ROME.

UNIFICATION TO WORLD WAR I
WORLD WAR I
FASCIST ROME
POSTWAR ROME
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ROME
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rome's history in the twentieth century is tied to its unique legacy as the seat of ancient Rome and the center of western, Catholic Christianity. This dual legacy continues to shape the "third Rome"—that of the capital of modern Italy.

UNIFICATION TO WORLD WAR I

Following the disintegration of the Roman Empire, Italy was divided politically for centuries. Only in 1861 did Italy achieve political unification. Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia, became Italy's first king (r. 1861–1878). Rome, the desired capital, remained under papal rule, protected by French troops. When the French withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War, Italian troops stormed into Rome on 20 September 1870. Rome became Italy's capital despite the protests of Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–1878), who refused to recognize the Italian state.

Rome rapidly grew in size and population. Between 1871 and 1911 the population increased from 212,000 to 518,000. The government constructed new public buildings, and developers built thousands of new dwelling units for residents of all classes. The city lacked heavy industry, relying principally on its role as the home of the national bureaucracy. Government employment and the building industry formed the economic foundation of the city.

Large new government buildings, such as the Palace of Justice, intentionally declared Rome's new political role in ways that both rivaled and defied the papacy. The first Protestant churches appeared soon after unification, as did monuments to Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), the national hero of unification, and to the philosopher Giordano Bruno, executed for heresy in 1600. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of unification in 1911, the government unveiled the huge, white marble monument of King Victor Emmanuel II on the Piazza Venezia, in the heart of the city.

WORLD WAR I

When Europe went to war in 1914, Italy remained neutral, but a movement began favoring Italian intervention. One of the interventionist leaders was Benito Mussolini, a radical socialist and editor of the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti! The Socialist Party opposed the war and so expelled Mussolini from the party and the paper. The interventionist cause prevailed. Italy entered the war in May 1915 as an ally of Britain, France, and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The Italian army engaged the Austrians in the mountainous border area in northeast Italy. Although the Italian army suffered a devastating defeat at Caporetto in 1917, it recovered sufficiently to defeat the Austrians by November 1918 at the end of the war. Italy received the South Tyrol on the Italian side of the Alps, even though the population was overwhelmingly German-speaking.

Immediately after the war Italy experienced economic, social, and political distress. Nationalists believed Italy had not received sufficient new territory from the dismembered Austrian Empire and dubbed the peace agreements the "mutilated victory." Thousands of returning veterans could not find work. Workers went on strikes and occupied factories. Peasants tried to seize land. Some, inspired by the Russian example, advocated revolution.

In March 1919 Mussolini and a few hundred followers founded the Fascist movement. By the next year armed Fascist squads were using violence to attack Socialists and to defend rural property owners. The Fascists claimed that they were trying to restore law and order while preventing a Bolshevik-style revolution. The central government in Rome seemed weak and indecisive. Fascist squads took over a number of provincial towns and then threatened to march on Rome in October 1922. King Victor Emmanuel III (r. 1900–1946) decided against using the army to stop the Fascists and on 29 October 1922 asked Mussolini to become prime minister as head of a coalition government.

FASCIST ROME

Rome now became Mussolini's Rome, the heart and center of the so-called Fascist revolution. Mussolini moved his office to the Palazzo Venezia in the center of the historic city and adjacent to the Victor Emmanuel monument, which now included the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Mussolini appeared on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to deliver his major speeches to thousands of people crowding the Piazza Venezia. He presided over frequent special ceremonies on the steps of the Victor Emmanuel monument. For twenty years the Rome of emperors, popes, and prime ministers became Mussolini's Fascist Rome.

Mussolini established a new governorship to administer the city. It was through this Governatorato that he set about rebuilding the city. As duce (leader), he declared that the Rome of the twentieth century had to confront the problems of "necessity and grandeur." The former constituted the needs of a modern city: housing, sanitation, streets, communications, and social services. The latter were the monumental aspects of Fascist Rome that had to be worthy of existing side by side with the monuments of ancient and Christian Rome such as the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, the Circus Maximus, and St. Peter's Basilica. The new Fascist Italy would define itself as the modern expression of romanità (Roman spirit), evoking ancient Roman greatness.

