained this way for many years after unification. The new governing class found some common ground with the local papal aristocracy in keeping the city "tranquil" without the class conflict that they associated with manufacturing activities. Bureaucracy, property speculation based on hous-

230 Geografiska Annaler - 80 B (1998) - 4

THE IMPOSSIBLE CAPITAL: MONUMENTAL ROME UNDER LIBERAL AND FASCIST REGIMES, 1870-1943

ing ministries and residences for civil servants, and some banking activities were quickly established as Rome's main economic functions. Initially, most immigrants came from the north, particularly the Piedmont region around Turin, but from 1900 on- wards the civil service progressively "south- ernized" and most other jobs were also filled by poorer immigrants from the surrounding region of Lazio and regions to the south. One long-term consequence of this shift has been to reinforce the image of Rome (particularly in the north) as a southern rather than an all-Italian city: the seat of a bureaucracy that exists for the bureaucrats and their clients and not for the national population as a whole.

From the outset, the new rulers tried to make the city a symbolic center for their regime. Initially, there was an attempt, under the patronage of the Piedmontese politician Quintano Sella, to establish a new center of gravity for the city to the northeast, beyond its 1870 core. But this largely failed. It was easier and more profitable for certain interests to concentrate government offices in the historic core of the city. In this they largely succeeded, expropri- ating convents, monasteries, palaces and other buildings from the ancien regime. Another and symbolically more important method was by means of "patriotic building": locating monuments to celebrate the new regime and thus to challenge the singular association of the Church with the most sacred sites in the city. From one point of view, most of the plans for establishing a new monumental Rome in the years 1870 to 1922 came to nothing. As Bruno Tobia (1991) has argued, ideological-rhetorical debate produced little physical change in the landscape of the city. Within the historic center (Figure 1) perhaps only the subversive placement of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II (the first king of the new Italy) on the edge of the Capitoline Hill (the historic core of the city, next to the seat of the commune and the imperial forums) and midway between the Pope's two seats, as universal pontiff, at the Vatican and, as Bishop of Rome, at San Giovanni in Laterano, provided a powerful symbol for the new Rome. Unlike Milan, whose center was transformed into a monumental celebration of a united Italy, Rome was reshaped by only a few street improvements and associated public buildings in beaux arts style (such as the Via Na- zionale and the Bank of Italy, respectively) and by interventions such as the "Passeggiata Archeolog- ica", finished in 1911, which contained all the main archeological sites of ancient Rome between the Capitoline Hill and the Terme di Caracalla.

From another point of view, however, the changes can be seen as more considerable, if nevertheless relatively modest compared to the transformation of central Paris by Haussmann. The problem was that there was no powerful constituency for urban planning of any kind. Private investors and their political allies neutralized most initiatives to limit and direct the growth of the city (Fried, 1973, p. 22). To the extent that there was any "success" for planning in the Liberal era, it lay in the placing of monuments to unification and the reorientation of the city away from its historic axis. In particular, the white Brescian marble pile that rose in Piazza Venezia against the backdrop of the Capitoline and the ruins of ancient Rome (1885-1911) provided a new vis- ual anchor for the city. Via Nazionale and its western extension, Corso Vittorio, in the 1880s made Pi- azza Venezia the central hub for traffic as well as the symbolic center of the city. All later attempts at re- orienting the city to represent the intentions of the new state took off from this point of reference.

The great monument in Piazza Venezia (the Vit- toriano) is undoubtedly the single most important element of monumentality celebrating the new nation in the new capital. It is the Roman equivalent of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Admiralty Arch and the facade of Buckingham Palace in London, and Garnier's Opera House in Paris. Even though built at different times in the long arch of European capital building from 1820 to 1920, each is an or- nate neoclassical monument to national pride and status, announcing the modem national metropolis as a center of aspiring or realized world power. The Vittoriano followed the pattern already established elsewhere:

Marble and white limestone were the favored building materials, Corinthian and Composite orders defined the decorative style of grand arches, pediments and columns, while monumental statuary and the recurrent personification of "Victory" in bronze or marble recalled the iconography of classical Roman cities, with their monuments and "triumphs." For both the established empires of Britain and France, and for the more embryonic colonial ambitions of Belgium, Germany or the infant Italian state, similar architectural themes and urban design, harking back to the decoration and iconography of the classical empires, declared an "Age of Empire" and inscribed its sentiments into the Western capital city.

