Viewing Rome in the Latin Literature of the Ventennio Fascista: Francesco Giammaria’s Capitolium Novum

This article analyses Francesco Giammaria’s Capitolium Novum, a Latin poem describing a tour of the historic center of Rome in 1933, in its historical, architectural, and intellectual contexts. It offers a detailed analysis of three key sections of the poem, which deal with the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, and the Ara dei caduti fascisti respectively. The authors show how Giammaria’s poem responds to urbanistic interventions in the city center during the ventennio, and specifically to the Fascist ‘recoding’ of the city as the ‘Third Rome’, with a narrative emphasizing the historically layered nature of Rome. Giammaria offers his own interpretation of the respective importance and interrelation of the city’s historic layers: the rhetoric of his poem is aimed at superimposing Catholic Rome over pagan Rome, and at framing all historical layers of the city, including the Fascist one, as part of its Christian mission and destiny. Thus, Capitolium novum resonates with efforts of intellectuals gathered around Carlo Galassi Paluzzi’s Istituto di Studi Romani, who aimed to promote a cultural reconciliation between Fascism and Catholicism. Downloaded from Brill.com12/19/2019 09:39:39AM via Universiteit of Groningen Bettegazzi, Lamers and Reitz-Joosse


Capitolium Novum and the Latin Literature of the Ventennio Fascista
During the ventennio fascista, Italy saw a diverse production of original Latin literature with Fascist themes, ranging from lyric odes in praise of Mussolini to prose orations extolling the new regime, from epics on Italy's martial exploits in Africa to Latin inscriptions on monuments old and new. Recent work has elucidated how the Latin language was accorded special ideological significance during the ventennio and how the regime stimulated its active usage in multiple ways.2 Latin was framed as the language of Fascist romanità, as a fascism 8 (2019) 153-178 modern and specifically Fascist language, as an international language of communication, and as the language of Italian imperialism.3 This article focusses on Francesco Giammaria's Capitolium Novum, a poetic description of a guided tour through the newly 'liberated' and reconfigured heart of the city of Rome: the area between the Piazza Venezia, the Colosseum, If you care to climb to the top of the illustrious mountain that preserved the duly hallowed fates of the city, and to look around attentively, you will immediately see before you -how wonderful! -a miracle: Ancient monuments arise, after ruined buildings have been cleared away. The Dux wanted it like this: and the will of the Dux was accomplished . . After this opening statement of the reinvigoration of the ancient city of Rome, the narrator leads the reader on a tour of its main sights (Figure 1). Beginning on Piazza Venezia, he first points to the monument of Vittorio Emmanuele ii, stressing its celebration of the Unification of Italy and the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He then leads the reader up the Via dell'Impero (with a short detour up the back of the Capitoline Hill), to the Colosseum and, turning right, the Arch of Constantine, pointing out and interpreting many of the sites -ancient, medieval, and modern -which are to be seen along the way. We then return to the Piazza Venezia and walk up the Via del Mare, again passing numerous ancient and later monuments. The exact route taken by the narrator is partly dictated by the state of the building and demolition works at the time of first publication in 1933: while the Via dell'Impero and the Via del Mare had been opened to the public in 1932, clearing and construction works were still in progress at the Via dei Trionfi until the autumn of 1933 and in the Circus Maximus area until 1934, making an actual circuit around the Capitoline and Palatine Hills impossible at the time of writing.7 The poem concludes with an imaginative flight to the seacoast and a reflection on Rome's and Italy's newly restored naval power. The walking tour and inspection of specific sites is several times interrupted by more reflective passages, in which the narrator discourses about the parallels between antiquity and the present or about the victory of Christianity over paganism.8 The poem ends with an extended affirmation of the eternity of Rome and of the ancient Latin authors who have immortalized her (implying that Giammaria's work is to fulfil a similarly immortalizing function and join the ranks of ancient authors' works).9 What was the intended readership of this remarkable text?10 We cannot pronounce on its reception with any certainty, but we would like to argue that this text particularly resonates with the efforts of a group of