Eroi – Ventidue storie dalla grande guerra
(Heroes – Twenty-Two Stories from the Great War)
This poster was produced by the neo-fascist accelerationist organization CasaPound Italia (House of [Ezra] Pound Italy, CPI) to publicize a November 16, 2018 roundtable discussion on the monograph Heroes: Twenty-Two Stories from the Great War (2018). In addition to the roundtable's date and time, along with the list of speakers, the poster features an illustration of a World War I Italian soldier, with his arms outstretched in a crucifixion-style posture. Drawing loosely upon Roman Catholic notions of individual "sacrifice" and collective "redemption," the illustration is intended to represent Italy's WWI casualties as patriotic "martyrs" for the Italian victory. CPI's logo – which features an "Arrowed Turtle," allegedly symbolizing knowledge, heritage, longevity, and the right to affordable housing – appears at the bottom right-hand side of the poster (2020).
According to the far-right publisher, Seaplane Publishing, the volume recounts the stories of twenty "heroes," one from each region of Italy (2021). The final two stories belong to a "hero" of the "unredeemed territories" along the Dalmatian Coast and an Italo-American soldier born to immigrant parents who only knew Italy through the stories his parents told him, "but in whose blood there was something" which "called for a return."
As the poster makes clear, the volume was published "to celebrate the centenary of victory." With this in mind, the publisher asks on its website, "Why did we decide to cancel the memory of Victory in the First World War?" Among the roundtable's speakers was Emanuele Mastrangelo and Enrico Petrucci, who served both as writers and editors for the volume. In addition to their publications, both Mastrangelo and Petrucci contribute to the right-wing website History on the Web, described by Gabriele Turi as exhibiting "widespread sympathy for fascism" (2024; Turi 2013: 142).
According to the publisher's website, Seaplane Publishing aims to "soar into flight" with its publications in order to "look at the world from a different perspective, driven by the impatience of those who refuse to settle for drifting in the everyday." The publisher's name, too, celebrates Italy's aeronautical achievements during the first half of the twentieth century, many of which were instrumentalized by Benito Mussolini's twenty-year dictatorship (1922-45) as a quintessential expression of Fascism's emphases on industrialism, militarism, and imperial expansionism.
This roundtable discussion took place at CPI's headquarters on Via Napoleone III – a six-story, state-owned building illegally occupied since December 2003. The movement places particular importance on cultural events as a method for spreading neo-fascist ideas and values and recruiting new members to the organization, particularly Italian youth. The building's rooftop terrace, moreover, serves as an important feature of CPI's youth-oriented socialization strategy in Rome, which includes the Cutty Sark bar in the city's Monti neighborhood, which has served as a popular gathering point for the city's neo-fascist constituency since the late-1990s.
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