(Cosgrove and Atkinson, 1998, p. 5).


JOHN AGNEW

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Fig. 1. The major changes wrought in the fabric of Rome by Liberal and Fascist regimes plus some other major sites.

The winning design, that of Giuseppe Sacconi, brought to Rome the beaux arts architectural style that had transformed Paris under the Second Em- pire. The realized monument, officially inaugurat- ed in 1911 but worked on until 1934, took the form

of a three-level acropolis made out of white marble brought from Brescia in northern Italy. The lowest level, above the first flight of stairs, was an altar to the Dea Roma, the mythical goddess of Rome and the secular spirit of the Eternal City. The second

232 Geografiska Annaler .

80 B (1998) ?

4


level was devoted to commemoration of the late king Vittorio Emanuele II (died 1878) whose equestrian statue surmounted the Dea Roma. The third level supported sixteen composite columns with associated friezes representing the sixteen regions of Italy-the geography of Italy encapsulated within a single monument. Inscribed vocations to Civium Libertas (the city's freedom) and Patrium Unitae (the nation's unity) proclaim the secular de- ities of the regime in open defiance of the Catholic domes and towers of the city. The monument can be thought of as a "heroic narrative of Italian history", gesturing for authenticity to adjacent sites such as the Roman Forum and Michelangelo's Capitoline Piazza with its own personifications of Dea Roma and the equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (Cosgrove and Atkinson, 1998, p. 7).

But there were changes to the fabric of the city during the Liberal period other than the Vittoriano and the new east-west axis through Piazza Venezia that helped to transform the city from its papal pattern (Aymonino, 1984). In the first place, numerous piazzas and other open spaces were "regularized" to fit a preference among the architects and planners of the new Rome for Euclidean dimensions. This reflected the rational ideals of the regime and the urge to straighten and otherwise order the dis- ordered appearance of the city. Second, new streets were built according to a model of fagades and layouts for which Via Nazionale provided the proto- type (Tafuri, 1959). The idea was to produce a greater uniformity in pathways through the city that would emphasize the impact of the regime on the country as a whole. Third, the River Tiber was em- banked and flanked by new boulevards. This served not only to protect the city from the periodic inun- dations to which it had always been subject but also to separate the life of the city from the river. Fourth, the new streets which cut through the fabric of the city divided up the city center into a series of "blocks" that undermined the organic unity that had been a feature of Baroque and Papal Rome. Fifth, the clearing and "freeing" of archeological sites was begun to set them off from later accretions. This reached its zenith in the Fascist period with the isolation of the Mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus, the pushing of the Via della Conciliazi- one from the Tiber to St. Peter's Square (Figure 1), and the cutting of the Via dell" Impero (now Via dei Fori Imperiali) through the Roman ruins between Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum. But it had begun earlier with the decision to turn the ruins into a resource for representing the historical continuity

between ancient and modern regimes by isolating them physically from the accretions of less distin- guished epochs. The new Roman monumentality had to deal with the presence of a past that always challenged the authenticity of attempts at recasting the city while at the same time seeming to invite its exploitation.

