• 1 “tutto ciò che è viso, aspetto, esistenza d’altri uomini, che non siano lui, riluce poco, riluce ma (...)
• 2 “anche l’Italia, che gira intorno, da vicino e da lontano, immense ruota di cui l’asse è lì nella (...)
• 3 Ibid., p. 1632.

1In 1931, Vitaliano Brancati, a young writer from Catania, published La mia visita a Mussolini, a brief essay in which he documented his unlikely audience with the dictator he greatly esteemed. In his account, Benito Mussolini is so big that he eclipses everyone else’s light: there in the hall where the writer awaits him, “all that which is face, appearance, existence of other men, who are not him, shines little, shines poorly, goes unnoticed”1. When he appears in the doorway, the Duce is colossal («colossale»), a «massive figure of a man, almost sea to an island» (“massiccia figura d’uomo, quasi mare a un’isola”); he appears as a monolithe (“come un monolite”). Brancati therefore senses «Italy, too, revolving, from near and far, an immense wheel whose axis is there in the room, a few steps from me»2. Reflecting on the many different things that people tend to say about the Head of Government, he pauses on the frequent comparisons to Napoleon, musing that Mussolini resembles the Corsican general like an oak resembles a pine tree (“una quercia somiglia ad un pino”)3.

• 4 The indispensable study on the sacralization of Mussolini as the leader and of fascism itself is E (...)

3Mussolini himself appears as a character in these three plays, and it is this creation of the Mussolini myth that particularly interests us here, noteworthy as the plays are for the way in which Brancati transforms rather banal metaphors into brilliant creative conceits. Namely, as in La mia visita a Mussolini, Brancati’s is the metaphor of a figure who is “larger than life”. As shall be seen, in his conception, the onstage Duce is meant to be quite literally aggrandized, a vision of the sacralized and omnipresent leader who was at the cultic center of fascism’s mythoepia4. Across his oeuvre, Brancati demonstrates a keen understanding of fascism’s aestheticization of politics and the Duce’s special role within that strategy of hailing loyal subjects; in his brilliant story Il Vecchio con gli stivali, for instance, a spy reports that protagonist Aldo Piscitello has adopted the habit of tipping his hat to a one and a half by three meter photo of the Duce displayed at Quattro Canti, a baroque square in Palermo. The reference is fleeting, and it is just one in a gaze that we might call multi-medial, for Brancati frequently represents the sights and sounds of life during the Ventennio: the billboards, the broadcasts blaring through loudspeakers, the construction sites that will (or will not) give way to gigantic towers, as in Gli anni perduti. In his conception, the dictator’s omnipresence is spatial, temporal, and psychic; he shapes the terrain and the horizon, he cuts through the airwaves, he breaks the barriers of time and space, penetrating land and sky as he penetrated Brancati’s imagination. This Giant Mussolini is the pinnacle of a national-heroic figure and a synecdoche for all fascist Italy and its would-be triumph in the present and future.

• 5 See P. Gaborik, Mussolini’s Theatre. Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge (...)

4It is not only on the level of imaginary and ideology, however, that the plays are illuminating. From them can also be extrapolated an understanding of the regime’s cultural ambitions, specifically, about what fascist intellectuals and artists – and the hierarchs who courted and supported them – might have had in mind when they spoke of their desire to create an original, truly fascist art. When it came to the theatre, expenditures of brainpower and funds, and institutionalization for this quest were fulsome, driven by various goals; as I have argued elsewhere, Mussolini and his hierarchs were concerned with broadening access to the dramatic arts, with lending them a pedagogic function that would elevate their base cultural level and train the theatre artists of the future, and with innovation. Although several key figures, including the dictator himself, had reservations about the efficacy of explicit propaganda, the shared ideal for the would-be fascist theatre was that it would be modern in style and novel in its form while retaining a socio-political function5. One can thus read Brancati’s plays not just as manifestations of a very personalized idea of Mussolini but also as examples of the broader aesthetic ambitions of the epoch.

• 6 P. Nicoloso, Mussolini architetto. Propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia fascista, Turin, Eina (...)
• 7 V. Gazzola Stacchini, Il teatro di Vitaliano Brancati. Poetica, mito e pubblico (con inediti), Lec (...)

