About the Project
In September 2018, Dr. Brian J Griffith and his family moved from Santa Barbara, USA to Rome, Italy on a year-long Fulbright Study/Research Fellowship. Although they had temporarily relocated to the Eternal City so that he could complete his remaining dissertation research on winemaking in Fascist Italy (1922-45), Griffith's interests quickly expanded to contemporary street-level memory politics in Rome. Unbeknownst to him prior to relocating, Griffith and his family had signed a year-long contract for a condominium in one of the city's most active far-right neighborhoods: Balduina. Located approximately four kilometers north-west of Vatican City, Balduina – along with a handful of other nearby Roman neighborhoods – has long-since been closely associated with some of the country's most outspoken neo-fascist groups. Immediately upon arriving in Balduina, Griffith was visually assaulted with a mélange of far-right graffiti – including swastikas, Roman fasces, and tributes to the "Duce" (Figs. 1, 2, and 3) – as well as posters, handbills, and stickers affixed to the walls of buildings everywhere.
The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
In his 2017 monograph On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder encourages his readers to "[t]ake responsibility for the face of the world" and "[n]otice the swastikas and the other signs of hate." "Remove them yourself," he insists, "and set an example for others to do so." Reflecting on this wisdom, Griffith decided to confront the "signs of hate" that he found in his temporarily adopted Roman neighborhood. After observing for a few weeks, it occurred to him that these neo-fascist posters and other materials were, in fact, valuable historical sources on this period of the city's, and indeed Italy's, history, which were very likely to be forgotten and therefore left completely undiscovered by scholars and the general public if they were not preserved either physically and/or digitally. They could also tell us something important about the far right's use of its own history. This realization eventually led to an idea: Why not collect, or "harvest," these materials, photograph them, and showcase them in an Open Access digital archive?
Gathering physical copies of these materials was the priority. To collect them, Griffith adopted a somewhat primitive repertoire of make-shift tools: namely, a putty knife (for carefully negotiating the posters away from the walls, billboards, and other surfaces to which they had been affixed) and a retractable razor (for quick retrievals, whenever it was physically possible or circumstantially necessary to do so) (Fig. 4). Although a handful of the materials were "harvested" during the daytime, the majority were gathered at nighttime, when Griffith could take his time with slowly peeling the posters away from their applied surfaces without damaging them, and all-the-while not being observed by any curious, or critical, passersby. In total, Griffith "harvested" thirty-five posters, seven stickers, two handbills, and one banner, all of which are featured in this collection.
In recent years, Western democracies have, once again, come under assault from a variety of far-right movements, groups, militias, and political parties. Ranging from CasaPound Italia (House of [Ezra] Pound Italy), Chrysí Avgí (Golden Dawn), and Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) in Europe to Patriot Front, the Proud Boys, and the "Make America Great Again" movement in the United States, these groups – much like their 20th century counterparts in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere – have slowly chipped away at the foundations of their societies' commitments to the values and collective practices of liberal democracy. Under Giorgia Meloni's far-right Italian government (2022-), moreover, public demonstrations in honor of Italy's various neo-fascist "martyrs" have grown larger. One of these ceremonies, for instance, held in Milan in January 2024, witnessed over one thousand participants marching in military-style formation to the location where a young neo-fascist militant was killed by members of a far-left extra parliamentary organization in 1975.
Given these ominous developments, therefore, scholars of twentieth-century fascism, authoritarianism, and far-right populism have a profound duty to share their knowledge of these types of movements and organizations with the general public. One of the ways scholars can support their fellow citizens in resisting the insidious spread of fascistic ideas, values and language is by highlighting the strategies neo-fascist groups have used to normalize their oftentimes deeply undemocratic and inherently authoritarian, ideological viewpoints within the public sphere.
The old world is dying. The new one is slow to appear. And in this interregnum [chiaroscuro], monsters are born.
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
Named after Antonio Gramsci's trenchant observations of post-World War I Italy's infamous struggles with ultranationalism, political violence, and dictatorship, Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019 (WMAB) is intended as an Open Access resource for exploring the visual and spatial strategies deployed by contemporary Italy's neo-fascist community in the popularization of their illiberal worldviews within the country's streets and public squares. Although a handful of this collection's materials appeal to present-day social issues and political debates, the majority commemorate the histories of interwar and post-World War II Italian fascisms, including Benito Mussolini's twenty-year dictatorship and the so-called Years of Lead (1968-82), during which the country's far-right and far-left groups violently clashed in public spaces.
Viewers can navigate through this collection's materials via a number of different pathways. In the Groups section, users can find an alphabetical list of the neo-fascist organizations and political parties whose propaganda materials are represented in this collection. In the Items section, viewers are presented with the individual posters, stickers, handbills, and banners. The Themes section showcases the primary points of thematic confluence between the collection's materials, ranging from "Patriarchs," or the early neo-fascist leaders who laid the ideological foundations for today's Italian far-right community, to "Resistance," which highlights Rome's anti-fascist opposition via those groups' street-level memory politics. In the Tags section, users are provided with a handful of key topics which, in one way or another, are either textually or visually referenced by the collection's materials. For viewers interested in exploring the materials chronologically, the Timeline section displays the order in which the posters and other materials were "harvested" from Rome's streets and alleyways between October 2018 and July of the following year. And for users interested in examining the materials spatially, the interactive Map section compiles the various locations where the posters and other materials were gathered. Lastly, the Pedagogy section includes a handful of classroom-related resources, including lesson plans, films and documentaries, and a bibliography.
In highlighting these posters and other materials, co-curators Dr. Griffith and Dr. Amy King hope to make a modest contribution to the struggle against fascism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by illuminating the primary visual and spatial strategies deployed by far-right groups in contemporary Italy to push their illiberal politics of collective – and selective – memory into public space. In promoting a visual literacy of the Italian far right’s propaganda campaigns, Dr. Griffith and Dr. King hope to equip their viewers with the skill sets required for identifying, as well as successfully combatting, fascistic ideas, values, and agendas within their respective societies.
Thank you for taking the time to explore WMAB.
Dr. Brian J Griffith
California State University, Fresno (USA)
Dr. Amy King
University of Bristol (UK)
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