At first sight, planning and Fascism might appear like a natural pairing. After all, it was the Fas- cist regime of Mussolini, coming to power in 1922 but consolidating its grip only in 1924, that coined the word "totalitarian" to describe itself and its aspirations. Yet Fascist planning, though producing such new anchors to the city as a whole as the Foro Mussolini to the northwest of the historic core (where the Olympic Stadium now stands) and the EUR complex to the southwest (built beginning in 1937 for an exposition that was never held and finished in the 1950s), only continued what had already begun during the previous regime. Possibly Mussolini's most important act in terms of the manipulation of urban space for political purposes was the transfer of his office from the Palazzo Chigi to the Palazzo Venezia in Piazza Venezia in 1929. Thereafter, Piazza Venezia became the key space in Rome for performing the ceremonies and ritual speech-making of Italian Fascism. It was from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia that Mussolini made the speeches proclaiming the "victories" won by Fascism and Italy and commanding Italians to faith and obedience. The sacralization of the Vitto- riano as the site of the burial of Italy's Unknown Soldier (1921) was used by the Fascist regime to further reinforce the symbolic centrality of Piazza Venezia to the "nationalization" of Rome. The associated rituals figure significantly in accounts of the exploitation of public space by Fascism, particularly those involving the use of amplification, floodlighting and the image of the masses pressed together in the presence of the leader (Ii Duce). Such technical innovations apart, however, it was the elaborate stage-set provided by the Vittoriano which gave to Piazza Venezia its "dimensions and architectural language of epic theatre" (Cosgrove and Atkinson, 1998, p. 10). Commemorations here and in the vicinity (in the Roman Forum, for in- stance) were important ways in which the Fascist regime represented itself to Italians and to the world.

But the commemorations enacted there were not merely repetitions of the same rituals. Mabel Be- rezin (1997, pp. 116-19) sees 1934 as a turning point in the character of commemorative activities.


JOHN AGNEW

If before that date the primary focus was on building national social and political institutions, after it the regime "took a decidedly more militaristic cast and so did its public ceremonies." Of the twelfth an- nual commemoration of the Fascist March on Rome in 1934 she notes: "two corporative physical bodies, the bodies of the fascist martyrs and the bodies of fascist athletes-dead youth and living youth-carried the symbolic weight of the twelfth anniversary commemoration. The old and the new generation of fascists, the past warriors and future fighters, were a harbinger of fascist aggression" (Berezin, 1997, p. 119).

It is still plausible to see the planning of Roman monumentality as one of the main features of the Fascist regime. To a considerable extent Mussolini (increasingly the personification of what Fascism stood for as the years went by) turned to ancient imperial Rome to provide a pedigree for his otherwise modernist movement. Reconstructing Rome according to an imperial image became a vital part of the agenda of Fascism. As Robert Fried (1973, p. 31) put it in his book on Planning the Eternal City, "The city of Rome was once again to become an imperial capital. Romans and Italians were to draw from the monuments of ancient Rome a sense of pride, power, and discipline." But even this was not new. Italian intellectuals had long called up on the grandeur of the Roman Empire for contemporary inspiration. In the years before, during and imme- diately following the First World War the Roman "ideal" reached its zenith, as related by Borgese in his Goliath: The March ofFascism (1937) (see also Salvemini, 1973, p. 26).

In the early years of the regime, Mussolini made a number of pronouncements about the "freeing" of the city from the years of "decadence". On the oc- casion of the 2,677th birthday of the city (21 April 1924), for example, when he was made an "honor- ary citizen" of the city on the Capitoline Hill, Mus- solini gave his vision of the physical form of the capital:

I should like to divide the problems of Rome, the Rome of the Twentieth Century, into two categories: the problems of necessity and the problems of grandeur. One cannot confront the latter unless the first have been resolved. The problems of necessity arise from the growth of Rome, and are encompassed in the binomial: housing and communications. The problems of grandeur are of another kind: lib- erate all of ancient Rome from the mediocre

construction that disfigures it, but side by side with the Rome of antiquity and Christianity we must also create the monumental Rome of the Twentieth Century. Rome cannot, must not, be solely a modern city, in the by now ba- nal sense of that word; it must be a city worthy of its glory, and that glory must be revivified tirelessly to pass on as the legacy of the Fascist era to generations to come.

(Mussolini, 1934, p. 93).

