Mare Nostrum : Italy and the Mediterranean of Ancient Rome in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

The Mediterranean has occupied a prominent role in the political imaginary of Italian Fascisms, past and present. In the 1920s to the early 1940s, Fascist Italy’s imperial project used the concept of mare nostrum – our sea – taken from the vocabulary of Roman antiquity, to anchor modern Italian imperialism within the authority of the classical past. In the postwar years, following decolonization in Africa, mare nostrum receded from popular discourse, previous claims to the Mediterranean suppressed. However, in the context of the so-called refugee crisis, Italy resurrected mare nostrum , in the nam-ing of its military-humanitarian operation, a move rejected by the contemporary Italian far right. This article argues that configurations of the Mediterranean of ancient Rome have served to yoke Africa to Italy when articulated into a Fascist, imperial ideology, as well as to reify the boundaries between Europe and the non-European other, in the xenophobic discourse of the contemporary Italian far right.

Mediterranean.1 In June 2018, news media reported that the refugee rescue ship, the Aquarius, which patrolled the waters of the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy, had rescued about six hundred refugees from the sea. However, the far-right interior minister of Italy's then newly installed government, Matteo Salvini, forbade the boat from docking at any Italian port. The mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, symbolically defied the Rome government's injunction by offering his city as a port of refuge, explaining that 'Palermo in ancient Greek meant "complete port". We have always welcomed rescue boats and vessels who saved lives at sea. We will not stop now' .2 Orlando, by referring to the ancient Greek history of his city, was following a well-established precedent in framing the ongoing humanitarian emergency with reference to Classical, in this instance Greek, antiquity. The evocation of this pre-Roman, Greek history of a region of Italy offers a counter-narrative to discourses of Italian national unification anchored in Roman antiquity, suggesting plurality and diversity of origins in contrast to Roman antiquity which had been co-opted into totalising ideologies of nation and empire.3 In this article, I will investigate some of the ways in which the Mediterranean of ancient Rome has been configured within Italian popular political discourses in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.4 I focus in particular on how the ancient Roman concept of mare nostrum was deployed to anchor Italian imperialism in Africa ideologically, both during the liberal and Fascist periods, and the legacy of this project with regard to Italy's political relationship with the Mediterranean today. I frame this discussion with reference to the so-called 'refugee crisis' in the Mediterranean, to consider how Italy's mare nostrum has been reconfigured in the twenty-first century.5 This is closely linked to the ways in which the Mediterranean of ancient Roman history and mythology has been articulated into neo-fascist and alt-right discourses on Mediterranean migration. I begin, therefore, by outlining the establishment of the Italian navy's military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum, before sketching out the development of this geopolitical concept in Roman antiquity. I move on to consider how mare nostrum resurged in the Italian imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the context of Italy's imperial project in Africa, especially Libya and Ethiopia, focusing in particular on the writings of Enrico Corradini, founder of the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana [ani; Italian Nationalist Association], and later a Fascist. Next, I look at the mare nostrum of the ventennio fascista and its role within Mussolini's Roman Empire. During the period of Italian imperialism in Africa, both liberal and Fascist, I argue that mare nostrum was articulated into a discourse which elided the geographical distance between Africa and Italy, as well as the temporal distance between ancient Roman and modern Italian imperialism. After this, I move forwards chronologically to argue that mare nostrum receded from the national imagination of Italy in the postwar period, concurrent to the distance between the Italian peninsular and the African littoral widening in the Italian popular imagination, before re-emerging in the era of the European Union as part of the project of European unification. Finally, I turn to the ways in which the conception of mare nostrum is being reshaped in the Italian imagination in connection with the refugee crisis, signifying the return of Italian sovereignty to the Mediterranean. Linked to this, I will briefly examine how the Mediterranean migration of Aeneas is configured both by pro-migration politics and far-right xenophobic rhetoric. I thus argue that the Mediterranean of ancient Rome has played a prominent role in the articulation of twentiethcentury Italian Fascism as a key rhetorical legitimization of imperialism in Africa. It continues to do so within contemporary Italian Fascist and far-right ideologies, albeit that now the Mediterranean represents a site of anxiety, and its liquidity and flux a threat to constructions of European identity. Indeed, since antiquity, the Mediterranean has been a basin of crosscultural interaction, a site for the negotiation of identities. It was across these waters that the Roman literary imagination looked across at Carthage, seeing in its Punic enemy the polar opposite of itself as well as its mirror image.6 The ambivalence of the Mediterranean as a barrier between hostile powers and the vector of contact which gave rise to these powers lies at the heart of the sea's polymorphous, ideologically fluid quality. This, after all, is the landscape of transformation, of Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses, of Proteus and the Phoenix.7 Thus, although the Fascism of the ventennio used the Mediterranean as a means to construct an Italian identity predicated on imperialism, it gave rise to some of the ambivalences that contemporary far-right movements in Italy seek to respond to. This article, by historicising evocations of mare nostrum, therefore argues that a closer examination of Italy's Mediterranean histories enables us to better understand Italian Fascisms past and present, and their relationship to the sea and the lands beyond.