The Fascist regime accelerated the growth of Rome as the bureaucratic center of the national government. It built large new ministries for the navy, the air force, and the corporations, which were to bring about Italy's political and economic reorganization. The prospects of government employment or work in the building trades thus continued to draw thousands of Italians to Rome during the Fascist period. Between 1922 and 1941 the population doubled from 600,000 to 1.2 million.

The policy of rebuilding Rome for necessity and grandeur meant that the city became a vast construction site for twenty years. Mussolini regularly appeared at building projects to have his picture taken with workers and again on inaugural days when work was completed. The two most common dates for such events were 28 October and 21 April, the dates commemorating the Fascist March on Rome and the traditional date of Rome's birthday, respectively.

Mussolini declared that the transformation of Rome would clear away slums, provide clean new housing, improve traffic, and put people to work. The goal of increasing employment during the Great Depression through public works was not unique to Italy, as America's New Deal demonstrated, but in Rome's case it formed an integral part of Mussolini's hope to create a new Fascist society under his infallible leadership. As one slogan put it, "Mussolini is always right!"

Fascism sought to create a series of "cities" within Rome. It began with the historic core city that lay within the wall built during the reign of the Emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275). A series of projects transformed the area from the Piazza Venezia and the Victor Emmanuel monument to the Colosseum, on one side, and to the Circus Maximus on the other. The neighborhood between the monument and the Colosseum was demolished and a broad new street, the Via dell'Impero (Empire Street), opened on 28 October 1932 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. It ran alongside the main Roman Forum and uncovered portions of the forums of Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Nerva.

The neighborhood on the other side of the Victor Emmanuel monument also disappeared to allow the construction of a wide street running to the Circus Maximus. This Via del Mare (Street to the Sea) would connect with streets built a few years later running out to the seaside town of Ostia, site of ancient Rome's port. The Circus Maximus itself was cleared of ramshackle buildings in 1934. This huge space, once the site of ancient Rome's chariot races, provided space for a series of large exhibitions in the 1930s, showcasing the achievements of Fascism.

The transformed historic center of Rome became the route for many parades and rallies staged by the regime. When Adolf Hitler visited Rome in 1938, he stood with Mussolini and the king on the reviewing stand next to the Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum as the long parade passed by and turned onto the Via dell'Impero.

Mussolini set out in the late 1920s to solve the "Roman Question," the unresolved tension between the Italian state and the Roman papacy. Negotiations led to the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which established a religious "city" within Rome. The Fascist government made a financial settlement with the church, recognized Vatican City as a sovereign state, and acknowledged the special place of the Catholic Church in Italy. Pope Pius XI (r. 1922–1939) thus gained an official status for the papacy and the church, while Mussolini received national and international acclaim for this political and diplomatic breakthrough. Several years later the regime demolished the neighborhood in front of St. Peter's to construct yet another wide new avenue, the Via della Conciliazione (Street of Reconciliation). Work was completed after World War II in time for the papal holy year of 1950.

The Fascist regime promised to produce a new generation of Italians to carry out the Fascist revolution, conceived as a hypernationalism, uniting Italians as never before and making Italy a major European and imperial power. Great emphasis was placed on youth groups, physical training, sports, and preparation for military service. Mussolini launched a project to create a major sports "city" for the leading boys' youth group, the Balilla. The Foro Mussolini, today the Foro Italico, arose on an open area facing the Tiber River north of the Vatican. It included two sports stadiums, an indoor swimming pool, tennis facilities, a building dedicated to fencing, and a youth hostel. The Stadium of Marbles, named for the athletic male figures surrounding it, seated twenty thousand and was used for athletic and military demonstrations and rallies.

To provide higher education for the new Fascist Italy, the regime built a "university city," opened in 1935. For the first time the University of Rome had a centralized campus with buildings designed by a group of Italy's leading architects.