This grand programme, however, offered no solu- tion to the contradiction between "necessity" and "grandeur." Fascist architecture and aesthetics were factionalized (Zevi, 1956, pp. 265-81; Tan- nenbaum, 1972, pp. 269-70). On one side, including Mussolini himself in the early years of the regime, stood the strongest advocates of romanittc and grandeur. One of the leading figures in this camp, Gustavo Giovannoni, proposed a massive re- building in the Baroque districts to celebrate Fas- cism by means of the large-scale construction of a new monumental space near Piazza di Spagna. He also approved the "conservation through isolation" of the classical monuments scattered around the historic city. The needs of the city's population at- tracted little or no interest. Mussolini appeared to endorse the emphasis on imperial Rome by moving his office to Palazzo Venezia-the center of the new east-west axis created in the years after unification-and by supporting plans to open up monumental access routes to it. But this also betrayed his pas- sion for new roads, irrespective of the "damage" this might inflict on the existing configuration of the city.

One part of this enterprise became the shifting of the center of gravity of the city towards the sea. This recalled the outward orientation of imperial Rome. The autostrada, linking the outskirts of Rome to Ostia, opened in 1928, was one part of this strategy. To open up the Piazza Venezia to the south a road had to be built along the foot of the Capitoline Hill via the Theatre of Marcellus to the autostrada and thence to the sea. On the other side of the piazza a road was cut through the heart of ancient Rome-the Via dell' Impero-joining the Piazza to the Colos- seum and thence to the Appenine Hills. A part of the classical inheritance had to be sacrificed to celebrate its rebirth.

On the other side stood a group of young Roman architects, under the protection ofMarcello Piacen- tini, by the late 1920s Fascism's leading architect, who wanted to conserve the existing city as it was

234 Geografiska Annaler - 80 B (1998) ?

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and move the Termini railway station to the east. The plan was to emphasize the "modern" element identified by Mussolini: to create a new Rome to the east of the existing one, along the lines origi- nally proposed by Quintano Sella, and to celebrate Fascism in this new city.

Finally, in 1931 a plan was promulgated propos- ing a "splendid, monumental capital" in which elements of both visions were brought together. Pia- centini, Fascism's perfect pragmatist, wrote the re- port which accompanied the plan. The plan accepted the continuation of the historic city as the center of the modern city. Expansion was proposed at the fringe in all directions. But the plan also proposed relocating the main railway station to the east and rigidly controlling development on the city's outskirts.

Some of the more significant monumental projects approved by the plan were carried out, including the cutting of the Via dell' Impero and the isolation of the Mausoleum of the Emperor Augus- tus. In general, however, the plan was not imple- mented. The railway station remained where it was. There was little concerted regulation of housing development at the fringe. Three factors lay behind the failure of systematic planning under Fascism. First, the government could not generate the reve- nues needed to buy land and cover the costs of the projects it had proposed. Rather, as with Fascist militarization, the design was not backed up with resources. The general failure of Fascist economic policies and the onset of the Great Depression also set limits to public spending for monumental projects. Second, private developers were major allies of the regime and were as a result allowed to build without let or hindrance. Third, and finally, the contradictions in the spatial orientation of the 1931 plan were exposed by the new plan in the late 1930s to hold a world fair in Rome in 1942 (the twentieth anniversary of Fascism's March on Rome) on a site to the southwest of the city. The choice of site was made without reference to the 1931 plan. It implicitly endorsed a seaward thrust to the growth of the city. The EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) site became, when it was completed after the Second World War, a memorial to Fascism and a new anchor for the city's growth.

The failure of the 1931 plan was due not only to the power of private land and building interests but also to the incoherence of the Fascist plans themselves. They failed to square the countervail- ing pressures of the "necessity" facing the city as a living entity with the "grandeur" of the city as a

national and imperial center to which Mussolini himself had drawn attention at the beginning of his regime.

