As Italian Liberation Day approaches every April 25th, the editorial pages of Italy’s national newspapers reignite the national discourse over Mussolini, fascism, and the future of Italian democracy. With the far right’s assent to power, editorial writers warn of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s deep, personal roots in the history of Italian fascism. Adding to the furor, as well as the rectitude of the left’s fears, Meloni steadfastly refuses to mention the word nazi-fascism, to declare herself antifascist, or to describe the Italian Constitution as an antifascist document.
While the US shares the same anxiety over its contemporary politicians who are pro-fascist and anti-Semitic, including a former president, it also has a direct historical connection to Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini’s fascism was not confined to Italy. Italian fascist influence in America, especially California, has been well documented in works by Gloria Ricci Lothrop and Philip Cannistraro, as well as by other scholars. Professor Lothrop informs us that Mussolini established the Los Angeles consulate so that he could influence Southern California’s Italian population with his propaganda. In addition, his propaganda ministry also sent false reports about fascist successes to all Italian newspapers throughout North America.
Mussolini also established RAI radio to spread his propaganda, not only throughout Italy, but to Italian immigrant colonies throughout the world (see Franceshini). In support of Mussolini’s régime, American poet, Ezra Pound, made pro-Mussolini and anti-Semitic broadcasts on Rome Radio to American soldiers, with disastrous personal consequences. After the war, Pound was convicted of treason. To escape the death penalty, he spent eight years in a mental hospital in the US and then spent the rest of his life in exile in Italy. In Iris Origo’s memoir War in Val D’Orcia, an Italian man tells her in the aftermath of World War II, “The radio made fools of us all.”
In 1977 I visited the offices of the newspaper L’Italo-Americano on Spring Street in Los Angeles, where I met with then-editor Mario Trecco in order to launch my book review column in the paper (see North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada; Guernica: 2000). There I also met then-owner and editor, Cleto Baroni. I saw stacks of carefully preserved early editions of L’Italo-Americano, which I assumed at the time dated back to 1908, the year of the founding of the paper.
However, in the 1980s when I asked Trecco for permission to research the early editions of the paper before 1940, he informed me that in all likelihood Baroni had destroyed those early editions because they contained fascist propaganda. As Cannistraro and Lothrop have explained, by the 1940s the US Congress had begun to investigate fascist influences in the Italian community in California, including Italian newspapers. Although we do not know about Baroni’s political beliefs, fearful of being investigated, he must have destroyed the early editions of the paper that contained fascist propaganda that Mussolini had sent to all Italian newspapers throughout the world.
Behind the façade of those glowing propagandistic press releases, Mussolini was taking a massive toll on Italian society, economically, culturally, and morally. (See Francesco Filippi, Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good: The Spread of Historical Amnesia.) In 1936 Mussolini would sign the Rome-Berlin Axis. Disaster was imminent. Mussolini’s propaganda was intended to unify Italian colonies everywhere in the world with his regime in Italy.
Among influential Italians in California at the time who were influenced by Mussolini was novelist, journalist, and editor, Paolo Pallavicini. He is featured in the 1939 edition of Italian American Who’s Who, where we learn that he was born in Milan, immigrated to New York where he wrote for Il Progresso, before he traveled to San Francisco and becoming managing editor of the profascist L’Italia. There is some evidence that he was responsible for organizing a pro-Mussolini group in San Francisco (see Rando). Otherwise, little else is known about his life.
While selections of his work have appeared in some Italian American anthologies, (Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration: 1880-1943), few have read his works, including his California novels, which have not been translated from the Italian and have been out of print for decades.
In one of his novels, La Carezza Divina (1939) we have a window into his commitment to Italian fascism. Set in San Francisco, California’s Central Valley, Mexico, and Italy, La Carezza Divina reveals not only Pallavicini’s fawning loyalty to Mussolini, but also his unpardonable anti-Semitism. He published his novel two years after the Rome-Berlin Axis agreement and a year after Mussolini passed his anti-Semitic Racial Laws, dispossessing Jews of their rightful place in Italian society.
