Abstract
The Excavatory Intervention: Archaeology and the Chronopolitics of Roman Antiquity in Fascist Italy
Romanità – the invocation of the «eternal Roman spirit» – has long been recognised as a core component of Italian Fascist ideology and political culture. However, the «cult of Rome» is typically seen as an expression of the regime's theatricality, its retrograde tendencies and its hostility to modernity. This contribution argues that, on the contrary, romanità was part of Fascism's revolutionary vision of modernity. In particular, the article highlights the regime's use of archaeological excavation, both in Rome and in North Africa, as an instrument of spatial and temporal rupture, used to forge an unmediated relationship between Roman antiquity and Mussolini's New Italy.
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