Difficult Heritage: Coming ‘to Terms’ with Sicily’s Fascist Past

Abstract

Against the backdrop of increasing social change, an urgency courses through contemporary life for weaving the past into the present. The process of folding past conditions into present ones is selective; it has to be, given the richly textured inheritance bestowed on each passing generation (Trouillot 1995). The result over the past century plus has been a gradual refining of practices and ways of talking about what came before, encompassed by the concept of 'cultural heritage.' Cultural heritage is variously invoked as something (some object, site, building, landscape, traditional practice) with historic connections that must be properly tended to, as well as the field of expertise that has developed around this care. Over time, or at critical moments provoked by shifting events, these practices and languages of heritage became incorporated into political and legal institutions with jurisdiction over local, regional (e.g., state), national, or international bodies of governance. National standards have traditionally been the most influential in institutionalizing how heritage is dealt with, but increasingly so too are international norms codified within an expanding oeuvre of global conventions, recommendations, lists, safeguards, management guidelines, and reports picked up as 'best practices.

After Wheat: Revitalizing Sicilian Agriculture through Heritage Tourism

“…Using these material remains to mobilize a counter‐narrative of agrobiodiversity through heritage foods is an appealing reuse of the vestiges of a difficult past. As I have argued elsewhere (Samuels ), creative reuse can be a very effective means to overcome the historical weight of ideologically loaded material or architectural remains (see also Burström and Gelderblom ; Macdonald , ).…”

“…Wheat iconography figured heavily in Fascist propaganda, from the iconic image of Mussolini participating in the wheat harvest in the New Town of Littoria, to images comparing the fasces , an ancient Roman symbol consisting of a bundle of rods encircling an ax that the Fascists appropriated as their emblem, with a bundle of wheat. Wheat imagery also appears at the borghi themselves: A plaque on the wall of the schoolhouse at Borgo Bonsignore depicts a book, a musket, a shovel, a Rationalist building, and a head of wheat (Samuels , 121). This is rich Fascist symbolism: The building evokes the borgo itself, the book and the gun refer to the slogan “ libro e moschetto, Fascista perfetto ” (“a book and a rifle make the perfect Fascist”), while the wheat and the shovel refer to the Fascist valorization of rurality and the Battle for Wheat.…”

Legacies of Fascism: architecture, heritage and memory in contemporary Italy

“…Many buildings were simply neglected; as for example, the Casa delle Armi, or fencing school, which is part of Rome’s Foro Mussolini (now Italico) (Figure 3). Neglect might have been calculated or deliberate, and might have embodied a wilful forgetting of the Fascist past (MacDonald 2006; 2009; Samuels 2015, 118). It could also have resulted from economic necessity and have been ideologically neutral.…”

“…There is no shared national narrative of Fascism and little consensus as to what it means for Italy today (Pavone 2000, 37; Fogu 2006, 149–150; Samuels 2015, 115). Divisions have been compounded, from the 1990s, by a tendency to revise history in a way that rehabilitates Mussolini’s regime (Tranfaglia 1996, 98–99; Corner 2002; 2005; Battini 2003, 1–8; Mammone 2006; Ventresca 2006, 195; see, for example, De Felice 1995).…”

“…In effect, the survival of physical traces contrasts with the absence of public memories. The architecture of Fascism is a ‘difficult heritage’ – not only because memories of the regime are painful and divisive, but also because Fascism is at odds with the values of today’s democracy (Macdonald 2009, 4; Samuels 2015, 111–114). Yet Fascist remains ‘are rarely understood in exclusively negative terms’, but rather elicit a variety of responses (Samuels 2015, 114).

Figure 1 Fasces and Fascist dating at the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome (author’s photograph, 2017)

Figure 2 Fasces at the National Library in Florence (author’s photograph, 2016)

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