A Historian's View from the Janiculum

Analyzing documents (02)

I sometimes hear IUP students say that dealing with documents from the modern era is easy. Of course reading a modern printed book does not require the same skills as reading a manuscript, especially if one is dealing with, say, medieval Latin script in which the writer developed his or her own method of abbreviating words. Indeed, the invention and broad use of the typewriter and the standardization of print fonts have made the modern printed word easier to decipher. However, if you find yourself working with fading and torn or poorly microfilmed newspapers (which is usually the case, at least in Italy), it can take hours to decipher a text, and you are often left with gaps in the text owing to indecipherable passages. (You also harm your sight pouring over microfilms, as I can personally testify.) The introduction and mass use of carbon paper in government offices, a phenomenon that started in Europe during World War I, presents another problem. The onion paper, often used for making copies, tears easily and frays along the edges, increasing the chances that text can be made illegible or become obliterated. The ink and paper used in the carbon-paper process are of a poor quality, resulting in letters continue bleed into the paper and fade as the years pass rendering copies very difficult if not impossible to read.

Another important consideration is that not all sources in the modern era were typed. Handwriting was still an important means of communication, and you may find yourself working primarily with handwritten notes, letters and diaries. These can be very difficult to decipher as the following letter sent from Alberto De Stefani to Federzoni on 8 October 1939 demonstrates:

Even if your Italian is quite good, the letter is in such poor condition that is it may be near impossible for you to read the text. In this case, the historian draws on vital reading skills. If you are working with documents that are in languages other than English, the most obvious skill is the ability to read the target language. My research on Federzoni requires me to work with Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and (rarely) German. In this case, reading requires both the capacity to comprehend the text and the ability to render it accurately (if need be) in English. A second vital skill is the ability to recognize and reconstruct words and syntaxes in a document, even when you are unable to make out some of the letters in a word or some of the words in a sentence. In other words, you might need to figure out, much like in a crossword puzzle (with only the syntax providing the clues) "What five-letter word with what looks like 's' and 'c' as the third and fourth letters would make sense in the sentence?" Sometimes, it can take hours to decipher a word or sentence. If you are lucky the archive will have an archivist on staff who has worked on a person's private papers and who has the time take time from his or her own work to offer you valuable suggestions. Even if you make out a difficult passage or word on your own, it is always best to ask an archivist to corroborate your guesses. But sometimes, it can be impossible for you or the archivist to make out what is written on the page. And, so you are forced to add a [?] to your transcription or notes. With the use of digital photography, you might have some luck by taking a picture of the document and blowing up the photograph on your computer screen and working through the difficult word or phrase, letter by letter.

So what did the letter say? Here's my reconstruction obtained by blowing up the document, manipulating the photograph through Photoshop and slowly working through the text (it took hours):

Roma 8-X-38
XVI

Caro Federzoni,
ho molto apprezzato ieri sera il tuo intervento contro i provvedimenti razziali che ha così efficacemente rappresentato il nostro pensiero ed ha servito, se non altro, a contenerne i più pericolosi sviluppi.
Un mio tentativo di far liquidare agli impiegati pubblici israeliti la pensione di cui avrebbero goduto se collocati a riposo per limiti di età, non ha avuto fortuna.
Vedi se sia possibile riprendere, in sede esecutiva, la mia proposta.
Cordialmente tuo [De Stefani]

and the translation:

Rome 8 October [19]38, in the sixteenth year of the Fascist Era

Dear Federzoni,
I greatly appreciated your speech last night against the racial laws which has so effectively represented our thought and has served, if nothing else, to limit in it the more dangerous developments.
An attempt of mine to pay off the pensions of Jewish public servants who would have gotten their pensions if they had been allowed to retire because they reached the age limits, was not successful.
See if it is possible to take up again in executive session my proposal.
Cordially yours, [De Stefani]

Now that I know what the document says, I need to understand its historical context and its content. Unfortunately, the file in which I found the document offers no clue to either. What I do know is that Alberto De Stefani, one of the founders of Fascism and a friend of Federzoni, were trying to subvert the Racial Laws as much as they could in order to protect Italian Jews. In this case, they were trying to save the pensions of public servants who could have retired because they had reached the age limits but had decided to continue working. Now, in 1938, since all Jews were being fired from public jobs, they were losing the pension to which they would have been entitled had they retired before the Racial Laws were imposed.

