Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy

Abstract

SummaryIn the essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Michel Foucault contends that every society constructs sites which can be defined as effectively enacted utopias (heterotopias), sites where social policies are articulated and where ideals of social ordering are physically performed. The article examines how a number of places in Fascist Italy, which conformed entirely to the principles of the heterotopia that Foucault sets out, were perceived by a selection of prominent writers and journalists. It examines the recorded journeys to the cemeteries of the First World War, to various renovated prisons within Italy and finally to the new towns south of Rome. It explores the kind of mental and physical sensations which the different writers evoked as well as examining the ways in which their written accounts of their imaginative experiences interacted with the myths of identity and social control which were central to Fascist ideology.

The Geographies of Heterotopia

“…A dazzling variety of spaces have been explored as illustrations of heterotopia. Here are some examples: Arab‐Islamic architecture (Tonna ) An environmental installation (Genocchio ) The Museum of Pacific Island Culture (Kahn ) The Citadel LA – the civic centre of Los Angeles (Soja ) Gardens in Vienna (Rotenberg ) The Palais Royal, masonic lodges and early factories (Hetherington ) Vancouver's New Public Library (Lees ) A performance prototype (Birringer ) Local exchange trading schemes (North ) Women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century (Tamboukou ) Sites in Fascist Italy (Burdett ) Landscapes (Guarrasi ) Gated communities in South African security parks (Hook and Vrdoljak ) Buddhist Site of Swayambhu in Kathmandu Valley (Owens ) Underground band rooms in Hong Kong (Kit‐Wai Ma ) The Nineteenth century ship narrative (Casarino ) British parks in the late nineteenth century (Joyce , p. 223) Pornographic sites on the Internet (Jacobs ) The cybercafé (Liff ) The museum (Lord ) Chinatown in Washington DC (Lou ) The vampire (Davies ) Norwegian and English prisons (Baer and Ravneberg ) Patterns of disclosure among heterosexuals living with HIV (Persson and Richards ) The shopping mall (Kern ; Muzzio and Muzzio‐Rentas ) Masculinity practices along the Tel Aviv shoreline (Allweil and Kallus ) Burial sites in Kinshasa, Congo (De Boeck ) The group dynamics of a climate camp (Saunders and Price ) The public nude beach (Andriotis ) Off‐shore pirate radio station (Soffer ) The syringe and the shooting gallery (Vitellone ) Derek Jarman's garden (Steyaert ) Hospitals (Coleman and Street ) Abney Park Cemetery in London (Gandy ) The Persian Garden (Kive ) The Lunar Cemetery (Damjanov )…”

De verovering van de aarde. Mussolini’s battaglia della natura op de Pontijnse vlakte

“…53 Met enig gevoel voor overdrijving vergeleek de kunstcriticus Ugo Ojetti zijn bezoek aan de vlakte als een wandeling in de nieuwe Hof van Eden, een nieuw paradijs, dat ditmaal niet door God, maar door de Duce was geschapen. 54 Dergelijke uitspraken passen uitstekend binnen Emilio Gentiles notie van het fascisme als politieke religie. 55 Battaglia della natura Het gevecht van de fascisten tegen de wilde natuur past in de fascistische retoriek van strijd.…”

Italian Fascism and Utopia

“…The various schools, academies, military barracks, hospitals and even university buildings that were constructed in the style of the period were represented as indications of the transformed social world that Fascism claimed to offer Italians. One commentator after another described the aura of regeneration that surrounded such places and evoked the idea of entering a concentrated space where the Fascist myth of the palingenesis of the nation could be experienced to the full (Burdett, 2000a). For example, Margherita Sarfatti, when writing on the inauguration of Rome's new university in 1935, referred to the complex as a kind of temple or cathedral created by the religion of the Fasces for its celebration and as the formative ground of one generation after another of new Italians.…”