‘Il tempo e la storia: Italiani in Etiopia’ (Time and history: Italians in Ethiopia)
2 February 2017
(ID Teca: X000016487) Broadcast on the general interest channel Rai 3 and on the theme-based channel Rai Storia on 2nd February 2017, this episode of "Time and history" shows the utility of the television formula that allows the historian to comment a movie in studio, thus combining the informative and emotional power of the images and the depth offered by the arguments of the specialist (in this case, the historian Nicola Labanca). The extract in question, on the colonization following the conquest of Ethiopia, mentions among other things a long-hidden event in Italy, namely the massacre of Debra Libanos perpetrated by the Italian army in 1937.
‘Il tempo e la storia: Italiani brava gente’ (Time and history: Italians “good people”)
9 June 2017
(ID Teca: X000014741) Broadcast on 9th June 2017 on Rai Tre and Rai Storia, this episode, with the historian Filippo Focardi, refutes the long-held stereotype of Italians as a population of "good people" (unlike the others, primarily Germans) incapable of being guilty of cruelty. The footage highlights in particular the war crimes committed by the fascist army in the Balkans, which were occupied during the Second World War. Massacres of civilians, summary shootings and deportations to concentration camps, such as Rab, reveal the violent (long denied or minimized) character of Italian fascism.
Historiography
E fu subito regime. Il fascismo e la marcia su Roma (And it was immediately regime. Fascism and the march on Rome)
Emilio Gentile, Laterza. It is the most analytical and brilliant reconstruction of the genesis and events that led to the march on Rome and the establishment of the first Mussolini cabinet, in the autumn of 1922. Gentile refuses to read a phase of transition in the Twenty Years, which would coincide with the two-year period preceding the Matteotti crisis, in which the dictator would have attempted the path of collaboration with pre-existing institutions and with conservative political forces, and law in perspective of radical break with the unitary tradition already the first acts of the fascist government, marked by an assault (symbolic as well as substantial) the freedoms and balances of parliamentary freedom and continuous ferocity against the remnants of the opposition.
Squadrismo e squadristi nella dittatura fascista (Squadrism and Squads in the Fascist dictatorship)
Matteo Millan, Viella. The attention of historians who have dealt with fascist political violence has traditionally focused on the biennium of the rise to power and studies have rarely focused on what happened after the march on Rome. Reworking of a doctoral thesis, this volume offers a first look of synthesis on the culture and practice of squadrismo after the constitution of the government Mussolini, highlighting the continuity in the use of armed repression but also the fractures in the construction of a fascist epic of the civil war.
L’occupazione tedesca in Italia (The German occupation in Italy)
Lutz Klinkhammer, Bollati Boringhieri. Expanded and updated edition of a volume originally released in 1993, The German Occupation represented a milestone in studies on 1943-1945. Based on an impressive mass of archival documents, it is in fact the first complete reconstruction of the complex (and often competitive) operating mechanisms of Germany as an occupying power but also of the operation (or dis-operation) CSR institutions, which found themselves acting in the paradoxical condition of theorist ally, in fact puppet state occupied.
La dittatura fascista. Consenso e controllo durante il Ventennio (The fascist dictatorship. Consent and control during the Twenty Years)
Paul Corner, Carocci. Paul Corner has devoted many years of research and many publications to deepen various aspects of the regime, including the central issue was the issue of consensus, in this volume as in the previous Fascist Italy. Politics and popular opinion under the dictatorship (Carocci 2015). Assembling different and wise approaches that have appeared over several years, this volume rearranges some of the key themes for understanding the success and survival of the dictatorship until the collapse of World War II, from the widespread regulation to the militarization of civil society.
Culture and politics
Mausoleum for Rodolfo Graziani
In Affile, near Rome, a mausoleum is erected in memory of Rodolfo Graziani, commander of the armed forces of the RSI, responsible for war crimes in Libya and Ethiopia (including the massacre of more than 2000 Coptic monks and pilgrims, and the massacre of Debre Libanos, perpetrated by Italian troops following the attack suffered by Viceroy Graziani, on 19th February 1937)
The fascist monuments
The historian Ruth Ben Ghiat, professor of Italian studies at New York University, publishes an article in the magazine “The New Yorker” in which she invites Italians to reflect on the need to tear down the monuments and buildings built in the fascist period, in particular the EUR and Foro Italico, which survived the advent of the Republic and became over time places of gathering for nostalgics and neo-fascists.