Ancient Rome and Mare Nostrum
In October 2013, the world watched on in stunned horror as news broke that two refugee boats off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa had shipwrecked, claiming more than six hundred lives. In response, Italy launched its military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum in the Mediterranean.8 By publicly evoking the memory of Rome's imperial hegemony over the Mediterranean in the name of this operation, Italy was reviving vocabulary drawn from Roman antiquity which, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had been excavated to legitimise Italian claims to sovereignty over the sea and the lands of the opposite shore. The name of the operation therefore represented one of the most recent chapters of the afterlife of this ancient claim to the Mediterranean, which had re-emerged time and again for over two millennia.
In antiquity, Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean depended on the defeat of Carthage. According to the first century CE historian Polybius, Rome's victory in the Second Punic War, fought between 218 and 201 bce against Hannibal, gave unity to the region. He writes, 'up to this time it had been as if history was that of the scattered deeds of the world . . . . But from this time, it was as if history becomes one of a single body [σωματοειδῆ συμβαίνει], the affairs of Italians and Libyans are intertwined with those of Asia and the Greeks and everything is brought to a single end' .9 Polybius' history, then, is at least in part about how the Mediterranean became united as the mare nostrum of the Romans.
The unity of the Mediterranean under Roman hegemony began to be challenged in later antiquity. With the split between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and the fall of the latter, the Mediterranean could no longer be considered a Roman lake. As the ancient historian Geoffrey Rickman points out, after the fall of the Roman Empire, no single power would again be able to refer to the Mediterranean as 'our sea' , mare nostrum.10 With the advent and expansion of Islam, the third of the Mediterranean's religions of the book, the sea began to represent a frontier between the Christian and Islamic worlds. With the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, the idea of a Mediterranean split in two, one part Christian, European, and civilized, the other Muslim, Oriental, and barbaric, became entrenched in the European imagination.11 This discourse of a maritime iron curtain between Christian Europe and Muslim Asia and Africa is, of course, an over-simplification; even at the most tense moments of conflict between these empires of faith, the Mediterranean continued to act as a conduit and network of communication. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the Mediterranean region was no longer united under a single hegemonic power, and that Rome's mare nostrum would now lie dormant for the next few centuries.12 Moreover the notion of the Mediterranean as a boundary between Christian Europe and the Muslim Other would have clear ramifications for modern xenophobic rhetoric surrounding Mediterranean migrations.

Mare Nostrum and the Unification of Italy
The myth of mare nostrum underwent significant changes in the modern era. Both before and after Italian unification, Italy was seen as neither Africa nor Europe, its physical position in the middle of the sea no doubt contributing to its perceived liminality. Indeed, Italy's heterogeneity and uneven development between north and south gave rise to a Torinese saying that Garibaldi did not unite Italy, he divided Africa.13 Northern Italy's colonial attitudes towards the South of the new state served as a discursive and practical laboratory for overseas colonialism, through which the advocates for imperialism hoped to, having made Italy, 'make Italians' .14 The Mediterranean, as mare nostrum, played a fascism 8 (2019) 250-274 pivotal role in the articulation of a discourse of empire which served to unify the fragmented limbs of the young Italian state.