The Power of the Past There were also more long-standing problems in using the city to make a nation. One was that the city was naturally polycentric, like Italy itself. The city in 1870 had inherited a complex structure from its variegated past of eras of expansion and contrac- tion. One consequence was that it lacked a single center or monumental space that could be readily expropriated for later use. Only half the area inside the Aurelian walls was urbanized. The center of ancient Rome was in the Roman Forum, but with the fall of the Empire this site was abandoned. In 1870 it was in the country rather than the city, and served as a cattle market for the city. The center of medieval Rome had been the Capitoline Hill, but by 1870 the municipal government located there had little power; it too was on the spatial periphery of the city. For centuries the Popes had moved between their seats at the Vatican and San Giovanni in Laterano. But no one of these or other sites of papal authority could be unambiguously identified as the spatial center of the city. The rationalist reading of the city favored by its new masters also suffered from the clash between the reality of a divided Italy on the one hand, and the highly charged and complex past/present within the fabric of Rome on the other. In Anna Notaro's (1996, p. 6) words, writing of Liberal Rome: "The obvious risk was that far from fulfilling its attributed role as the unifying force of the risorgimento, the city might start re- flecting the fractures of the country and the contradictions within the process of unification".

The choice, of course, was to impose a center, that represented by the Vittoriano. This was to give a unity to the city that would symbolize the unity of Italy. The "Third Rome", the "Rome of the People," as Mazzini would say to distinguish this vision from that of the previous "two Romes" of the Cae- sars and Popes, "needed a directing centre and an image that would speak of progress, Italian-ness and, above all, unity" (Notaro, 1996, p. 6). This was easier said than done. The fateful choice to build within and over the fabric of the existing city meant that it was impossible to fully separate out the impacts of different eras in the past and associate the grandest ones with contemporary clearance or building projects celebrating the new regimes. The production of new symbols in the Vittoriano and


JOHN AGNEW

beyond the existing city at EUR, for example, represent explicit attempts to create a monumentality for the new capital city. But these efforts were difficult to translate into singular and unambiguous political messages. The existing Romes got in the way. The Vittoriano was popularly derided from the start as a monstrosity deposited into a setting in which it did not fit. The ambitious EUR scheme was never completed by the Fascist regime. Its future role as a pole of suburban office and residential development is hardly what its architects had in mind when they designed it.

The lack of "fit" between intention and outcome, therefore, should lead to caution in interpreting the monuments of Liberal and Fascist Rome. Simply because they were built does not mean that they in- evitably served to solidify the regimes among the national populace and necessarily sacralize their claims about Italian nationhood and empire. The emerging literature on the "sacralization of politics" under Fascism tends in this direction (see e.g. Gentile, 1996; Falasca-Zamponi, 1997). This perspective, which draws from George Mosse's (1996) assertions about the symbolic "nationalization of the masses" under Fascism and Nazism and Clifford Geertz's (1973, 1980) political anthropology which emphasizes taking the claims of regimes on their own terms, confuses the attempted representation of power with its successful exercise. Building a "Temple of the Faith" gives no guaran- tee that anyone other than the already converted or cynical will assemble there to worship what it represents. The appeal of the perspective is that it of- fers an alternative to a vision of Italy as riven ideologically, socially and geographically. It puts in its place a myth of politics as pure spectacle, ritual and showmanship; one that avoids hards judgements about the character of regimes and what they do or do not accomplish (see also Bosworth, 1997). It is difficult not to see the parallel with Robert Wohl's (1979, p. 586) conclusion when writing of De Fe- lice's revisionist account of Mussolini:

In taking at face value the rationalizations given by Mussolini for his policies, De Felice misses the drama of a man who possessed the dangerous ability to inspire others to act in the name of causes in which he could not bring himself to believe.

At the same time, the sacralization perspective not only exaggerates the political-ideological differ- ences between the Liberal and Fascist regimes,

which as we have seen were not all that great in terms of impacts on Rome's historic center and in the common appeal to a magnificent past, it also overstates the ideological coherence and the architectural success of the Fascist regime. To the extent that Fascism exhibited a core belief it was a disdain for the regime that had preceded it. Following on from suchfin de siecle aesthetes as Giosue Carduc- ci (Drake, 1980), some of the Fascist grandees may well have wanted to erect a "Theater State" that sat- isfied their desire for a Rome that was Roman rather then Byzantine. The use of monumental sites and spectacles, however, was not always successful as either theater or propaganda (as Schnapp (1996) has shown in one little known if instructive case). The evident popular hegemony enjoyed by Fascism appears to have rested as much or more on indifference and coercive powers as on conviction conveyed by shared mythology communicated through the symbolic manipulation of urban landscapes. An anecdote from the archives of the Fas- cist spies captures the spirit of weary cynicism with which Fascist "consensus-making" was often greeted by large elements of the population: "One spy commented in 1932 that the Duce's motto, andare verso ilpopolo (go to the people), had so far been interpreted in only two ways: the usual pa- rades and the usual speeches lasting a couple of hours" (Ghirardo, 1996, p. 352).

