The monumentalization of culture

The fascist regime had early recognized the instrumental value of la cultura in the consolidation of its rule. Coming to power with all the rhetoric of an unfulfilled Risorgimento tradition, fascist and nationalist ideologues continuously paid homage to the idea of a unified and unifying national culture. The formation of a single dominant culture would, it was understood, not only help to mask the patent inequalities of Italian society, but also serve to legitimate the regime according to a traditional bourgeois and even a popular cultural sensibility. But this said, there remained a wide spectrum of “cultures” from which such a national culture might be forged, from the avant-garde to the popular; from the technological utopias of the Futurists, whose pugilistic tactics had made them especially suitable companions for the squadristi, to the verities of elitist practitioners of the old high culture; and, in theory at least, the stock of folk traditions of precapitalist Italy. The regime demonstrated itself willing to espouse any one of these according to its need for support, and as a whole its cultural pretensions remained extremely eclectic in content. But in practice, and especially in the formation of the institutions for the dissemination of one or another kind of culture, fascism was inevitably drawn toward the reproduction of the already class-defined divisions between “high” and “low”.