intellectuals and scholars gathered around the Institute of Roman Studies (isr).11 Founded in 7 Painter in particular, the revival of Rome also entailed the revival of its language, Latin. It encouraged the use of the ancient language both inside and outside Italy. To this effect, it organized a range of activities, including competitions in Latin composition and the compilation of specialized lexica designed to turn Latin into an up-to-date international academic language.13 Although Latin was constructed as a modern language, capable of expressing the newest ideas and the most recent developments, Latin writers of this period such as Giammaria often directly adopted phrases and expressions of ancient Latin authors in their works. They did so at least partly for compositional or stylistic convenience. But phrases adapted from classical authors also served to cement the relationship between the Roman past and the Fascist present, and moreover enabled Latin writers to 'anchor' their work in a venerable tradition.14 Contemporary Latin authors often engage in intertextual dialogue with a small number of 'favorite' ancient texts: Vergil (especially the Fourth Eclogue, the Georgics, and some sections of the Aeneid) or Horace (above all the Carmen Saeculare). Giammaria's intertextual references, however, while used sparingly, cast a much wider net. Besides Vergil and Horace they include, for example, the less popular Ovid, the imperial author Statius (a favorite of the humanists), the late-antique author Rutilius Namatianus (fl. 5th cent.), and even the inscriptions on the Arch of Constantine, to which we will return below. the language of Augustan Rome but the language of ancient Rome, Roman Catholicism, and Italian Fascism, and therefore perfectly suited to conveying his layered vision of Rome, to which we will turn next.

Walking Through Rome and Time
The poem's readers were presumably steeped in classical literature and its reception just as Giammaria himself. They would therefore immediately have recognized the literary tradition which his text evoked. Although Giammaria did not follow one specific model or include copious citations of ancient authors, Capitolium Novum, by its very subject matter, evokes a long tradition of ancient and later literary 'guided tours through Rome' . For example, in the eighth book of Vergil's Aeneid, the Arcadian king Evander famously leads Aeneas to some of the sights of proto-Rome, among them the Capitoline Hill (still without buildings, yet already a numinous place), the site of the future Forum Romanum (where cattle still graze), and the Palatine (where the Arcadian king's simple hut prefigures the home of Augustus in Vergil's own time). This genre of the 'literary guided tour' through Rome, thus established, is developed by several authors both in antiquity and later, especially during the Renaissance.16 A common characteristic of the Rome-tour genre of any period is a form of 'time-lapse': the superimposition of different periods on each other during the walk around the city. Vergil, for example, describes the pre-Roman wilderness of Aeneas' time, but also points to the sights of Augustan Rome, actually visible in the same places to his readers. The Augustan poet Propertius, in a poem which responds to Vergil's scene, invites a stranger to survey the new, Augustan city of Rome, while asking him to compare what he sees to the simple, rural beginnings of the place (Elegies 4.1). Renaissance authors often tend to stress the contrast between the neglected aspect of Rome's ancient center in their own time and the now invisible glory of ancient Rome: through centuries of neglect ancient buildings have crumbled or disappeared. Another prominent theme of Renaissance 'tours' is the contrast between the now prostrate remains 16 Famous  Kultur (1930), to imagine what it would be like to be able to look at all of these layers at once: Where the Coliseum stands now we could at the same time admire Nero's Golden House; on the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today as bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but on the same site also Agrippa's original edifice; indeed, the same ground would support the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva and the old temple over which it was built.18 Given the palimpsestic nature of the city, it is hardly surprising that at the heart of the Rome-tour genre lies the question 'which Rome am I looking at?' , and that the answer is almost never just 'one' Rome. Looking at the eternal city means looking through history, and yet we cannot (except in Freud's famous thought experiment) see all of its history at the same time. Every tour selects, emphasizes, and privileges some elements and periods of Rome, while others fade into the background.
