by Roberto Dulio

Margherita Sarfatti Dal mito del Dux al mito americano, Simona Urso Marsilio, Venezia 2004 (pp. 238, € 21,00).

Margherita Sarfatti was certainly not just the art critic who legitimised the group of 20th-century painters, or one of Benito Mussolini’s innumerable lovers. Instead she was a prominent intellectual figure who, among other things, strongly conditioned the regime’s cultural choices at least from the beginning of the ‘30s. Her influence was not reducible to the preferences of a certain stylistic connotation, but involved a more complex definition of fascist society’s cultural identity, the intellectual’s role within it and the historical legitimisation of fascism.

She transformed Mussolini into the myth of the Dux (Milan 1926, the book had already appeared in English with the title The life of Benito Mussolini, London 1925). The enormously successful biography had innumerable reissues and translations, and largely contributed to shaping fascism’s imagined “Roman spirit” that intoxicated Mussolini. On this point Renzo De Felice in his Interview on fascism (Bari, 1925) recalled a conversation with Sarfatti in 1961, which led the historian to question “how much of the Roman spirit myth was Mussolini’s work, and not instead a result of Sarfatti’s influence. Because in my life I have never met a person as affected by the Roman spirit as she was”.

Simona Urso’s essay retraces this matter discarding the biographical option and concentrating on Sarfatti’s approach to fascism. The analysis ranges from her militant, yet precociously revisionist socialism in Milan in 1902 (where the young Venetian Jew, born Grassini, lived after marrying the lawyer Cesare Sarfatti) to her relations with the futurist circle and later with the review La Voce, to the interventionist propaganda on the eve of the Second World War, until combining art’s regenerating function with the context of political renovation. In lee of the march on Rome and the establishing of the 20th century, this last connotation led Sarfatti to conceive the idea of “politicisation of aesthetics”, which is one of the keys to analysing her role within fascism.

As the author confirms, this commitment within the regime “can be explained in the same way as many of her contemporaries, with the middle class intellectual desire (not always fulfilled) to become a new political ruling class convinced of embodying a new idea of nation”. Urso’s work can be compared to that of Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian R. Sullivan, who with The Duce’s other woman (New York 1993, immediately translated into Italian with the title Margherita Sarfatti. L’altra donna del duce, Milan 1993) were confronted with the Sarfatti issue after the reticent autobiography Acqua passata (Rocca San Casciano, 1955), published by Sarfatti a few years before her death in 1961.

Cannistraro and Sullivan’s studies were conducted in the scope of an American historiographic school that took the contradictory issue of fascist Italy to be a privileged field of inquiry. This contributed to giving a new view, devoid of any involvements, on the events of the dramatic conclusion. The two American historians went back over Sarfatti’s entire life from her education to militant socialism, from fascist involvement to her prominent position in the regime followed by increasing marginalisation, until, after the racial laws that forced her into exile, her stay in South America and the return to Rome in 1947. In the book Sarfatti’s importance appeared evident not only in determining a new cultural orientation (considerate of tradition but far from the xenophobic attitudes of the regime’s most reactionary policies) but also in defining a strategy that closely connected cultural and political components.

Cannistraro was also the author of the well-known essay The consensus factory. Fascism and mass media (Bari, 1975), which should certainly have made him well aware of the regime’s cultural and political mechanisms. If the biographical narration of The Duce’s other woman sometimes dispersed the connection between the various stages in Sarfatti’s cultural project in the intimism and colour of many personal events of her life, Urso’s well-documented book suffers the opposite defect.

The entire Sarfatti story appears to unfold in a prearranged manner, without contradictions and perfectly faithful to the author’s interpretation, disillusions included. Furthermore the use of innumerate “historical labels” (only on page 32 we find “the crisis of rational thought”, the “revolutionary trade unionists”, the “revision of Marxism”, the crisis of positivism”, the “Catholic and, shortly after, futurist avant-garde that brought French culture, symbolism and the myth of modernity to Milan”, the “reformist militancy” and the “informal meeting places of secular Milan”) generate a kind of disciplinary inscrutability that is not always useful to a non-expert readership. Nonetheless, few defects for a book that successfully continues American historiography’s most qualified contribution to the subject.

As already highlighted, it analytically reviews Margherita Sarfatti’s role in the construction of the fascist myth, and after the disenchantment and racial laws, her search for “a new Rome” in America. The book’s subtitle alludes to this American myth, the construction of which Sarfatti was already devoted to before leaving Italy, publishing America, search for happiness (Milan, 1937). Urso only takes us to the threshold of this myth, without covering the American period of the author of Dux.

Roberto Dulio Architect