The relationship between Italy, as a modern nation-state, and Africa owes itself not only to the relative geographic proximity between the two, but is given added specificity by the temporal proximity between Italian unification and the Scramble for Africa.15 With empire in Africa viewed as a means for Italy to enter into the club of European imperial powers, Tunisia, then a part of the Ottoman Empire, was viewed as a suitable site for Italian colonisation. This was not only as a result of the Tunisia's relative proximity to Italy, but also because of the ancient history of Roman imperialism in the territory of its former nemesis, Carthage, the first part of Africa to be colonised by Rome. However, in 1881, the heavily indebted Ottoman province became a French protectorate, a bitter pill for Italian imperial ambitions to swallow.16 It would only be in 1940, during the Second World War, that Italy would right this perceived injustice, when Italian forces seized Tunisia. This, however, would be a short-lived victory: Allied forces retook the region in 1943.
Meanwhile, as early as the late 1860s, Italy had embarked on its colonial project in Africa, gaining its first African colonies in Assab, and Massawa in 1869 and 1885 respectively.17 With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1871, these East African coastal outposts were connected to the Mediterranean. As Domenico Tumiati wrote in his 1905 travelogue of Tripolitania, republished in 1911, 'to the south, workers hurry in the Pharaonic sea [Red Sea], to tie Italian Eritrea to the Mediterranean, Tripolitania to Ethiopia' .18 Thus, although Italy had its eyes on a Mediterranean empire in emulation of Rome's, the Suez Canal made East Africa a temporarily acceptable substitute.
From its East African possessions, Italy attempted to encroach into Ethiopian territory, leading, in 1887, to a disastrous defeat at the hands of Ras Alula at Dogali. The defeat was commemorated in a series of essays by the nationalist publicist Alfredo Oriani, collected in a volume entitled Fino a Dogali ['until Dogali']. Although he died in 1909, Oriani would later be claimed by the ideologues of Fascism as a proto-Fascist, to the extent that Mussolini is even 15 Welch  23 It is no accident that Corradini writes that his initial sense of Roman Africa was in Campania. In another volume of essays from later in the same year as Il volere d'Italia, published once war in Libya had broken out, Corradini states that 'the Southern Question is above all an African Question' . He writes, 'I want to say that the South is like that above all because it neighbours Africa. The primary cause for all the differences between North and South is the difference between Europe and Africa: Northern Italy is linked with the centre of Europe, Southern Italy is aligned towards the African desolation' .24 Thus, Corradini argues in this essay, entitled 'the occupation of Tripolitania is useful for everyone' , that if Italy invaded and Europeanized North Africa, it would create 'favourable conditions' for the south of Italy which, at that moment, due to its geography, was 'more African than European, and must be Europeanized' . No class would benefit more from this, Corradini states, than the proletariat.25 Here, therefore, the proximity between Africa and Italy is both a problem, contributing to Italy's uneven development, at the same time as being a legitimisation for imperialism on the other side of the Mediterranean; somewhat perversely, invading Libya would serve northern Italy's civilising mission in the south of the country. In short, Italy could become more Italian by compressing the distance between Italy and Africa across the Mediterranean.
It is significant that Africa, in this essay in Il volere d'Italia, is Roman Africa, rather than the modern continent. In the National Archaeological Museum, Corradini meets the art critic and philosopher Angelo Conti, a regular contributor to the review Il Marzocco. antiquity, the Mediterranean is centred, and at the centre of this was the Italian peninsula and Rome (see figure 1).40 On the 28th October 1936, almost six months after Mussolini's proclamation of empire following the completion of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, a fifth marble map was added to the four which had been put up two years previously.41 Now, in addition to representations of the extent of the ancient Roman Empire, here was the New Roman Empire of Mussolini. Similar in design to the other four, the New Roman Empire was represented in white, and the rest of the world in black. It had the same scale as the other four maps, but because more of the world had to be shown, this map was larger than the others. Now that East Africa was included, the role of the Mediterranean in the impero fascista was reconfigured: through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea could now be absorbed into Italian imperial mare nostrum. By placing this fifth map within the continuity of ancient imperialism, Fascist  Italy's proclamation of empire was anchored by antiquity, and fixed it onto the urban landscape of Rome, as well as in the popular imagination of Italy.42 The blank spaces of these maps constitute an important aspect of Italy's colonial discourse. All that is shown in these maps is the empty expanse of the Mediterranean, and the featureless lands surrounding it; those parts under Roman dominion are shown in white, the rest in black. Loredana Polezzi has argued that such representations are characteristic of Italian colonial attitudes towards empire, and in particular Africa.43 By highlighting the tension between coasts and interior, the blank spaces of land and sea, Polezzi shows how these maps represent Libya, and Africa in general, by a 'rhetoric of absence' or emptiness. Muñoz's maps partake in this same rhetoric: the only inscriptions of difference on these maps are those denoting Italian sovereignty. Since there is no such distinction in the representation of sea in these maps, it is strongly implied that Italy has claim to sovereignty over the waters of the Mediterranean, given its centrality to these displays of imperial claims. Polezzi argues that such claims to sovereignty over blank space have important consequences for representations of the ongoing humanitarian emergency of Mediterranean migrations.44 This is a theme to which I will return at the end of this article.