The largest building project of the regime was a new "city" that arose several miles south of the historic center. It was scheduled to be the site of a Universal Exposition of Rome (Esposizione Universale di Roma, or EUR) in 1942 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome. World War II caused the cancellation of the exposition, and building came to a halt. Development of the EUR section resumed in the 1950s and became part of the southwestern expansion of the city in the area of the new international airport, Leonardo da Vinci.

The most dramatic project Mussolini sponsored was the draining of the Pontine Marshes south of EUR and the city center. The newly acquired land provided farms for several thousand immigrants from northern Italy and the building of five new cities: Littoria (now Latina), Sabaudia, Pontinia, Aprilia, and Pomezia. The concept of land reclamation, bonifica in Italian, became a metaphor used by the regime to champion its moral and political redemption of the nation. This area also underwent significant growth after World War II.

Italy's conquest of Ethiopia in 1936 drew the condemnation of the League of Nations, but Hitler's Germany gave Italy diplomatic support. Consequently, Mussolini spoke of an emerging Rome-Berlin "Axis," and the two fascist powers gave military support to General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war from 1936 to 1939. In May 1939 Italy and Germany signed the Pact of Steel. Nevertheless, when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Italy remained neutral.

In May 1940 German forces overran the Netherlands and Belgium and swept into France. By June it was clear that a German victory was inevitable. Mussolini made the fateful decision to enter the war and invade France. On 10 June 1940, he appeared on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to announce Italy's declaration of war.

Italian armed forces did poorly in the ensuing conflict. By mid-1943 an Italian army of 250,000 had been destroyed in the Soviet Union, and German and Italian forces surrendered to the Allies in North Africa. The Allies then conquered Sicily and prepared to invade mainland Italy. The first bombing raids on Rome inflicted considerable damage east of the city center in the area of the Basilica of San Lorenzo and the new university campus. These military reverses led to the dismissal of Mussolini by the king on the morning of 25 July 1943, following an all-night meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, which had taken a vote of no confidence in Mussolini.

The announcement of Mussolini's dismissal brought rejoicing in the streets of Rome. Italians believed that the war was over for them. The new Italian government negotiated an armistice with the Allies that it announced on 8 September, but the Germans quickly rushed in armed forces to confront the Allied troops that had invaded southern Italy. The Germans rescued Mussolini and set up a puppet Fascist government in northern Italy.

The Roman armed Resistance emerged in September 1943 and continued until the liberation of Rome by Allied troops on 4 June 1944. The first clashes took place on the 8th, 9th, and 10th of September when civilians joined Italian army units to fight German troops entering the city through the Aurelian Wall at the Gate of St. Paul. The overwhelming strength of the Germans, however, forced the Resistance underground.

The German occupation brought many hardships to Romans. In October 1943 the Gestapo entered the ghetto, rounded up over 1,000 Jews, and immediately shipped them to Auschwitz. Food was scarce, Nazi and Fascist army and police units combed the city, a curfew was imposed, and suspected Resistance members or sympathizers were jailed and tortured.

On 23 March 1944, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Fascist movement, Resistance members set off a bomb in the heart of Rome that killed thirty-three members of a German police battalion. In retaliation, 335 Roman men and boys were executed south of the center in the Ardeatine Caves. A monument to these victims opened on the site in 1951.

Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film, Rome, Open City, commemorated the sufferings of the Romans during the Nazi occupation through the story of the collaboration of a Communist Party Resistance member and a Catholic priest. Rome, the center of Mussolini's Fascist Italy, now became the symbol of the anti-Fascist collaboration of Italians of all political persuasions that would form the foundation for a postwar society.

POSTWAR ROME

Italians voted in a national referendum in 1946 to abolish the monarchy. A new constitution establishing the Republic of Italy went into effect on 1 January 1948. The constitution provided a weak executive, a reaction to Mussolini's dictatorship, and a multiparty system based on proportional voting. The Christian Democratic Party became the largest vote getter, followed by the Communists, the Socialists, the Social Democrats, the Republicans, the Liberals, and the neofascist Italian Social Movement. On both the national and municipal levels, coalition governments were required as no one party had an absolute majority.

