The article explores the development and functioning of the Dopolavoro ferroviario (DLF), a Fascist leisure organisation for Italian railway workers. Although originally created as part of the Ferrovie dello Stato (State Railways), the DLF was rooted in a longstanding tradition of workers’ associations and became a means of managing leisure time, offering educational, welfare and recreational activities. Through its cultural and educational programmes, sporting activities and organised tourism, it sought to regulate collective behaviour and promote a model of sociability aligned with fascist objectives. At the same time, the DLF offers valuable insights into the tensions between consent and dissent, highlighting both the regime’s ability to penetrate the railway sector and the persistence of spaces of autonomy and resistance. Drawing on original research, the article argues that the DLF served as a laboratory for political and cultural socialisation, the legacy of which – stripped of its ideological framework – continued to shape Italian society in the republican era.

I examine the transformation of Italy during the fascist era and the way in which it was explained by one of the most prominent constitutional lawyers of the time, Costantino Mortati (1891–1985). A member of the Constituent Assembly of 1946–1948 and later a constitutional judge, Mortati had a deep influence on the Italian post-War constitutional thinking. Here I focus on Mortati’s understanding of the state’s transformation after 1922. I show how he conceptualised Italy’s transition from a liberal state to an authoritarian regime as a shift from the parliament to the executive of the power of ‘political direction’, ie, the power of identification of the aims and values of the state. Mortati did not envisage in the Italian transformation the full erasure of the separation of powers, but rather a large reshuffle of political direction moving from the Parliament to the Head of Government, allegedly a process in line with the country’s needs in the 20th century. He read the growth of executive powers as the most enduring constitutional transformation of his time, one destined in his mind to persist even after the downfall of the regime.

Mussolini is considered in this article as a figure around whom narratives have been developed for a century or more. Several biographies were published shortly after he came to power and many others have appeared in the decades since his death in 1945. This article explores the place of anecdotes in the construction of a legendary Mussolini in the 1920s and in the demystification that marked the period after World War Two. It is shown that early biographies were marked not only by hero worship but also by a commercially driven need to humanize and to amuse. After the war, humanization persisted as former Fascists and associates of Mussolini spread stories and anecdotes that made the dictator appear not as an evil tyrant but as a flawed and fallible human being. The agenda here was to make support for Fascism and its leader forgivable. A comparison of the anecdotes shows that both adulatory and demystificatory ones reserved a place for minor stories or petite histoire. The resulting image, which placed some emphasis on his sex life, proved influential. It presented a challenge to historians and found its way into the biographical films that were made for cinema and television between the 1970 and the 2000s. It is suggested that, via anecdotes, Mussolini occupied an ambiguous and continuous place in the moral universe of Italians, functioning variously as a political and a gender exemplar.

This article analyzes the role of soil in the making of authoritarian regimes and illustrates twentieth-century practices and discourses related to fertility across the globe. It compares two different approaches to and understandings of soil fertility: the first emerged in North Libya under Italian Fascist rule (1922–1943), the second in Central Brazil during the civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). We compare two soil-forming processes that changed physical and chemical properties of the original matter and were embedded within specific ideologies of modernization. In both cases, state agendas of agrarian production played a paramount role not only in socioeconomic projects but also as an instrument to suppress opposition. Technocratic and political aspects of building and maintaining fertility were interwoven, although in different patterns in the two countries. We show how the rejuvenation of land bled into the regeneration of communities through processes that anchored the self-definition and development of these authoritarian regimes, and argue that attempts at landscape transformations through agricultural activity and strategies of fertilization are inescapable features of dictatorships. In so doing, we elaborate the concept of “authoritarian soil.” The juxtaposition of these non-synchronous cases reveals how agricultural modernization developed throughout the twentieth century. Our study is rooted in environmental history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue between that field and science and technology studies. Its cross-temporal, comparative methodology draws upon sources and historiographical debates in English, Italian, and Portuguese.

Benedetto Croce’s description of fascism as ‘a moral illness of our time’ provides a useful starting point for thinking about the phenomenon of cine-revisionismo storiografico and the representation of Fascism and fascists in Italian cinema. In many films from the post-war period and beyond, the metaphor of moral illness is literalised in portrayals of fascist characters who are shown as mentally or physically sick or disabled (often confusing the two), in contrast to the otherwise healthy and wholesome body of Italians. Addressing the conflation of physical and moral impairment in three 1960 films that grapple with the memory of Italy’s Fascist past – Roberto Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma (Escape by Night), Carlo Lizzani’s Il gobbo (The Hunchback of Rome), and Florestano Vancini’s La lunga notte del ’43 (It Happened in ’43) – this article argues that in these films, bodies that do not conform to an able-bodied male norm function as lieux de mémoire that permit both the expression and containment of painful memories of the Fascist period.

While looking at the world’s politics and ideologies for a vision of the future nation state, India’s anti-British freedom activists and intellectuals remained deeply ambivalent about drawing lessons from Europe’s experience of Fascism and National Socialism. Indian nationalists cautiously admired elements of National Socialist and Fascist ideology and expressed their distress with imperialist expansionism, racism, and anti-Semitism that accompanied the two regimes. This article draws on the exemplary “global biography” of one such Indian internationalist thinker, Taraknath Das, to investigate interwar Indian preoccupation with Fascism and National Socialism in articulating the discursive ground of Indian nationalism.

Within the wider attempt to transform Italian communities abroad into Fascist colonies, the Italian Fasci Abroad sought to build nationalist propaganda in the Mediterranean. The irredentist activities and the propaganda of the Fasci in Malta alarmed the British governors on the island, the British government and MI5. This article analyses the cultural conflict organised in Maltese schools, bookshops and universities by the Italian nationalists against the British protectorate–a conflict the British suspected could be followed by military activity, in particular when Italy began building its empire in Ethiopia. The nationalist offensive was supported in the 1920s and, more vigorously, in the 1930s by the Fasci, the Italian consulate on the island and, ultimately, the Italian government. Not even the Second World War and the bombing of Malta by the Italian air force concluded the conflict between Italian and British imperialism on the island.