The blank space of the Mediterranean and Italy's fourth shore served an important function in the construction of imperial, Fascist identities. Italianist Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues that scenes of Mediterranean crossings feature in almost every 'empire film' of the ventennio. These scenes, she suggests, serve to 'initiate travellers into unstable realms of cultural translation and personal transformation' .45 The notion of the Mediterranean as a boundary, a place of 42 See Minor, 'Mapping Mussolini,' 153, fig. 6: a photomontage from Italia Imperiale (Milan: La rivista illustrata del Popolo d 'Italia, 1937 If one can imagine that a country, inseparably linked through two thousand years with the fortune of Rome and Italy, a country which on one hand is an imminent danger for our sea frontier [because of the North African theatre of war], a country which the Italians over almost two thousand years has made to flourish and re-flourish with their intelligence, with their enthusiasm and work, how can one violate with arms and with impunity these Italians?50 Thus, in these pamphlets, ancient Rome's mare nostrum is used to stake claims to North African territories, and to cast Fascist Italy's enemies as modern incarnations of ancient Rome's African nemesis. The emphasis on the close relationship between Italy and North Africa, based on Roman history on the other side of the Mediterranean, highlights Italy's self-positioning in relation to Africa.
Later in the war, after the defeat at El-Alamein, and once it had become clear that Italy was fighting a losing battle in North Africa, this relationship towards Africa was cast in a less triumphalist light. In a 1943 booklet in Roma e Africa, published by the Reale Istituto di Studi Romani, the eminent archaeologist Pietro Romanelli assessed the historical relationship between Italy and Africa. He sees the history of Italy as inseparable from that of Africa: 'Rome and Africa cannot ignore each other, they cannot but meet in the sea in which one and the other bathe: from the meeting can come struggle or friendship, but a relationship has from birth been inevitable' .51 Thus, even as Fascist Italy's Roman Empire was crumbling around Mussolini's ears, Italy continued to position itself in relation to Africa. Although the Fascist imperial project now seemed doomed to failure, this represented the vicissitudes of history's cycles of epochal struggles between Italy and Africa: from that between Rome and Carthage, or that between the empire and Genseric, the Vandal ruler of North Africa and Sicily, to that of Fascist Italy and the modern Carthaginian British and French Empire.52 For Romanelli, in this context, Italian history would always be tightly bound up with the Mediterranean and its opposite African shores. The choice to inscribe this commemoration in Latin alludes to the longstanding idea of Latin as a universal language,54 which could now serve as a suitably solemn language to memorialise the coming together of the peoples of Europe. It is striking that the neighbouring inscription, commemorating the Treaty of Rome of 1957, is in Italian rather than in Latin.55 The implication of the classicising rhetoric of the 2004 inscription is a resurgent Italian national confidence, such that the state could once again adopt the vocabulary of ancient Rome. Additionally, the emphasis in this inscription on singularity of mind, will, purpose, and people, at the same time as echoing Polybius, evokes the biopolitical drive of Italian imperialism, namely to formulate a unified identity Where, in the era of liberal and Fascist Italian imperialism, Italy's proximity to Africa and its relative continental liminality appeared as a boon to imperial projects of national formation, now, this was a threat.58 A new rhetoric of fear around immigration began to emerge. This fear of this African Other was weaponized by Colonel Ghaddafi, the dictator of Italy's ex-colony of Libya. At the same time as the Schengen zone was propelling member states towards greater European unification during the 1990s, Libya's pan-African immigration policy opened the doors of the North African nation to migrants from across the continent. Periodically, Ghaddafi threatened to unleash waves of African migrants, many of whom had originally departed from Somalia and Eritrea, two former Italian colonies, across the Mediterranean to threaten the walls of Fortress Europe. The Libyan port of Zuwara, which had served as the beachhead for Italy's 1911 invasion, now served as a major hub for people-smuggling across the sea.59 It is therefore unsurprising that it was during this period that