Giammaria's poem places itself within this literary tradition of Rome-tours and adopts some of its most important features, including the contrast between the past and the present, the element of time-lapse, and the 'layering' of pagan, Christian, and contemporary Rome. The question 'which Rome?' also lies at the heart of his poem and plays directly into urbanistic and culturalpolitical developments at the time of his poem's composition. It has been argued that the radical reconfiguration of the city in the 1920s and (especially) 1930s, including demolitions, constructions of new buildings, and reconstructions of historical ones, was aimed at 'a wholesale recoding of the (existing) city as a spatial and visual container of symbolic (Fascist) meaning.'19 By erasing the remnants of certain historical periods and by reframing, reconstructing and emphasizing others, the regime was 'seeking to "reclaim" the ideal essence of its illustrious predecessors' , 'carefully redacting a palimpsest of urban layers forged across millennia of history and then subsuming it into a single, all-embracing narrative of Roman and Fascist universality.'20 Giammaria reacts to this ideological architectural program. In his guided tour, he embraces and emphasizes the historically layered nature of the Roman cityscape, offering his own, equally careful (literary) redaction of the city's palimpsest. In doing so, Giammaria seems to modify the overall narrative of the Fascist urban interventions, complicating the regime's 'recoding' of the city as a symbol of Fascist universality. His layered image of the city includes its ancient, late-antique, medieval, early modern, and modern strata, but Giammaria offers his own interpretation of the respective importance and interrelation of those historic layers. In particular, his rhetoric is aimed at superimposing Catholic Rome over pagan Rome and at framing all historical layers of the city, including the Fascist one, as part of its Christian mission and destiny. While the poet repeatedly emphasizes that the 'will of the Dux' has been accomplished,21 and depicts Mussolini as the driving force of Rome's transformation,22 he also frames Fascist Rome as part of a larger, divine plan for the world. In this way, Giammaria's poem exposes a tension between Fascist and Catholic claims to the city as symbol and guarantor of universality, a tension which is never entirely solved in the poem.
In Giammaria's guided tour, three monuments are made to stand out as especially significant by the length and rhetorical elaboration of their descriptions: the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, and the Ara dei caduti fascisti [Altar to the Fallen Fascists]. For each monument, Giammaria emphasizes the layered nature of the Roman cityscape and depicts the interrelation of these historical layers in different ways. His discussion of the Colosseum emphatically contrasts ancient pagan with Christian Rome, whereas his representation of the Arch of Constantine melds late-antique with contemporary Fascist Rome. His discussion of the Ara dei caduti fascisti focuses on the recent Fascist interventions in the ancient cityscape. Together, these descriptions form a complex layered image of the city. 19 Kallis

Colosseum
A colossus with a huge mass rises at its end (i.e. of the Via dell'Impero), made of Tiburtine stone, and also splendid in craftsmanship, executed with arches constructed in three tiers, an astonishing thing: erected on an immense base, lofty and outstanding it raises its top to the skies. However, even if these wonders were once symbols of a mighty people, reminders of human suffering are not absent . . .23 Thus begins Giammaria's description of one of the most iconic monuments of Rome, the Colosseum. The poet mentions the monument's magnificence and presents it as evidence that the Romans were a 'mighty people' . But he immediately adds that the monument is also reminiscent of 'human suffering' . He then evokes, rather graphically, the Christian martyrs who were reportedly persecuted there under the Roman emperors: In this arena, warm blood of men flowed, because the cruel, blood-thirsty masses demanded it. Now, remembering the past, you can actually hear the sound of the moment when, with a downturned thumb, the cruel masses rejoiced in seeing struggling men killed. Here also the invincible Christians, engaged in a harsh battle, preferred to suffer burnt bodies and shattered limbs, for the sake of the triumph of the sacred Cross, and to sanctify their unshaken faith with the seal of death.24 The poet turns the Colosseum into a monument of Christian triumph over pagan antiquity, drawing on the building's long history as a Christian ;31 another one mentioned the removal of the Cross in the nineteenth century and its restoration in the Fascist era. Two more inscriptions specified the date of the new installation according to four different chronological -Christian and Fascist -conventions. In this way, the Fascist regime had attempted to reframe the monument's Christian significance as part of a Fascist message. Giammaria's emphatic nunc [now] clearly refers to the very recent restoration of the cross. However, only with this single word does the poet acknowledge the regime's carefully orchestrated and widely publicized reinstallation of the cross.32 The picture that emerges of the Colosseum shows us the different historical layers and meanings of the monument, including the most recent intervention, but in weighting their relative importance, Giammaria's eloquent silence on the regime's re-erection of the cross denies this gesture its intended import of recoding the monument as symbolic capital of Mussolini's 'Third Rome' .
