Vittoria – Corteo per il centenario della vittoria italiana
(Victory – Parade for the Centenary of the Italian Victory)
This poster was produced by CasaPound Italia (House of [Ezra] Pound Italy, CPI) to commemorate the centennial of Italy's "victory" in World War I (WWI). At its center stands a winged Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, who appears on the façades of several important structures in Rome including the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument (AKA the Altar of the Fatherland) and the Palace of Justice. The Roman goddess is seen riding in a quadriga, a chariot drawn by four horses typical of ancient Rome. Victoria holds aloft a laurel wreath, a symbol of triumph (see also Fig. 1).
The image of this Roman goddess is superimposed upon a photograph of the Sacrario Militare di Redipuglia (Redipuglia War Memorial). Located on the border between Italy and Slovenia, the Redipuglia War Memorial is the largest and most ideologically significant shrine to the estimated 500,000 Italian soldiers who fought in WWI. Inaugurated by Benito Mussolini in 1938, the memorial served as an important platform for the dictatorship's collective memory politics regarding both Italy's "sacrifices" in the Great War between 1915 and 1918 and the association between WWI and the emergence of Fascism in 1919. The Redipuglia War Memorial is notable for its scale and the repetition of the word "Presente!" (Present!) across the edge of the twenty-two steps that house the remains of nearly 100,000 Italian soldiers. The word "Present!" was deployed consistently in interwar Italy's various commemoration ceremonies to symbolize the imagined eternality and, therefore, enduring presence of Italian patriots and fascists (Fig. 2). During these interwar commemorative ceremonies, leaders would shout the names of fallen Italian soldiers, which would be met with a cry of "Presente!" along with synchronized Roman salutes.
The public march and rally being promoted by this poster took place in Trieste's Piazza Oberdan on November 3, 2018 (Figs. 3, 4, and 5). Speaking to attendees in the language of national sacrifice, Simone Di Stefano, CPI's National Secretary, described Italy's war dead as having "fought like lions in the Great War, writing the borders of this nation of ours in blood" (Giraldi 2018) (See also Fig. 6). Following the demonstration, CPI supporters attended a neo-fascist rock 'n roll concert in Ronchi dei Legionari, a small comune around thirty kilometers northwest of Trieste and the point from which the ultra-nationalist poet-turned-WWI "hero," Gabriele d'Annunzio, and his followers set off to occupy the city of Fiume following Italy's so-called "mutilated victory" in 1919.
That same day, an anti-fascist demonstration also took place in Trieste, which included a speech from Lidia Menapace, a ninety-four-year-old former Italian Partisan from World War II (Minnucci 2018).
This is one of many initiatives CPI has organized to celebrate Italy's experience in WWI as glorious and triumphant, much like many interwar Italian fascists before them. Indeed, remarking on what he imagined would be the sociopolitical consequences for the Great War, Mussolini commented in 1917 that "[t]he disabled servicemen of today are the vanguard of the great army that will return tomorrow." This "enormous mass of men," Mussolini continued, remarking on this so-called "aristocracy of the trenches," "will shake society's equilibrium" by expelling "[t]he old parties, the old men, who carry on with the exploitation of Italy's political life" (Mussolini 1917: 1).
For an additional example of the mythologization of Italy's WWI experience and the commemoration of Italy's fallen soldiers as "heroes," see the Heroes – Twenty-Two Stories from the Great War poster in the CPI collection (see also Fig. 7).
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