But, what were the meetings mentioned in the letter? To whom did De Stefani refer when he wrote "our thought"? How many Jewish public servants found themselves in this condition? What other measures did Federzoni and De Stefani use to protect Jews as much as they could under the limits of the Racial Laws? To what extent were they successful and why?

So where do I go to find answers? Since there is nothing else in Federzoni's papers that will shed light on this topic, I need to look elsewhere. Doing some bibliographical work, I found the following book:

Marcoaldi, Franco. Vent'anni di economia politica. Le carte De' Stefani 1922-1941. [Twenty years of political economy. The papers of De' Stefani 1922-1941] Milan: F. Angeli, 1986.

The book is located in a library close to the academy, so I can see where this book leads me – whether to published documents or another archive with the private papers of De' Stefani. I have also noted all of the questions that this document raises in a file I call "LEAD.DOC" so that when I go to the State Central Archives, I can see if I can find answers in some of the ministerial documents.

Now, had I just put this letter aside as unreadable, I would not have found the only clue to this aspect of Federzoni's opposition to the Racial Laws. I do not know where this document will take me. But, further research built on this almost illegible letter may enable me to show internal divisions at the very top of the Fascist government over the Racial Laws and how these divisions played out.

Analyzing documents (01)

I thought I might give some examples of what I am doing in the archives. Here is a page of a document that I have worked on. This is a page of minutes to the Administrative Committee of the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia which was held on 12 September 1938. This committee, of which Federzoni was the president, was the governing board for the Institute that had written the massive Italian Encyclopedia (modeled after the Encyclopedia Britannica) and, in 1938, was writing smaller encyclopedias as important spin-offs (a short encyclopedia, a legal encyclopedia, a biographical encyclopedia, an encyclopedia of politics, etc...)

This particular page is interesting because it shows the agenda (what is typed) and the hand-written minutes of the Executive Director Domenico Bartolini. At this meeting, the committee discussed what to do now that Italy had officially embraced antisemitism and that Jews were no longer allowed to hold jobs at the Institute. While the work had been proceeding on the large Italian Encyclopedia (now finished), there had been over forty Jewish Italians who had worked on it, and many were still needed for the smaller encyclopedias the Institute intended to print over the next five years. When compared to the official minutes (not shown), it is evident that not everything that was said at the meeting was included. Unfortunately, the handwritten minutes do not tell us more about what was said at the meeting. The reason why the official minutes left out much of what was said is probably owing to the committee members' stance against the Racial Laws and Mussolini's decision to ape Nazi Germany's antisemitic policies. We do know that the philosopher Giovanni Gentile (who had been the director of the Italian Encyclopedia and was still an important person within the Institute; but was not at this meeting) was very much against the Racial Laws. Federzoni, the president of the Institute and the man running the meeting, was also against them and had taken a public stance against them. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any more documents about the meeting that would shed more light on what happened. I do know that the Institute found ways to keep Jews on the staff even though it was illegal.

Finishing up with the Fondo Federzoni

Well, it looks like hard work paid off. I finished with the collection of Federzoni's papers (the Fondo Federzoni) a month and a half ahead of schedule! And, I finished just as the archivists were finishing a long project which they needed to complete before they could begin reordering Federzoni's papers. So, everyone is happy.

I am still digesting the thousands of documents and pages of notes I have taken. As often happens at this stage of the research, the more I work the more work I realize I have yet to do: unanswered questions and new questions to answer.

It looks like my theory to date the documents in the Fondo Federzoni is working out. Next Tuesday, a colleague from the American Academy who works at the National Archives will go over my methodology to see if I can make my case as strongly as I hope I can. I think I'll publish an article on this work. So, as soon as it's ready to go to press I'll share it here.

I still have a few weeks of work in the Treccani Institute. I am trying to find out how Federzoni, a Fascist, ran this cultural institute which, all things considered, did not tow the line when it came to Fascism. Unfortunately, in 1943, the Institute was transferred north (away from the invading Allied armies) and most of the documents were lost. But, there may be enough evidence left for me to draw inferences about Federzoni's attitude towards intellectuals who were either lukewarm on Fascism or downright anti-Fascist. I also want to investigate some documents that are always referenced that suggest that Federzoni tried as much as possible to refrain from firing all the Jews who worked at the Institute. The 1938 Racial Laws made it illegal for Jews to work at the Institute, but most (perhaps all) stayed on and worked. I want to see if I can find out what the story was.

