Explore the vast range of titles available.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including war diaries, memoirs, paintings, films, and government archives,Roads and Ruinsis a richly textured study that offers an original perspective on a well known story.

A fascinating look at the architectural mark fascism left on one of the world's most beloved cities.

The cultural and material legacies of the Roman Republic and Empire in evidence throughout Rome have made it the \"Eternal City.\" Too often, however, this patrimony has caused Rome to be seen as static and antique, insulated from the transformations of the modern world. In Excavating Modernity, Joshua Arthurs dramatically revises this perception, arguing that as both place and idea, Rome was strongly shaped by a radical vision of modernity imposed by Mussolini's regime between the two world wars. Italian Fascism's appropriation of the Roman past-the idea of Rome, or romanità- encapsulated the Fascist virtues of discipline, hierarchy, and order; the Fascist \"new man\" was modeled on the Roman legionary, the epitome of the virile citizen-soldier. This vision of modernity also transcended Italy's borders, with the Roman Empire providing a foundation for Fascism's own vision of Mediterranean domination and a European New Order. At the same time, romanità also served as a vocabulary of anxiety about modernity. Fears of population decline, racial degeneration and revolution were mapped onto the barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome. Offering a critical assessment of romanità and its effects, Arthurs explores the ways in which academics, officials, and ideologues approached Rome not as a site of distant glories but as a blueprint for contemporary life, a source of dynamic values to shape the present and future.

Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda constantly manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships.

Given the centrality of Africa to Italy's national identity, a thorough study of Italian colonial history and culture has been long overdue. Two important developments, the growth of postcolonial studies and the controversy surrounding immigration from Africa to the Italian peninsula, have made it clear that the discussion of Italy's colonial past is essential to any understanding of the history and construction of the nation. This collection, the first to gather articles by the most-respected scholars in Italian colonial studies, highlights the ways in which colonial discourse has pervaded Italian culture from the post-unification period to the present. During the Risorgimento, Africa was invoked as a limb of a proudly resuscitated Imperial Rome. During the Fascist era, imperialistic politics were crucial in shaping both domestic and international perceptions of the Italian nation. These contributors offer compelling essays on decolonization, exoticism, fascist and liberal politics, anthropology, and historiography, not to mention popular literature, feminist studies, cinema, and children's literature. Because the Italian colonial past has had huge repercussions, not only in Italy and in the former colonies but also in other countries not directly involved, scholars in many areas will welcome this broad and insightful panorama of Italian colonial culture.

The World Gay Pride week convened in Rome in July 2000 at the same time the Catholic Church planned on celebrating its Holy Year Jubilee. Thousands of gays came together, and by the end of the week more than 200,000 marched through the streets of Rome's historical centre. This unique event provides an opportunity to examine the causal relationship of the gay movement acquiring a political identity of its own while the city of Rome was trying to assert a 'proper' identity for its public spaces. Acting in solidarity for the first time since its formation, the gay movement drew attention to the difficulties in securing unrestricted access to Rome's public spaces. Conservative sectors of society challenged the right to demonstrate, as guaranteed in Italy's Constitution, which resulted in the delay of obtaining the necessary permit. On the one hand, this revealed the existence of sectors of society not yet willing to acknowledge gay rights or even discuss gay issues in public; on the other, it helped make clear that the process for building Rome's identity is governed by a specific political design. In particular, policies for the privatisation of urban space in conjunction with discriminatory planning processes in the city's historical centre, point to tourism as a powerful tool to control urban space. Resisting this spatial marginalization the gay movement has significantly widened the scope of its social and political action in order to contest prevailing practices and trends which are shaping the city.

This book examines how romanità—translated variously as “Romanness,” “Romanity,” “the idea of Rome,” or “the Roman spirit”—shaped the political culture of Italian Fascism. It shows how the Fascist regime tried to refashion the nation into a new body politic guided by “the immortal spirit of Rome.” Benito Mussolini's “New” Italy, though resolutely an expression of twentieth-century modernity, would be guided by the moral, political, and aesthetic values of classical antiquity. Fascism's appropriation of the Roman past emerged as one of the most familiar and enduring aspects of Mussolini's regime. This book argues that Fascism's appropriation of the Roman past was a revolutionary project for modernity, a coherent language with which to articulate aspirations for the contemporary world.

In the cult of the romanita is found a relatively coherent set of ideas, which quasi-scientifically support the fascist totalitarian concept of the state and offer a 'historical aim' to fascist imperialism, characterized by the mission to spread Roman virtues and values throughout the world.