The Racism of Romanità: Mobilizing the Idea of Rome for the Fascists’ Anti-Semitic Campaign

Mussolini and his supporters regularly invoked the Roman Empire to justify the Fascist regime’s colonial projects in North and East Africa and the racist policies that accompanied them. But they also used the idea of Rome to justify anti-Semitic measures on the Italian Peninsula during the late 1930s. In the pages of his political and cultural journal Critica Fascista , Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai used the concept of Rome, primarily the idea that the Fascists were constructing a modern “Third Rome” after the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes, to mobilize support for the regime’s infamous “Racial Laws” among the Italian intellectual class. Bottai—who lived all his life in Rome, led a squad division during the 1922 March on Rome, served as Fascist mayor of the city in 1935–36, and was a key exponent of “Roman studies”—united the idea of Rome with Fascist anti-Semitism to sway Mussolini away a biological definition of race and the faction within the regime that supported a close alliance with Germany and an aggressive foreign policy. Instead of achieving his goal, however, he provided the cultural space in his journals Critica Fascista and Primato for young intellectuals and artists to participate in Fascist race propaganda. Inserting the Fascist Racial Laws into pre-existing cultural traditions provided Bottai with justification for his own removal of Jewish professors, teachers, and students from the public school system. Using Bottai’s articles in Critica Fascista , his diary entries from 1938, and official government documents, this article analyzes how Bottai used the idea of Rome to justify the anti-Semitic policies of the regime and the ways in which he applied these policies to the school system. Finally, it considers whether Bottai himself was a committed anti-Semite and what his case reveals about the complex legacy of Fascist anti-Semitism and the city of Rome.