Giammaria's representation of the Colosseum primarily as a testimony to Rome's Christian history is consistent with the poem's general emphasis on the city's Christian tradition and its role in God's plan. This is also reflected in Giammaria's discussions of other monuments with a Christian history, such as

Arch of Constantine
While the Colosseum offered Giammaria an opportunity for playing ancient (pagan) and Christian Rome off against each other, both 'Romes' naturally coincide in his depiction of the Arch of Constantine, a famous monument to the first 'Christian' emperor (Figures 3 and 4) In the first section of the passage,35 the narrator points out the monument, isolated in the recent clearing operations, and recalls the reason for the senate's dedication of the arch in AD 315: Cum patriam fortis servaverat, hoste repulso (line 146) -an obliquely abridged version of the battle of the Milvian Bridge and Constantine's victory over Maxentius in 312. 36 While the fascinating decorative program of the arch remains entirely unmentioned, the next, intriguing lines draw our attention especially to the inscriptions on the arch: 'The words you see on both sides above the sculpted Giammaria's further generalization (hoste) paves the way for the later parallel between Constantine and Mussolini by eliding the difference between the kinds of 'enemy' they faced in marching on Rome. stone celebrate the Divine bringer of liberty and peace as a victor, and greet him with gratitude' .37 Giammaria here refers to the two short inscriptions on facing sides of the interior of the portal, reading liberatori urbis ['to the liberator of the city'] and fundatori quietis ['to the founder of peace'] respectively, but the reference to the 'celebration of the victor' conflates this with a reference to the large inscription on both sides of the arch, which famously praises Constantine for his victory over Maxentius.
The narrator then introduces a particularly marked form of time-lapse, by claiming that the words of the inscription, which he now calls fatalia verba, 'words of fate' or 'prophetic words' , refer not only to Constantine, but also suit the present age and in fact describe the leader of Fascism, Benito Mussolini: After so many things have happened and so much time has passed, these same words, prophetic, if you look at them well, perfectly suit the age we live in and represent a man of our time with a strong mind. For he too secured the Fatherland, which was suffering from misfortune, and safely brought it back into one body, strenuous and warlike, stern, and rejecting the sluggish.38 The reference to Mussolini's robusta mens picks up Constantine's magnitudo mentis in the inscription, and in what follows, manly force and energy and the achievement of uniting and steadying the fatherland in a crisis are all attributed to the arch's original dedicatee as well as to Mussolini. A reference to the decennalia, the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome,39 forms the quick transition to the elaborate description of a modern triumphal procession, featuring Mussolini as the protagonist of the spectacle:40 'He was the Leader, and with his head held high, he led the mutilated soldiers, bearing It seems that by the time Giammaria wrote his poem, the model of Constantine competed in some circles with that of Augustus as an emblem of the kind of leadership that was capable of restoring political and social stability and prosperity after a period of dangerous unrest. In Giammaria's poem, Augustus is almost entirely absent, while Constantine is set up in this role. Thus, Giammaria's representation of the Arch of Constantine shows how he melds lateantique, early Christian Rome with Mussolini's 'Third Rome' , while presenting both Constantine's reign and Mussolini's regime as crucial moments in the city's providential history. By suggesting a direct 'prophetic' relationship between Constantine and Mussolini, Giammaria moreover offers an alternative to the 'Augustan' model which, by the time he wrote his poem, was becoming increasingly popular among Fascist ideologues. Both of these tactics illustrate the poet's sophisticated and slightly unconventional response to the regime's most recent and ongoing urbanistic interventions.

