Mussolini's Ghost:
Mia Fuller examines Italian fascism through the eyes of those who grew up inside its walls

After spending an enormous amount of time studying the architecture and urban design of 1930s-era Italian towns in colonial Africa, professor of Italian studies Mia Fuller decided she had had enough of buildings and city plans. She wanted to add some people to her research on fascist-built places.

While Italian settlers left or were expelled from colonial cities in places like Libya and Ethiopia following those countries' independence, the descendents of Fascist-era settlers still reside in similar towns in Italy itself.

Propaganda and the fascist ideal: Benito harvests wheat, while wearing his motorcycle goggles

"These places are really amazing. They're fun to go to. They're weird," Fuller explains. "There are pizzerias with Mussolini's portraits and busts. There's a restaurant called Empire."

During the Fascist era, Italy sought to recreate the idea of the Italian town, both at home and in the colonies. Ostensibly intended to resettle farmers or workers from economically depressed regions on underutilized land (or in the colonies), these towns sometimes functioned as dumping grounds for politically difficult Italians.

"There was this idea of social reform, but there are people who actually felt it as a moral issue," Fuller says. "Redeeming the Italian citizen. That's a big image, redemption." The Fascists made a big deal of these new towns, especially five farming hamlets carved from swampland south of Rome.

"They were an enormous public relations success," Fuller says of the propaganda campaign devised to promote the towns. "The United States thought they were great. A lot of countries liked fascism until World War II. In a way, this was the thing that made the fascist vision look better than anything else."

Mussolini looks over city plans for a new town

Italy built at least 13 new towns in this new model of urban design, and about 60 small hamlets located in agricultural areas. Some of these new creations were mining and industrial towns, but the majority were for farmers.

With her book on towns in the Italian colonies forthcoming, Fuller will spend the summer in Italy conducting fieldwork for her next project. She plans to continue work on the project during the fall semester while on leave from teaching. In contrast to the arduous task of digging around in libraries for decades-old architectural drawings and city plans, she expects the fieldwork to be much easier.

"This is a project that will practically do itself in terms of the research," Fuller says. "I'm going to these places where people are eager to talk. You can't shut them up."

"In most of these places, the people are descended from the settlers who came in the 30s," she explains. "Sometimes the original settlers are still alive. There's an enormous amount of personal, collective, and family memory."

A is for archictecture, M is for Mussolini -- an alphabetically inclined building in one of Italy's fascist-era cities

Even more surprising, many of the residents follow the scholarship written about their towns. Some even contribute to it. Public debates are spirited and frequent, for example, whether or not to construct an unfinished tower on a building shaped like and M (for Mussolini, naturally) in one town.

"They call each other, 'You fascist, you communist'," she says. "So there is a lot of humor in it too."

While scholars have delved into the architecture and philosophy of urban design of some of these towns -- akin to what Fuller did for colonial towns in Africa -- there's one area where almost all of the scholarship has fallen short.

"Nobody ever talked to the people in these towns," she says. "It was always about the place and the agriculture and the buildings, the economy, the success." Other Italians even told the Berkeley professor not to visit such obvious remnants of a regrettable past.

For Fuller, much of the intrigue lies at the intersection of population and place. While fasces -- the emblems of fascism -- adorn buildings, the population is both nostalgic of its ideological past and yet dismissive of its past ideology.

"They will say, 'Thanks to Mussolini, my grandparents were able to come here. Here's my land, my house, my dog'," Fuller says. "And on the other hand, they will say, 'Fascism sucks'."

A shirtless Mussolini gives a speech to Italian settlers, as women swoon on his right

The new towns of 1930s Italy also created their own folklore, something Fuller thinks will shed light on the current-day residents' view of their place in history. The five towns south of Rome were particular favorites of Mussolini. He would sometimes ride down on his motorcycle to visit. Local legend has it that if you go to a certain place on the highway, you can still hear him ride by on his Moto Guzzi.

"He still haunts them, whether or not you believe that literally," Fuller says.

For Fuller, the challenge comes in understanding how these particular Italians view a political past that most Italians are often reluctant to talk about. "There's the amnesia that exists about Italian colonialism, that also applies to Italian fascism," Fuller says. "I think of the towns as a great window onto that, and they've been ignored."

Unearthing dirty laundry that some Italians would prefer to forget, Fuller is prepared for a less than enthusiastic reception. Non-Italian scholars doing research on sensitive issues sometimes take a bit of a public beating.

"There is a kind of pattern, whereby not necessarily American scholars, but Americans are the ones I know about, working on touchy Italian issues in the modern period, tend to get criticized a little extra severely," she says. "Primarily the reaction tends to be dismissal -- it's another one of these foolish foreigners, making up stories."

The risk of criticism doesn't dissuade Fuller, who's looking forward to diving into an sea of inquiry where some Italian scholars may fear to swim.

"So it still comes down to, why doesn't anybody talk to these people?" Fuller asks. "At the rate they talk, when I go there, it might take me three weeks to collect the material for the book." -- Todd Dayton