Era Fascista : Italian Fascism’s New Beginning and Its Roman Past Future

Abstract

Departing from Roger Griffin’s work on fascist temporalities and their nexus to modernity, this essay gives an overview of concepts, which were of fundamental relevance to the Fascist but also fascist vision of the future. To begin with, this contribution takes a look at the Fascist Revolution as well as at its institutionalisation as era fascista, that is the calendar adopted by the Fascists in 1926/27 to express their claim to have inaugurated a “new age”. It also sheds a light on the concept of the New Man, which was closely intertwined with the vision of a new era. In the second section, this article takes a brief look at the concept of bonifica and at the myth of universal Rome, a buried past future, which had to be ‘excavated’ and realised anew. The Fascists compensated the dynamism of their movement, the permanent mobilisation and perpetual Aufbruch, which they attempted to trigger in Italian society, with a supposedly eternal myth. This paradoxical Fascist temporality, or rather this oscillation between Aufbruch, destruction of the past, and the rebirth or revival of eternal order stands at the centre of attention of this chapter.