Tomorrow there will be a transit strike, so I won't be able to make it to the Treccani. I'll stay at the Academy and read and write.

Working in my first archive

For the past five weeks I have been working forty hours a week at the Treccani Institute. The Treccani (as it is called), is an important cultural institute in Rome, Italy. It has its origins in the efforts by a group of leading Italian intellectuals in the 1920s and the 1930s to produce a national encyclopedia (similar in scope and purpose to the Encyclopedia Britannica) as well as a comprehensive biographical dictionary of Italian historical figures. Luigi Federzoni was the president of the Treccani from 1938 to 1943. His family donated Federzoni's papers (called a fondo in Italian) to the Treccani in 1996.

I usually maintain a forty-hour workweek when doing research in Italy in order to maximize my time in the archives since I cannot consult them when I am not here. But there is an added urgency. The Fondo Federzoni will soon be closed so that a team of archivists can reorder it. Indeed, it was only through the kind intercession of the Treccani Institute's president, Francesco Paolo Casavola, that the institute decided to keep the collection open until the end of December so I could consult the documents.

So, I am currently reading the entire collection of 116 dossiers, which contain 3,494 items as fast as I possibly can. The types of documents in the collection vary widely: photocopies, annotations on slips of papers, photographs, pamphlets, books, ministerial documents from the Fascist period, newspaper clippings, letters, unedited writings and so on. The dossiers also vary widely in size and content. Some may have a single item; others may contain dozens of sub-dossiers. Most dossiers are structured around a theme, an event, a person, or a correspondence between Federzoni and a historical figure. The purpose of some dossiers, however, is not always readily apparent. Fortunately, a historian produced an index of the items in each dossier when the papers were donated to the Institute. Thus, I can use the soon-to-be old index to request dossiers and to organize the notes I take as I read the items in the fondo.

Most of Federzoni's paper were lost during the war. And this is a shame. One gets a sense of how important this loss was from a letter Federzoni wrote to his friend Giuseppe Bottai that is conserved in the fondo. In January 1939 Federzoni told Bottai that he was in middle of moving his library to a new home. It then consisted of 25,000 books and ten trunks of papers. After Rome was liberated, the Communist Party was responsible for the sack of Federzoni's home. And, who knows, some of the documents might have been sent to Moscow for safekeeping and may now be lost somewhere in a Russian archive? More documents were stolen in Florence; and who knows what happened to them? The intense interest in his papers can best be explained by the fact that Federzoni was Interior Minister from 1924 to 1926, a crucial period in the Fascist dictatorship. People probably feared that he had dossiers containing the names of spies who worked for the Fascist police. By destroying the archive, one could be sure that one's secret Fascist past was safe.

Some documents have recently appeared in the hands of a well-known Italian journalist who has just published a book on an incident in Federzoni's life. I will try to contact journalist to find out from where the documents came. These things happen when you work on a period of history that is so close to our own time. Should any new documents emerge, hopefully, I will be the one who will get first dibs on them. I will also need to read the book to see what it holds. (More to come on this subject in the future.)

In any case, only a fraction of Federzoni's original papers remain and most of them are located in the Treccani Institute. So, it is here where I started my research this year. After having read through almost all of the documents, I am certain that the dossiers were created (mostly) by Federzoni as a way of preparing two books: a history of Italy from 1859 to 1946, which was never published, and a memoir that was published posthumously in 1967. Federzoni's ordering (which will disappear, unfortunately, when the collection is reordered according to other criteria) thus constitutes a "document" in itself. The actual ordering of the Fondo Federzoni contains his thinking post-1943 (the year he had to go into hiding, followed by a lengthy exile in Portugal and Brazil) about his own activities and Italian history. One pitfall I must avoid is to avoid being influenced by the polemical nature of the fondo's origins. For, I know now that Federzoni collected the documents in the fondo as a way of making his own points about Fascism, the monarchy and his role in Italian history. I need to consider these points as artifacts, but I also need to look at his life from other perspectives lest I wind up writing an apologia to supplement the one in his memoirs.