With respect to the presence of a fundamental Liberal-Fascist dichotomy, both regimes were cen- trally interested in nation-building, both had imperial designs in Africa and elsewhere, and both made use of monuments to "stage" pageants commemo- rating and celebrating their successes, even if the Liberal pageants were usually both less bombastic (exempting the Vittoriano) and less focused on the charisma of a single person. Fascism had come out of the social conditions established under the previous regime. It did not come out of nowhere. Hav- ing himself contributed to the maximalist socialism that became a threat to significant sections of the dominant groups of the Liberal epoch, Mussolini came to power under the sponsorship of the forces of traditional conservatism (Salvemini, 1973; Vi- varelli, 1981, 1991). Fascism thereafter pushed to an extreme views and understandings that where already widely accepted by powerful segments of Italian society and coerced the rest of the population into going along. The birth of Fascism in vio- lence meant that the Fascists always achieved con- sent through an all too obvious capacity for coer- cion (Elazar, 1993). This was what Antonio Gram-

236 Geografiska Annaler ?

80 B (1998) ?

4


sci understood by "hegemony." The recent experience of squadrismo meant that Fascism required no appeal to a popular mandate that had to be constant- ly reproduced if the regime was to survive.

With respect to the nature of Fascism, it was an opportunistic political movement based on nationalist opposition to the more ideologically coherent (if organizationally sectarian) Socialist movement. Right-wing in its conservation of the existing social order, it invented itself ideologically as it went along, drawing eclectically from a wide range of intellectual and political sources. Revolutionary and nationalist in its early years, Fascism became increasingly imperialist and statist in orientation as it institutionalized (Visser, 1992). To the extent that a consistent and coherent outlook underpinning its cultural policies can be detected, it involved the pursuit of an ultra-nationalist vision of a "new Ita- ly" but without consistent aesthetic content (Grif- fin, 1998). Welding together a set of local groups into a national movement, Mussolini drew on a va- riety of contradictory ideological currents in fash- ioning a set of Fascist precepts. For example, he brought together the hyper-modernism of the Fu- turists, and their obsession with technology and speed, with a romantic distaste for cities; he dem- onstrated both a sympathy for the Vatican (as in the Lateran Pact of 1929 deeming the Roman Church as the national church of Italy) and an attachment to the idea that he was resurrecting Italy as the seat of a new Roman Empire. When it came to planning the "new" Rome, the symbolic seat of the "new" It- aly, the total intellectual incoherence of Fascism was open to display. Perhaps only after 1937, when Mussolini threw in his lot with Hitler and turned Fascism into an imitation of Nazism, did a degree of coherence begin to emerge (Knox, 1982). This was based openly on the cult of the leader and a "ra- cial" definition of italianittd. Because of the rapid onset of war it had little or no impact on the monumental projects and, at the very least, correlated with a dramatic decline in popular support for the regime.

The emergence of romanitdt as the dominant ideological motif of the regime can be seen as a reac- tion to the ideological incoherence of Fascism as well as its reliance on recycling old myths for its own purposes. Schnapp (1992, p. 3) argues plausi- bly that the regime's lack of a consistent set of precepts gave rise to "an aesthetic overproduction-a surfeit of Fascist signs, images, slogans, books, and buildings-to compensate for, fill in, and cover up its forever unstable ideological core." It is not surpris-

ing, therefore, to discover that the most persisting theme in the planning of Rome as Mussolini increasingly personified the regime was the imperial heritage of the city and the need to re-establish it in the present (Atkinson, 1996).