Cover of Pallavicini’s La Carezza Divina (Sonzogno, 1939). Source: Queens College Archives; Periconi Collection
Pallavicini’s 573-page novel has far too many subplots to describe here. To advance the novel’s fascist agenda, characters conveniently appear and disappear. The main action of the novel focuses on Italian American Anna Valdesi who works for wealthy immigrant Italian farmer, Giorgio Albani. Albani owns a vast farming empire in an imaginary California landscape that stretches from somewhere south of San Francisco to the Mexican border. In Pallavicini’s typical stylistic ploy, early in the novel Albani is characterized as a benevolent man who is kind to his poor workers and is generously aiding Anna and her bankrupt family.
In another stylistic ruse, to obtain his readers’ sympathy for his heroine and to convince the reader of her populist roots, Anna is portrayed early in the novel as a strong-willed woman who is on the side of the poor. In one incident, at gun point she rescues one of Albani’s unfortunate tenant farmers and his family from eviction from their home by land developers who are attempting to build a damn on Albani’s property. This is an allusion to William Mulholland and his wealthy investors who before World War I hijacked Owens Valley water rights from unsuspecting Owens Valley farmers to deliver the water to the San Fernando Valley where they had previously purchased large tracks of land.
Anna is also a singer, performing in clubs from San Francisco to Mexico and finally Italy, where she becomes nationally famous. As a beautiful, talented woman, Anna has many admirers, most important of all, the wealthy Italian American Robert Lorenz, a San Francisco stock broker who has Anglicized his last name to facilitate his social and economic success. Pallavicini portrays Robert as a crass, money-oriented, assimilated Italian American who has forsaken his Italian heritage in pursuit of material gain. In one of the novel’s many subplots, Pallavicini spares a few lines to express his disdain for those glamorous, superficial Hollywood types, committed to their selfish pursuit of fame and fortune in the movie industry. They and other Americans, Robert included, are contrasted later in the novel with the soulful dedication of youthful fascists who unselfishly dedicate their lives to the love of La Patria and to a subservient identification with the equally vague term, Italianità, both popular fascist terms at the time. Whatever Italianità meant to the fascist mentality at the time, today we might define it as a trope designed to exclude the “other” in society, whether LGBTQ, immigrants, or Jews.
Upon first meeting Anna, Robert falls in love with her and tries to persuade her to marry him, promising her an affluent, comfortable life. However, Anna rejects him, but for mysterious reasons. She speaks to Robert about a puzzling kind of love, which the materialistic, Americanized Robert, estranged from his Italian roots, cannot understand.
When Anna travels to Italy, she becomes famous. At this point, Pallavicini shows his hand. While in Italy, Anna finally reveals her commitment to fascism and her admiration for Il Duce and his fascist ideology. Anna’s celebrity comes to the attention of Il Duce, who invites her to sing at his residence, the Villa Torlonia, where he accompanies her on the violin.
Conveniently, Robert appears in Italy and continues to implore Anna to marry him, whom she repeatedly rejects for reasons that soon become clear. Anna explains to Robert that he has forsaken his noble Italian identity, that Italianità, and has committed himself to a crass American materialism. Therefore, he cannot possibly ever comprehend her meaning of “love,” the love of Mussolini’s La Patria. Anna attempts to explain to the uncomprehending Robert the idealism intoned by a group of fascist youth parading in the streets below her residence where they meet. The young men’s singing expresses their commitment to La Patria, their loyalty to Mussolini’s regime.
In another of Pallavicini’s convenient plot twists, Georgio Albani suddenly arrives in Italy. The otherwise unassuming farmer, like Anna, suddenly reveals his commitment to fascist ideology. He takes the perplexed Robert on a tour of Northern Italy to introduce him to his lost Italian heritage, seen through the delusional, fascist lens of an idealized Roman and Renaissance Italian culture.
In his attempts to restore Augustus’ tomb in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore in Rome, which his fall interrupted, in his self-righteousness Mussolini purportedly vowed to replace Augustus’ statue that once stood on the top of the mausoleum with his own. He destroyed an entire neighborhood surrounding the piazza, and constructed on two sides of the ancient tomb two new architectural facades. On the north side, the facade includes mythological images and fanciful depictions of a devoted Italian working class and on another a frieze of an idealized agricultural Roman past. Albani is, after all, a farmer.
The final outcome of Robert’s fascist indoctrination comes when he and Albani finally arrive in the Piazza Venezia below the Palazzo Venezia’s balcony from which Il Duce staged his bombastic orations to his adoring supporters. Mussolini had also destroyed the historic neighborhood in the piazza to create a space for self-aggrandizing parades and speeches. Together the two men look up at the infamous balcony from which, as Albani explains to Robert, Il Duce expressed his plan for the “new Italy.” The enlightened Italian American Robert finally understands: he is converted to that love of La Patria and embraces his recovered Italianità. He is ready for a renewed relationship with Anna.