Another important consideration is how to date more accurately Federzoni's unedited writings, which are located here and there among the 116 dossiers. These writings can be as short as a paragraph or as lonk as seventy pages. I could simply read them as expressing Federzoni's ideas in the 1950s and the 1960s. But, some of the documents were clearly written earlier and many bear Federzoni's revisions. Others are clearly later revisions. If I could date the pages and figure when revisions were made, in what appears a fairly fluid conception of the Fascist and post-Fascist periods, I could offer a more nuanced and more valuable interpretation. The problem then is to find a way to date the writings, and I think have found one. Drawing on textual evidence I have identified four phases in which these documents were clearly written and revised:

1. The period in which Federzoni was hiding out in Rome from the Fascists and Nazis (after he helped orchestrate Mussolini's downfall in 1943)
2. The period in which he was in exile in Portugal and Brazil (and after the Italian population voted to become a republic)
3. The period after Federzoni came back to Italy and prepared his defense against charges that he had embezzled funds as a Fascist leader. (He was cleared of these ludicrous charges.)
4. The period in which he prepared his memoirs and sketched out his history of Italy (the 1950s and 1960s).

I would explain my exact method to ascribe pages to the four periods, but I must be careful about not giving out information on a public site that could be used by someone else to beat me to publishing my own findings. For, Federzoni is becoming a hot topic in some circles now that people know that a historian from Indiana University of Pennsylvania is working on a biography of this important cultural and political leader. Suffice it to say that I will explain my method in my book if I am able to date Federzoni's unedited writings. If not, I will explain on this site how I tried to do it and why I was not successful. Wish me luck!

Preliminary Work (preparing my researh agenda)

My current research is focusing on Federzoni's activities from World War I to his death in 1967. To prepare for this work even before I applied for the Rome Prize at the American Academy, I read every secondary source on Federzoni that I could find and I began to hunt down possible archives to mine for documentation about his life. Fortunately for me, there is not much historiography on Federzoni. This means that I will be the first to write a comprehensive biography. As my work progressed, I figured out that three types of fonts of information existed for my research: private and public archives, published primary sources and period newspapers. Many of the published primary sources are available in the United States. As a faculty member at IUP, I had at my disposal two valuable resources: the Interlibrary Loan Department at Stapleton Library and the online databases from our library's webpage. Through interlibrary loan, I could obtain published diaries, memoirs and other books relating to my topic. Using the World CAT link to OCLC's Online Union Catalog, I was able to make a list of newspaper holdings in the US and Italy. Using the library's access to the historical databases of the New York Times and the London Times, I was able to locate any reference to Federzoni ever made in these two important newspapers. I had already compiled a list of articles on Federzoni, but now I was able to create a comprehensive list of articles that gave me new insight into his life and American and British attitudes towards him.

To find archives that might have documents relating to my topic was a little more problematic. Italian scholars know that the Central State Archive in EUR (an area of Rome built during the Fascist Period) is invaluable as a font of documentation. From my reading of books on Fascism, I knew that I could find something there on Federzoni. After consulting the Central State Archive's index, I was able to make a list of holdings that could be of use to me. For instance, Federzoni was a member of Mussolini's cabinet, so I figured that boxes of documents listed under the heading "Cabinet Meetings" during the Fascist Period would be of interest. Using the same type of logic, I tried to identify other archives that might contain documents relating to Federzoni's official positions (Colonial Minister, Interior Minister, member of parliament, president of the Senate, member of the Fascist Grand Council, etc...). Sometimes, this led me back to the Central State Archive, but it also led me to unexpected areas, like the Archive of the Foreign Ministry, which holds documents relating to the ex-Ministry of the Colonies. From my readings of other historians' work on the period, I also found out that the Federzoni family had donated a collection of documents that had belonged to Luigi Federzoni to the Archive of the Treccani Institute, a cultural institution in Rome. I knew that I would need to find a large chunk of time to look over those documents. I also knew that most of Federzoni's papers were lost during World War II, so I could not simply rely on this one archive for most of my documentation. I was also able to come up with other potential sources for documents by more reading of secondary sources, networking with historians and archivists and writing letters to descendants of people Federzoni knew during his lifetime. Armed with a list of private and public archives, libraries and governmental offices, I could now justify my rationale for applying for the Rome Prize. (The application clearly stated that applicants needed to explain why they needed to come to Rome.)