The main problem was that the presence of so much past in Rome got in the way of offering singular interpretations of what it all meant, irrespective of Fascism's ideological incoherence. It was impossible to start from scratch, to make over the city according to some new or modern image yet in- tegrate within this the historic fabric of the city. In particular, the idea of romanitdt, the city's Roman past as the inspiration for a new Rome in a new It- aly, had to contend with the formidable presence of the Pope as the heir to an entirely different urban history: that of Rome as the seat of a universal Church. This represents the greatest continuity with Rome's recent past in that, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the city's most important continu- ing function has been as the home of the Pope. The churches of the city and the huge numbers of reli- gious and pilgrims in the city are daily reminders of the embedded tradition against which the nation- builders had to struggle.

But in Rome the past can also mean something other than an alternative (ecclesiastical) history to that of the nation. One long dominant image of the city has been that of a city of ruins. This is the image conveyed in Chateaubriand's famous Promenade dans Rome au clair de lune:

Rome is asleep in the midst of her ruins. This orb of the night, this sphere which is supposed to be extinguished and unpeopled, moves through her pale solitudes, above the solitude of Rome. She shines upon the streets without inhabitants, upon enclosed spaces, open squares, and gardens in which no one walks, upon monasteries where the voices of monks are no longer heard, upon cloisters which are as deserted as the arches of the Colosseum.

(Quoted in McGann, 1984, p. 84)

In this construction, Rome is only what it once was and can never be again. The ruins are a constant re- minder of a permanent loss. But each generation has reinvented Rome on the basis of interpretations received from previous ones. Thus, Liberal and Fascist Rome knew Classical Rome through the drawings of Piranesi as much as through their own archeological endeavors.

Less definitively, the ruins can be seen as part of


JOHN AGNEW

a city of layers, in which no one element from the past ever really predominates. The remnants of different epochs interpenetrate in complex ways. To William Weaver (1984), for example:

Literally, the ancient stratum underlies the medieval city, the Baroque city, the modern city. But layers can also be vertical; they inter- lock, intersect. As you walk along a downtown street, you can see a Roman column incorpo- rated into the facade of a Baroque palazzo, or a fragment of ancient wall preserved in the atrium of a glass and steel apartment house.

From its twenty-five centuries of history, five epochs had provided major contributions to the city as it stood in 1870. The first and most important re- minder of the glorious past of the city was ancient Rome (both republican and imperial) whose few remaining complete monuments (such as the Pan- theon), scattered ruins, ancient roadways and bridges challenged the veracity of contemporary attempts at reconstructing a new imperial city in their image. The second epoch was the early Chris- tian period from which a number of important churches survived on the periphery of the city. These churches, such as Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano and Santa Maria in Trastevere, gave the city a series of ecclesiastical axes around which much of the street plan was still organized. The third epoch, that of the Middle Ag- es, left its impact in terms of the dense residential settlement in the elbow of the Tiber, with palaces constructed as fortresses by noble families and few open public spaces, such as Piazza Navona. The fourth epoch, that of the Renaissance and Catholic Reformation, had seen the transformation of the Vatican into an architecturally dominant complex in the city with the dome of St Peter's giving tan- gible proof of the supremacy of papal power in the city. It also brought about the opening up of the medieval city and a new monumentality that gave old sites, such as the Capitoline Hill, a new architectural centrality to the city. Finally, the papal government from 1750 to 1870 had initiated a number of changes in the fabric of the city, including the railway station at Termini and the construction of a number of factories and railway lines.

This rich historic inheritance formed the basis of the city's claimed status as the Eternal City. What- ever the epoch, the changes to the urban fabric had blended into the existing eclectic mixture. Some important sites, such as the Capitoline Hill, the Pi-

azza del Popolo, the Piazza Navona and St Peter's Square, contain a wide array of elements from different epochs brought together in juxtaposition. The influence of no one epoch totally prevails over others. As a result, simple epochal messages have always been swallowed up by the rich inheritance from the past. Rome's uniqueness lies in the plu- rality of aesthetic effects and interpretations that it engenders. Georg Simmel noted of Rome in 1898 that it "can still be experienced in multiple ways and this sentiment can be interpreted in many man- ners" (Simmel, 1996, p. 7). This was also the case after Liberal and Fascist regimes went to work on transforming the city.