the Italian neo-Fascist organisation CasaPound, named after Ezra Pound, was established.60 Although numerically small, CasaPound, founded in 2003, represents an extremely militant, terroristic force of the Italian far right, whose members constitute a close-knit, coherent political community.61 Its symbol, the 'arrowed turtle' , represents an ancient, wise animal that carries its home with it. Moreover, it alludes to the Roman military formation of testudo, by which 'the army of Rome showed its greatness in conquering the then known world, showing that the force that emerged from a vertical order and a hierarchical principle is destined to dominate barbarism, even if in smaller numbers' .62 Despite emphasising the association between its symbol, the turtle, and its capacity for migration, the organisation places anti-immigration politics as a cornerstone of their ideology, which triangulates nation, state, and identity.63 Taking its cue from Mussolini's pro-natalist drive announced in 1927, in 2017 CasaPound announced a 'National Birth Income' policy, to offer incentives for Italian mothers to procreate, contributing to the overall aim of getting 'immigrants out, fascism 8 (2019) 250-274 Italian babies in' .64 Where Mussolini's Fascism had sought to absorb North Africa into Italy, incorporating Libya into metropolitan Italy in 1939, with the aim of completing national (re)unification, the Italian far right of the twenty-first century was now trying to re-establish the distance between Italy and Africa across the Mediterranean. Although CasaPound alludes to Roman antiquity in its symbols, it wants nothing to do with claims to mare nostrum, even when it glorifies the empire-building of ancient Rome.

Mediterranean Crossings, Ancient and Modern
Faced with increasing pressure from the anti-immigration right in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Italian government was pressured into acting decisively. Thus, in 2008, in exchange for financial and political concessions, as well as some reparations for Italy's colonial atrocities in Libya, Ghaddafi promised oil and agreed with Berlusconi to cooperate with Italy to control migration across the Mediterranean.65 As a symbol of this rapprochement between these countries, Italy returned to Libya the stolen Venus of Cyrene, a Roman statue excavated in colonial Libya.66 This ancient artefact embodied the long, multi-layered history of the relationship between Italy and Libya, played out across more than two millennia: from imperialisms ancient and modern, where the Mediterranean fulfilled its role as mare nostrum for Italy, to the twenty-first century, when mare nostrum becomes 'mare aliorum' -someone else's sea. 67 When the Libyan Civil War broke out on the centenary year of Italy's invasion of Tripolitania, Ghaddafi reopened the migration routes across the Mediterranean. 68 Now that the flow of people had taken on a south to north orientation fascism 8 (2019) 250-274 across the waters mythologized in the Italian imagination as mare nostrum, Italy turned its back on the sea and the continent to which, as heirs of the Roman Empire, they had previously claimed a birth-right. After the tragic shipwrecks off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013, which brought migrant deaths to the forefront of the European public imagination, Italy could no longer be seen to totally abnegate its responsibilities over its ex-colonies or the waters previously claimed as its own. In the same month as the Lampedusa shipwrecks, Italy instituted Operation Mare Nostrum, a military-humanitarian mission which conceptualized the Mediterranean as a humanitarian 'battlefield' .69 Thus, the idea of Italy's mare nostrum had made a return in a different guise. The emphasis of this operation was that of policing mare nostrum -fingerprinting arrivals, prosecuting smugglers, and deterring further migration.70 Even so, the humanitarian aspect of the Italian naval operation proved to be unpopular, criticized as a state-operated ferry service for migrants. 