Fascism’s Urban Epicenter: Remaking Rome in the Era of Charismatic Politics

This book re-imagines the heart of Rome, animating it with the mass rituals of Mussolini’s pioneering regime of twentieth-century totalitarianism. It retrieves from a post-war amnesia the ceremonial events, urban sites, and historic monuments of the Duce’s charismatic rulership, demonstrating how architecture and urbanism functioned as instruments of persuasion in fashioning a fevered national identity. Piazza Venezia and its surrounding structures emerge anew as material and spatial exemplars of an illiberal modernity, first as incubator and then as cockpit of a novel form of politics. Here you will experience the frenzied crowd at pavement level as a quintessential phenomenon of Fascist rule.

John Beldon Scott, Ph.D. (1982), Rutgers University, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa. His books include Images of Nepotism: The Painted Ceilings of Palazzo Barberini (Princeton, 1991) and Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin (Chicago, 2003).