Internet connection problems

It has been over a month since I have been able to log in and post. In short over the past five weeks, I have experienced Internet problems that have almost made me lose completely all electronic contact with the world. I may have found a work-around that will (hopefully) make this and subsequent postings possible.

Should this test work, stay tuned for regular updates.

Arriving at the American Academy

Happy to say, there were no problems with the trip. The flight was uneventful. I tossed and turned as much as a cramped seat allows one, and arrived jet-lagged and sleep-deprived in Rome. I was prepared for customs, but had no problem. We are lucky that the Academy sent a car service to pick us up at the airport, so I did not need to figure out how to get my two large suitcases and a carry on from Fiumicino Airport to the grounds of the Academy. Instead, a man bearing the signs with “American Academy” written on it greeted me as I cleared customs. The driver was not sure whether or not he needed to pick up anyone else, so I had a few moments to text-message friends in Rome and elsewhere that I had arrived.

The trip to the Academy was approximately thirty minutes, and I kept my mind active by engaging my driver in a conversation about, what else, Italian politics. As we arrived at the Academy gates, it really hit me, I had traded the Oak Grove for the stately grounds of the Academy. I’ll post some pictures as soon as I can figure out how; suffice it hear to say that it is incredibly beautiful place.

For those who may not know about the American Academy in Rome, let me give a quick historical background. The Academy is not a school, as many people in the States seem to think. It’s a place for scholars and artists to research and share the fruits of their labor. Although it is not a school, the idea of the Academy does hearken back to a school--THE Academy, a school centered around philosophic inquiry, which the ancient Greek philosophy Plato founded circa 387 BC. Plato’s Academy lasted until the sixth century AD, when it was closed down because the Roman Empire, then officially Christian, decided to close down pagan schools. (You might ask Dr. Moore for more details.) In the late sixteenth centuries, educated elites in the Italian kingdoms and republics began to found centers of intellectual inquiry and named them “accademie” or “academies” after Plato’s school. The idea soon spread, and within two hundred years there were academies in every European state, from Naples (which had the oldest academy) to Edinborough anf from Russia to Portugal. Thus, the Academies fed into the European Enlightenment and eventually became important centers for the spread of Enlightenment ideas throughout Europe and the Americas. The American Academy was founded under a private initiative in 1894 as a way of emulating the famous academies of the past. Its purpose was to advance the scholarly activity of citizens of the American republic and thus contribute to the advancement of American civilization, which they viewed as European by tradition and Classical in inspiration.

Let us fast-forward to 3 September 2007. I was the first to arrive, but other Fellows followed me in short order. The excitement of arriving was palpable. I constrained myself to unpack, but could not help taking in the ambiance. My spacious suite overlooks the gardens of the US ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican); my equally large office overlooks the internal courtyard with its beautifully soothing fountain. I am certain I will get a lot of work done here, but for now, I am lost in the moment.

As the other Fellows trickled in I introduced myself to the other scholars with whom I will share the year. It was impressive to hear about their specialties, research topics and artistic projects. I am already getting ready to head into the archives to do my own research.

The foundation: my dissertation on Luigi Federzoni

When I began my doctoral work on Federzoni, I decided to concentrate on Federzoni's early career as leader of the Italian Nationalist Association for both practical and methodological reasons. Practically speaking, back in the early 1990s, when I was working on my dissertation, most of the archives I needed for the Fascist phase of Federzoni's career were closed to scholars (for various reasons). From a methodological perspective, I wanted to follow the advice of the Italian scholar Francesco Perfetti that one should look at the emergence of the Nationalist movement in itself, and not as a pre-Fascist or proto-Fascist movement.

In my dissertation, I used what the sociologist Max Weber called the verstehen approach to understand Federzoni's Weltanschauung (worldview). I started with the assumption that one lives in several milieux at the same time. I used the term "milieux" (a fancy English word borrowed from the French) because it can be put in the plural. I meant by this choice to emphasize that we all live in several environments that may or may not intersect. To illustrate this point, think of how you live in several intersecting identities, each tied to several intersecting identities: an IUP student; a son or daughter of parents; a Republican, Democrat, independent or politically apathetic person; a history or social studies education major; and the list goes on. The milieux in which you live (whether by choice or not) limits and/or expands your Weltanschauung and the choices that you can (or cannot) make.

