This essay appeared in The Public Historian (Volume 47, Issue 4), sponsored by the National Council on Public History and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this interregnum, monsters are born.” That is an English translation of a quotation by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci that inspired the Open Access digital archive, Where Monsters Are Born. A digitized collection of fascist street propaganda posted around Rome between 2018 and 2019, Where Monsters Are Born offers what it calls “a modest contribution to the struggle against neo-fascism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by illuminating the primary visual and spatial strategies deployed by far-right groups within Italy’s public sphere.” Created during the short-lived emergence of the far-right Lega party as coalition partners in the Italian government under Giuseppe Conte, the archive seems both timely and prescient. Given the rise of the Fratelli d’Italia, whose roots extend to the Roman fascist youth of the 1970s, this archival analysis of aesthetic and political geography enables a deep and broad analysis of the complex palimpsest of urban spaces in which the Italian far right has thrived in the heart of the “Eternal City.”
Read the rest at the website here.
Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019. Brian J. Griffith and Amy King, Co-editors
Alexander Reid Ross 