Rome abolished the Fascist Governatorato and restored a government with a mayor and a city council. Initially, the Christian Democrats and the Communists received the largest portion of votes, about 33 percent each, with the remaining one-third shared by half a dozen smaller parties. As with the national government, it took coalitions to elect a mayor and run the city government. Throughout the period of the Cold War (1945–1989), the Christian Democrats managed to form national governments that excluded the Communists, but that was not the case in Rome. Postwar mayors came from the Christian Democratic, Communist, and Socialist Parties. The first Communist mayor took office in 1976, and Communists filled the office until 1985.

The population continued to grow after the war, increasing from 1,650,000 in 1951 to a peak of 2,850,000 in 1981 before decreasing to 2,650,000 by 1997. The city also grew in area. The municipal government adopted a new master plan in 1962 to replace the Fascist one of 1931. The city faced a number of issues related to housing, transportation, social services, and developing areas. After the war large numbers of Italians, mostly from the poorer south, flooded Rome looking for jobs. Most of these poor immigrants lived in hastily built or illegal housing that sprang up on the periphery of the historic center. The beginnings of economic prosperity, Italy's so-called economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, along with Rome's master plan of 1962, brought some order to the city's growth and a general improvement in conditions.

Some political division marked the planning for the city's growth. The Left favored development to the east, whereas conservatives backed growth to the south. The Fascist origins of EUR lay behind the debate, and various compromises were reached that allowed growth in all directions. EUR did provide land for government and business buildings, including Rome's first skyscrapers. Mussolini's new cities to the south also attracted new business that fed the growth of Rome in that direction.

The historic center saw little population growth and experienced some decline by the end of the century. Neighborhoods once considered working class such as Trastevere and Testaccio underwent a measure of gentrification. Public housing grew in areas outside the center that continued a pattern established by Mussolini's regime. When the Fascists demolished neighborhoods in the 1930s, they moved the displaced Romans to inexpensive public housing well beyond the center, which allowed the government to maintain more firm control of its working-class population. Postwar growth followed a similar pattern, with major housing developments in the southern and southeastern sectors of the city.

Postwar Rome continued the practice of extending public park space in once aristocratic properties such as the Villa Ada, the Villa Doria Pamphili, and the Villa Borghese, the latter of which includes several museums and Rome's zoo. The Fascist regime had also created public spaces in the historic center such as the Circus Maximus; the Cestio Park, renamed for the Resistance after the war; the Park of Trajan, adjacent to the Colosseum; and the Park of Hadrian, surrounding the Castel Sant'Angelo. The large park on the Janiculum Hill overlooks the Trastevere neighborhood and includes the city's botanical gardens.

By the 1980s Rome had several modern supermarkets, but Romans continued to do most of their food shopping in open and covered markets, filled with stalls, and in small shops specializing in one product: fruit, vegetables, fish, cheese, meat. Retail clothing stores include the luxury, high-fashion shops below the Spanish Steps, several department stores, specialty shops, and open-air stalls selling less expensive clothing.

In the last twenty-five years of the century, Rome attracted large numbers of foreign immigrants. Initially, Filipinos and East, West, and North Africans were most conspicuous. Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, large numbers of eastern Europeans joined the migration to Rome, and at the turn of the twenty-first century yet others came from South Asia and Latin America. Italy's declining birthrate increased the demand for workers to fill low-wage jobs. The new immigrants typically worked as domestics, as street vendors, and in other low-paying jobs unattractive to native Romans. About 20 percent of the newcomers were Muslims, leading to the construction of Rome's first mosque in 1995.