The same can be said for Luigi Federzoni. So, by immersing myself in the socio-economic and cultural fabrics in which he lived during his adolescence and early political career, I tried to understand both the objective factors and the subjective choices that resulted in his Weltanschauung as he co-founded the Italian Nationalist Party and emerged as its leading political figure by 1914. I argued that his Weltanschauung was shaped predominantly by social and cultural factors. He came from a provincial university town (Bologna) where he belonged to the intellectual classes through his father, a prominent high school professor and close friend of the famous Italian poet Giosuè Carducci. Through his family, he had additional access to some of the great minds who lived in Bologna: the physicists Augusto Righi and Guglielmo Marconi (Nobel Prize in Physics 1909), the physician Augusto Murri, the poet Giovanni Pascoli, the politician Alberto Dallolio and the publisher Nicola Zanichelli, to name just a few members of his father's circle. And yet, despite these connections, Federzoni, like many of his generation in the period leading up to World War I, could not take for granted that he, too, would follow in his father's footsteps and become a member of the educated classes that had ruled Italy since before unification. Indeed, this elites were becoming increasingly irrelevant with the industrial revolution transformation of Italy. Like today in America, well-paid jobs were becoming harder to find for the younger generations trained in the Humanities in turn-of-the-century Italy. If traditional Classical university studies had prepared his father's generation for the professions in the nineteenth century, the knowledge of Latin, ancient Greek, philology and the history of Italian literature was no longer adequate to prepare Federzoni's generation for professional jobs in the early twentieth century. Federzoni was untrained for a managerial or entrepreneurial job in society and unwilling (of course) to become a member of the working classes. As a college student he began to recognize his own predicament and that of his social group. He began to feel increasingly alienated by the course he saw Italy taking. He expressed anger and jealousy toward the new industrial classes, as well as bitterness towards the traditional classes whom he accused of having resigned themselves to social extinction. Federzoni thus became driven by the need to justify the continued existence of the traditional elites in a modernizing world. Federzoni and his role in the Nationalist Party can thus be understood, in part, as a vehicle for carving out a leadership role for the traditional classes and for thwarting the new elites' efforts to take command of industrial society.

A strong sense of inferiority as an Italian was another important element in Federzoni's Weltanschauung--something he shared with many Italians. To understand this sense of inferiority one must keep in mind an important cultural impact of Italian unification (the Risorgimento) on many Italians. With unification, expectations ran high that a new age was dawning. A "third Rome" was rising up on the Italian peninsula as heir to the "first Italy" of the ancient Romans and the "second Italy" of the Catholic papacy. Italy would become a Great Power and change European diplomacy. However, reality did not meet expectations. If Italy became a Great Power, it became only "the least of the Great Powers" (to borrow a term coined by the historian R.J.B. Bosworth). Of course some statesmen had seen this coming. During the Italian Wars of Unification between 1859 and 1868, Austrian armies had soundly defeated the Piedmontese armies bent on kicking the Austrians out and "liberating" the Italian states. Fortunately for Piedmont, its allies (France and Prussia) had soundly beaten the Austrian armies. Thus, owing to the victories of its allies, Piedmont was allowed to annex territory on the Italian peninsula that led, in short order, to the creation of a united Italian nation.

Italy continued to present a poor picture as a Great Power after 1870. Colonial defeats in Africa and domestic failures at home led many in Italy and abroad to question if something had gone wrong with Italian unification. Was there a character flaw in Italians that had to be rooted out? If so, what could be done to make Italy a Great Power worthy of its past? For Federzoni, the answer was that socialist, democratic and liberal ideas had softened the martial nature of Italians. The new industrial classes, the carriers of these "foreign" ideas, had to be defeated or else Italy would become so weak that its neighbors would eventually absorb Italy. Instead, the government had to ready Italy for war and make it feared in the world. The government needed to expand into the Mediterranean and Africa as an imperialist nation. It needed to build a strong army and navy. It needed to harness Italy's productive forces by disciplining the middle classes to lead and the lower classes to follow.