Ara Dei Caduti Fascisti
The Ara dei caduti fascisti [Altar to the Fallen Fascists], to which we now turn, appears as one of the first monuments of Giammaria's tour ( Figure 5). Unlike many of the other landmarks in Capitolium Novum, which date to classical and late antiquity, the middle ages, and the period of the Risorgimento, the altar is a very recent addition to the cityscape. But as we shall see, even this newly erected monument had been set up with the intention of reframing its historical surroundings in a Fascist mould. Giammaria's representation of the monument, on the other hand hints at its place in a different teleological narrative for the city of Rome. We cite Giammaria's depiction of the altar in full: Here a curved slope, which gently goes around the hill, extends to the shady top and a peaceful retreat. Here a new altar, which rises up between the laurel-trees, celebrated with sacred devotion and an eternal cult, has deservedly been dedicated, as the Dux wished, to the strength of the unsubdued youth, which, slain by an unspeakable crime, shed its blood and offered its life to the Fatherland. Here then it is now honoured with dignity, so that it may become both an example and a warning for future generations. If you prefer to pause briefly on these summits and look into the distance opposite you, you see the rooftops, built on many levels and arranged as if in the shape of a theatre.  48 Its ancient provenance underlined both the symbolic and the physical association with Roman antiquity, while its red color visually suggested the theme of bloodshed and martyrdom. During its inauguration, incense burned to accentuate the sacral nature of the ceremony. 49 The monument was dismantled after the fall of the regime, and its main component, the red granite block, was moved a short distance to a republican brick wall, with the Fascist inscription turned on its head and facing the wall.50 Giammaria again makes some specific and telling choices in describing this strange monument, which come into sharper focus when we consider his words in relation to the altar's inscription. In 1927, an epigraph was carved on the Ara to commemorate 'the heroic sacrifice of those who died for the fascism 8 (2019) 153-178 black-shirt revolution' .51 The Ara was thus framed as the explicitly Fascist counter-part to the more broadly nationalist Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.52 Interestingly, in Capitolium Novum, the specificity of the actual inscription is answered by a vaguer, more inclusive nationalist rhetoric. While acknowledging Mussolini's role in erecting the memorial, Giammaria broadens its cultic function to the Italian youth who had 'shed its blood and offered its life to the Fatherland' -rather than specifically for the Fascist cause.53 This is a significant rhetorical move, albeit one of shifting nuances, rather than of opposition or dissent. Giammaria reframes the Ara as a national rather than exclusively Fascist memorial, while at the same time emphasizing that this was exactly 'as the Dux wished' .54 The theme of martyrdom in this passage reminds the reader of the passage of the Colosseum discussed above. The themes of martyrs' sacrifice and bloodshed, of brave opposition against morally depraved enemies, as well as of sacred memory and everlasting reward, unite the two monuments in the poem, and Giammaria invites us to read the two passages against each other through this thematic and verbal reprisal.55 But if we do so, we cannot but notice that the poet's language is noticeably less emphatic in the passage on the Ara dei caduti fascisti than it is in the Colosseum passage: martyrs of the state receive only a fraction of the praise lavished on their Christian equivalents. By turning the altar's martyrs into (admittedly lesser) counterparts of the martyrs of the Colosseum, Giammaria incorporates the caduti fascisti into a larger teleological narrative of a Christian Rome on its way to salvation. Potentially 'pagan' associations of the altar with its political rituals are effectively downplayed, while Fascism's cult of its martyrs is subsumed into the (Christian) history of Rome and the Fatherland.

Conclusion
Once the monument has been described, the guide encourages us to linger on the platform, pointing out the majestic view over the city (lines 72-77 representation of the city is rooted in a long-standing literary genre which lends itself perfectly to his sophisticated reflection on the interrelation between and respective importance of different historical moments. His choice and use of the Latin language in itself conveys a complex message of mediated universalism. In a medium and language accessible only (especially in its subtleties) to a relatively small circle of specialists, Giammaria's poem nonetheless engages with important contemporary concerns of Fascist propaganda and ideology. In particular, as we have argued, Capitolium Novum resonates with the efforts of intellectuals and scholars gathered around Galassi Paluzzi's Institute of Roman Studies in trying to broaden the scope of Fascist romanità, to mediate between the claims of Fascist and Catholic universalism, and ultimately to effect a cultural reconciliation between Fascism and Catholicism.