71 If Operation Mare Nostrum was a claim to responsibility over what Gabriele D' Annunzio had, in 1901, called the 'Latin sea' ,72 made once again by Italy in the context of policing its waters, it was a claim which fell flat. The unpopularity of the operation suggested that the Italian nation no longer had any taste for extending its influence beyond its borders. Mare Nostrum was discontinued after a year and replaced with an operation launched in collaboration with the European Union's Frontex Border and Coast Guard Agency. Tellingly, this 2014 operation, more aggressively securitarian than the previous year's, was named Mos Maiorum. Alongside the names of other Frontex Mediterranean border policing operations, Poseidon and Hermes in 2011, Triton in 2014, the classicising name of this operation is striking. The name refers to the Ancient Roman idea of public and private life being regulated by the ways of the ancestors, encompassing ideas of tradition, customs, and unwritten laws. According to Livy (1.8.7), the belief was that the mos maiorum [ancestral custom] had existed from the beginning of Rome, having been established by Romulus. Mos maiorum protected the authority of the aristocracy, who were seen as the guardians of tradition.73 Thus, it represented an exclusive cultural formation, fascism 8 (2019) 250-274 of Carthage, shortly before and during the Italian invasion of Libya, in order to retrace the footsteps of Dido and Aeneas, and to stage their own returns.78 In the twenty-first century, the much-contested figure of Aeneas continues to be articulated into nationalist discourse. However, unlike twentieth-century nationalists' use of Aeneas to promote imperialism as a means to consolidate national unification and 'to make history' , the contemporary Italian right's evocations of the legendary hero are reactionary and defensive against the perceived threat of immigration. In other words, rather than representing a figure for an expansionist conception of the Italian nation, Aeneas is reconfigured to stand for a contracting, narrowly defined nation, in terms of territory and ethnicity.
Giusti points to an article from 2018 on the alt-right website Giovani a Destra, which argues that 'Aeneas was not a migrant, and above all, was not a Turk' . In this article, Federica Ciampa argues that Turks only settled on the Anatolian Peninsula in 1100 CE, while the Trojan War is generally dated to around 1250 bce. Thus, Aeneas could not have been a Turk. Additionally, from the mythical point of view, the article argues that Dardanus settled in Anatolia, having migrated from Arcadia in Greece. According to Virgil, however, Dardanus originated from Etruria. Aeneas, then, as a descendent of Dardanus, was Italian, and Italy was already his homeland. The article goes on to state that Aeneas did not flee war, because he only left Troy after the war was over and after fighting valiantly alongside his compatriots. He is a profugus only because of providential fate. The article concludes: 'It seems clear, therefore, that there are no Aeneases among the new migrants: they do not return to their homeland; they do not go to uninhabited and economically prosperous places, but, on the contrary, they head towards an Italy that has other important emergencies to face in this historical period.'79 A 2016 article in Il Primato Nazionale, the periodical of CasaPound, argues for Aeneas' indigenous Italian status along similar lines. This article attacks socalled 'immigrationist theories' and their appropriations of the figure of Aeneas. The article argues that 'It is normal to try to comfort one's theories by citing examples taken from classicism in virtue of the authority that, even 78 Tumiati contemporary Italian Fascism and more general xenophobic politics have excised Mussolini's claims to the Mediterranean from the historical imaginary. In both cases, the Mediterranean has figured as a significant presence in the selfnarrated stories of Italian Fascism, past and present: from representing the potential for a New Roman Empire, to embodying a critical threat to Italy's European identity. As Polezzi has argued, visualizations of Italy's African colonies as a blank space for the projection of colonial fantasies have important consequences for contemporary Italian imaginings of the humanitarian emergency in the Mediterranean.83 When Libya, from which many migrants begin their Mediterranean crossing, is characterized by its emptiness, it becomes defined by the people moving through the region, unchanging in its constant flux.84 The appropriation of Libya and mare nostrum as blank spaces in the Italian imagination now serves the reverse purpose to that of the early twentieth century: the Mediterranean and the lands beyond are no longer a canvas for the projection of colonial dreams, but of postcolonial nightmares. This article does not suggest that a reminder of Mussolini's mare nostrum could dispel the racist violence of CasaPound; rather, it hopes that the historicization of these aspects of Fascist ideology might contribute to the articulation of a more compelling discourse of migrant solidarity. 83 Polezzi, 'Looking across.' 84 Polezzi demonstrates this rhetoric in the photos of Luca Sola, Fabio Bucciarelli, and Giulio Piscitelli.