In the period leading up to World War I, the Nationalists became some of the most virulent hawks in Italy. They saw war in mythic proportions. Nations were locked in a Darwinian struggle for existence. They successfully won over public opinion for a successful war against the Ottoman Empire in 1911-1912. In 1914, they were so enthusiastic for war that they demanded Italy join with Germany and Austria-Hungary against France, the UK and Russia. When they realized that Italy would never get much in terms of concessions out of its alliance with Germany and Austria, the Nationalists simply reversed themselves and advocated war against Germany and Austria! What was important was that Italy join the war on the side that would ensure it a stronger position in the world once the war was over.

My current work will pick up where I left off. In the meantime, I have bags to pack...

Parentheses: The hurdle of the Italian Consulate in New York City

One of the more onerous difficulties facing American scholars studying abroad is having to deal with bureaucracies. This difficulty is particular true of scholars going to Italy.

I will be studying at the American Academy in Rome, so I need to apply for a student visa. I got back from a study trip in Italy on August 1 (more about this later). The very next day, I went to the Italian Consulate in New York City and spent four hours waiting in the hot sun to apply for a student visa. But, it was to no avail. All I got for my pains was a pass that will allow me to file for the visa on August 27. I tried again today, but all they would give me was another pass; this time for August 28. It does not matter that I need to be at the American Academy in Rome on September 3 and that the application process takes two to four weeks.

So, eight hours of waiting in line and little to show for it… Hopefully I'll find a way around this problem or else I will have to pay hefty fees to change my plane ticket and miss the beginning of the program at the American Academy.

I'm not the only one in this predicament. Almost everyone on line on Thursday and today (80 some odd people) find themselves facing the same problem. Of course the Italian Consulate is insensible to our plight. Its solution for the increased number of visa requests had been to close its offices an extra day (Wednesday as well as Friday)--at least that's what a sign posted on the door says. I guess they think that the way to handle increased requests is to decrease the number of hours the office is open. It all seems absurd; but we are dealing with a bureaucracy.

Who was Luigi Federzoni?

Who was Luigi Federzoni?

My project at the American Academy in Rome is to research a biography on Luigi Federzoni (1878-1967). Federzoni was an important cultural and political figure whose career spanned the liberal, fascist and republican periods of Italian history. To put it another way, he was born before the invention of the automobile and died during the height of Soviet and American lunar exploration.

Federzoni is a relative unknown figure to most Italians today. And yet, his political and cultural accomplishments are significant. He was a co-founder of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI), which became a small but important anti-democratic and anti-liberal party prior to World War I. After the war, he led the Nationalist Party into fusion with the Fascist Party. Under Fascism, he held key governmental positions, including Colonial Minister, Minster of the Interior, and President of the Senate, as well as serving as a member of the Gran Consiglio del Fascismo (a Fascist governmental body created by Mussolini which brought about his downfall in 1943). Federzoni played an important role in the re-conquest of Libya (an Italian colony that had taken advantage of Italian participation in World War I to rebel against its colonial master) and the creation of a Fascist state through the creation of the so-called "Very Fascist Laws." Indeed, in 1924, the Italian king, Victor Emanuel III, called on Federzoni, a law-and-order conservative and staunch monarchist, to take over the Interior Ministry during the Matteotti Crisis--a crisis that threatened the fall of Mussolini's government. During this period, Federzoni hamstrung the liberal-democrats and progressive Catholic opposition. He also brought under control the unruly, violent and extralegal Fascist squads that the political elites in power viewed as equally serious threats to the status quo.

In the 1930s, Federzoni moved into the cultural realm. As Director of the Nuova Antologia (then Italy's leading cultural journal) and President of the Royal Academy, he recruited leading intellectuals to propagate an idea of Italian culture (italianità) that reflected what I argue was a more Nationalist than Fascist worldview. He still found time for politics, but increasingly found himself at odds with Mussolini, most notably with the Racial Laws, which he attacked openly in the Gran Consiglio. In 1943, he voted to remove Mussolini from office. He then was forced into hiding and eventual exile in Portugal and Brazil. In 1951 he returned to Italy to serve as a political advisor to Umberto di Savoia, the pretender to the abolished throne of Italy.

Next installment: How my current research builds on my dissertation.