But there is a deplorable subplot in the novel that further indicts Pallavicini’s senseless support of Mussolini. Early in the narrative two mysterious Russian women, Baronessa Raisa Kutroff and her daughter, Sonia, appear in San Francisco society. In another of his stylistic deceptions, Pallavicini initially depicts them as Russian refugees, enemies of the Bolshevik government. Throughout most the novel, inexplicably, Sonia works clandestinely to undermine Robert’s efforts to convince Anna to marry him. With that same stylistic misdirection, Pallavicini does not clarify Sonia’s motives.
Suddenly, Pallavicini discloses Sonia’s real identity. She is not an enemy of the Bolshevik government, but she is, in fact, a Bolshevik spy. Her role in the novel is Pallavicini’s clumsy allusion to Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed in which the Spanish tyrant, Don Rodrigo, criminalizes Renzo who must take flight and is unable to marry Lucia. Manzoni’s novel is a demand for the overthrow of the Austrian occupation of Italy at the time and an appeal for Italian unification. Sonia is the equivalent of Manzoni’s tyrant, Don Rodrigo. As a Bolshevik, she is standing in the way of Mussolini’s best efforts to unify Italy and all its colonies in America under the fascist banner.
Before World War II, Bolshevism was a widely-used anti-Semitic slur. Racists called immigrant Jews in America Bolsheviks and accused them of attempting to undermine American capitalism and democracy. Ole Hanson, the founder of the city of San Clemente in California and a Norwegian immigrant, wrote an anti-Semitic work entitled Bolshevism versus Americanism (1919) in which he repeats all the degrading stereotypes of Jews at the time. In Edgar Rice’s play, Street Scene (1929), set in a New York’s West Side immigrant neighborhood, one of his characters hurls the slur “Bolshevik” at a Jewish man sitting in the window of the immigrant-filled tenement.
By the time he finished his novel, Pallavicini must have been aware of Mussolini’s anti-Semitism and the passage of the regime’s Racial Laws. With the perfidious Sonia as his anti-Semitic trope, in his delusional and conspiratorial imagination, Pallavicini believed that Jews were undermining Il Duce’s attempt to establish a unified fascist empire. He must have known as well that Mussolini was imprisoning intellectuals and his political enemies, such as Antonio Gramsci, and exiling artists and writers to remote villages, Carlo Levi notable among them.
Having fulfilled Pallavicini’s anti-Semitic agenda in the novel, Sonia conveniently disappears from the plot. Robert’s re-education under Albani’s tutelage is complete. In the end, Robert and Anna are finally united under the fascist banner, and they will one day be married. In Pallavicini’s fascist imagination, Italian colonies in America will also be united with Il Duce’s La Patria. Like Robert’s, their sense of Italianità will be restored, including, presumably, their exclusion of Jews from society.
La Carezza may seem like an historical artifact. But it is a reminder of what can in fact go wrong in society. The resurgence of anti-Semitism and its political component, fascism, in both Italy and North America in 2024 are troubling signs of the nascent roots of anti-Semitism and fascism in western culture.
As a remembrance of anti-Semitism, in the wake of the war, Italy imbedded those bronze “stolperstein” in the sidewalks before doorways that display the names and dates of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. As the consequence of the anti-Semitism that Pallavicini and others like him supported and espoused, with Mussolini’s collapse and the German occupation of Italy, the Germans arrested and sent more than eight thousand Italian Jews north to die in concentration camps. Primo Levi, a survivor, was among those Jews and partisans sent to die in the German camps.
Each year Italy celebrates Liberation Day on April 25 with public rallies and with a plethora of articles in the national newspapers that revisit the history of Italian fascism in order to rekindle awareness in Italians of the devastating effects that nazifascism had on Italian society. The newspaper articles warn Italians not to be distracted by social media trivia and internet false news. They warn Italians, especially the youth, not to allow the internet, as the radio once did, to make “fools of us all.”
Ken Scambray’s most recent book is Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870-1940 (University of Nevada Press). A version of this articles appeared in L’Italo-Americano, April 18, 2024.