Finally, the meanings of monuments and archeological sites are never finally fixed and unambiguous, whatever the intentions of their builders and excavators. Take, for example, the case of the Vit- toriano, the great white "Altar to the Nation" in Pi- azza Venezia, developed as a sacred site for nation- building by both Liberal and Fascist regimes (Dick- ie, 1994). In his well-known book, The Italians (1964), Luigi Barzini concluded that the bulk and bombast of the monument reflected the anxiety and ambivalence that accompanied the process of national unification. On the one hand, there was the apathy or indifference of most "Italians" (particularly peasants and the working class) towards the entire project. The monument was the subject of jokes and barbed nicknames (for example, the "wedding cake" or the "false teeth") from the mo- ment of its inauguration. On the other hand, there was the active hostility of the Papacy towards the declaration of Rome as the capital of the new nation. In addition, the movement for unification was itself divided into republican and monarchist currents which operated according to distinctive visions and different symbolic codes. Even at the zenith of Fascism, when the cult of Il Duce as the em- bodiment of the nation was at its peak, the Vittori- ano remained an ambiguous symbol of nationhood and its travails. As Cosgrove and Atkinson (1998, p. 5) note of one particularly revealing incident in the life of the monument:

Only the decisive intervention of Mussolini himself thwarted a plan to paint it yellow so that the stark white Brescian marble of its construction, so dazzling in the summer sun, might appear less obtrusive against the ochre tones of the Roman cityscape. In the red cray- on in which he dispatched his paperwork, II Duce had scrawled "niente" (no such thing)



over the policy proposal (Cederna, 1981, p. 83). Yet that such a suggestion was proposed at all is indicative of the controversy and con- testations which attended the monument only two decades after its completion, and how ready some lobbies were to suggest that it be, in effect, camouflaged or disguised as an em- barrassment to the city.

Conclusion The choice of Rome as capital proved to be a fateful one for the project of Italian unification. Its complex iconography, recalling a series of divergent in- fluences in a complex past, defied the symbolic unification according to a singular interpretation of that past which the project of representing the new nation in the capital required. The monuments to a revived Italy were swallowed up by a city in which a singular imposition of architectural and political meaning proved impossible to attain. Unique as this case appears to be, an ancient city posing as the new capital of a late-unifying European nation- state, it does suggest some larger lessons about how we should interpret the political monumentality of capital cities in general. One is that political regimes of a range of political complexions, from parliamentary to totalitarian, face similar problems in imposing their visions of nationhood and poten- tial grandeur onto the fabric of existing cities. We should also be careful not to take the rhetoric of the regimes too seriously; this is something that does seem to be a problem with some recent work on Rome, in which bombastic intentions are presumed to have given rise to outcomes that were both aes- thetically and politically successful in conveying the intended messages. This sometimes happens because in following the traditions of art history, particular sites are isolated from the wider landscape of the city and given readings that make sense only when the sites are isolated. Most importantly, attempts at making Rome a monumental city for a unified Italy ran up against the power of the past to subvert the intentions of politicians and planners. New layouts and monuments must coexist with and draw in the established fabric of the city. Juxtapo- sition, however, is a two-edged sword. While it draws attention to the connection between past and present (as in the Roman Forum next to the Vitto- riano), it also opens up the possibility for invidious comparison between the achievements of past and present. Without some concrete accomplishments (other than monuments), therefore, nation-building

through the symbolic manipulation of urban space is a potentially dangerous activity. A materially and symbolically divided Italy was not readily unified monumentally.

John Agnew, Professor and Chair of Geography and Associate Director of the Center for European and Russian Studies, UCLA, 1255 Bunche Hall, Box 951524, Los Angeles CA, USA 90095-1524. E-mail: jagnew@ ucla.edu

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