Rome is no longer an isolated city surrounded by empty countryside as it was in the early twentieth century. The enlarged city of the early twenty-first century is part of a metropolitan area that extends east to the Leonardo da Vinci Airport and Ostia on the sea and southeast to EUR and toward the Fascist new towns in the province of Latina. EUR contains a collection of government buildings, banking and business skyscrapers, museums, sports facilities, and upper-middle-class residential dwellings that make it second only to the historic core as an urban center. Overall, the contrast between a prosperous city center and a poor periphery of workers and immigrants has faded. Rome has become a more integrated city. The improved economy has led to better housing and social services and more mixing of social groups in many neighborhoods.

Economic prosperity made it possible for middle- and working-class Italians to buy automobiles. Rome's 50,000 cars after the war grew to over 800,000 by the mid-1970s and to 1.6 million by 2000. Traffic jammed central Rome's streets, and every piazza and curbside became a parking lot. The construction of a ring road linked to the major highways helped with the flow in and out of the city. Certain areas of the historic center were declared off-limits to private automobiles. The bus system continued to provide reasonably cheap and efficient service throughout the city, but it often ran large deficits. The subway system, begun by the Fascists, opened its first line between the main train station and EUR in 1955. This Line B has since been expanded and joined by a Line A that intersects at the main train station. Traffic congestion also brings stress to historic monuments through street vibration and air pollution.

Italy experienced a wave of domestic terrorism in the 1970s fueled by both left- and right-wing extremists. Government officials were often the targets of assassins' bullets. In 1978 the Red Brigades abducted the Christian Democratic leader and former prime minister, Aldo Moro. The government refused to negotiate with the abductors. On 9 May 1978 Moro's body was found in the trunk of a car in downtown Rome, midway between the party headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Communists. Public revulsion at the Moro murder and the subsequent capture of leading terrorists led to the end of this period of the "years of lead" by the mid-1980s.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ROME

By the early 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the system known as partitocrazia (rule of the parties), after the revelation of the long-standing bribes that funded the major political parties, a new set of political parties and coalitions emerged on the national level. Nevertheless, Rome continued as the political center of Italy. The political importance of Rome reinforced its role as a center for lobbyists, insurance, banking, retail and wholesale business, the media, and communications. Rome also became the national center for newer enterprises such as computer technology and pharmaceutical companies.

Rome also serves as a major cultural center for Italy. The city was both the location and the subject of many postwar films, such as Roberto Rosellini's Rome, Open City (1945); Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thief (1948) and Umberto D. (1952); Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (1960) and Roma (1972); and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962). The Fascist-built Cinecittà (Cinema City) provided facilities for film and television productions. Late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Rome has also been a magnet for writers. Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante have all written in and about Rome. Many of Italy's leading literary journals are based in Rome, as is its most prestigious annual literary award, the Strega Prize. Rome maintains a flourishing art community with its geographical center on the Via Margutta near the Spanish Steps.

Since 1300 the popes have declared holy years every twenty-five years that attract pilgrims from all over the world. Pius XII held one in 1950 and Paul VI in 1975. The Second Vatican Council, convened by John XXIII in 1962, also reinforced the role and image of Rome as the center of Roman Catholicism. John Paul II's Holy Year and Jubilee of 2000 was eagerly embraced by Major Francesco Rutelli, a member of the Democratic Party of the Left, the successor to the Italian Communist Party. The year 2000 thus embodied both Rome's historical legacy and its role as a modern city.

The city received a facelift in the several years leading to the Jubilee. Scores of churches, buildings, and tourist sites were cleaned and restored. Streets and parking facilities were improved. Romans had to cope with the resulting disruption of traffic and the sight of scaffolding throughout the city. The funds came from the church, the national and municipal governments, and businesses. Rome had hosted the Summer Olympic Games in 1960 and the World Cup soccer matches in 1990, but the Jubilee surpassed both of these major events in size and scope. It underscored the significance of tourism in Rome's economy in attracting millions of additional visitors. As Rome entered a new century and a new millennium it proudly displayed itself as the expression of its unique legacy as the Rome of antiquity, the Rome of the papacy, and the Rome of the modern nation of Italy.

See alsoFascism; Italy; Mussolini, Benito.