5In 1936, sculptor Aroldo Bellini set out to build a bronze Hercules with unmistakably Mussolinian features: it was to be 86 meters tall and stand atop the Monte Mario in Rome, towering over the city. Its enormous head and a foot were constructed, but sanctions resulting from the invasion of Ethiopia forced the suspension of the project (which, then, would never be completed). In its conceit, the statue was, as Paolo Nicoloso points out, “forse tra le più spettacolari e inquietanti, del culto della personalità costruito dal fascismo attorno al suo duce”6. No one can contest that Bellini designed the herculean Mussolini, of course, but one could observe that it had first been dreamed up by Brancati, a handful of years earlier, in 1928, when he wrote Everest, a play which premiered in 1930 at the Salone Margherita in Rome under the direction of Luigi Pirandello’s son Stefano Landi7.

• 8 “a fa ricadere sui posteri, per decenni e forse per secoli, gli effetti di questo progetto storico(...)
• 9 Fascism’s conception and poetics of history are becoming a popular area of study; among the major (...)

7The enormous sculpture is the play’s backstory and backdrop even as it is its ideological (and propagandistic) center, revealing Brancati’s acute understanding of the regime’s use of architecture in its construction of fascist society. As Nicoloso has pointed out, the Mussolini government invested significant creative energies and funds in architecture not just because it served immediate logistic needs, but also because it would endure. Reforging the Italian character would take a very long time, but architecture would have immediate results even as it aimed to “leave for posterity, for decades and perhaps for centuries, the effects of this historical project”8. Brancati quite perceptively noted this colonization of history, to again adopt Nicoloso’s term: the Colossal Mussolini on Everest becomes the flag stuck on the moon: Fascism Was Here. Indeed, for the audience viewing the play, implicit in the statue’s presence on the mountaintop is the sense of the Duce’s reach in space and time. The sculpture, as big as a building, tells the audience that fascism’s structures had extended far into Asia and into a very distant future9.

• 11 C. Duggan has observed that Garibaldi’s own cult was representative of a historically conditioned (...)

9This Garibaldi is perhaps warmer than the colossal Duce, watching rather than looming over the nation from on high; nevertheless, the echo corresponds to the history that points to the Risorgimento as one precursor to fascism in its sacralizing tendencies11.

• 13 F. W. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo [1908], trans. A. M. Ludovici, United Kingdom, Dover Publications, 2004 (...)
• 14 Ibid.

12Here another resonance is undeniable: Friedrich Nietzsche, who had penned his Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1881, as he famously recounted in Ecce Homo, after a walk along the shores of Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland: the note he made to himself regarding the new work – and its fundamental idea of the eternal recurrence – was, “six thousand feet beyond man and time”13. To inspire him, in the woods along the lake, were not just the nearby mountains that reach nearly two miles into the sky, but, specifically, “a huge rock that towered aloft like a pyramid” much like the statue in the play14. Zarathustra has been living on the mountain for ten years, having ascended in search of enlightenment; when he returns to life among others below, he brings with him his conception of the Superman.

• 17 V. Brancati, Everest, op. cit., p. 13. Brancati makes very few explicit references to Nietzsche in (...)

16In Brancati’s script, indeed, Targhi may speak of comfortable homes, but the image presented is of something altogether different; in fact, that he would describe homes made of all windows on a frigid and windy precipice in the sky as “comfortable” gives a clear sense that these are people of strong stock: in addition to the constant vertigo, harsh elements, and maneuvering along dangerous cliffs that define their days, for instance, they look down upon a plateau that has become an airplane graveyard due to the failures of so many others who have tried to make it as far as they have. As the play begins, in fact, Targhi and a few others watch a man “che ha una corportura robusta” climb up the mountain after having crashed there17.

• 18 F. W. Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, eds. A (...)
• 19 Indeed, as Paul Baxa has recently discussed, the initial context was Mussolini’s encouragement of (...)

17The Everest dwellers are, in other words, superman-ish men and women, successful by-products of fascism’s anthropological revolution: citizen-warriors and adventurers who have shunned the comfortable life and who are ready to live dangerously –“vivere pericolosamente” as the Duce had ordered his party faithful to do already in 1924 (inspired by Nietzsche, who had, however, counseled to live on Vesuvius rather than Everest)18. Mussolini had declared his desire that this would become a “motto of the youthful passion of Fascism. It means being ready for anything, to make any sacrifice, face any danger, undertake any action”. The original context for this exhortation was different and more specific, but it became common to translate it into a general ethics of physical challenge and heroic, even death-defying, exploits19.

• 20 “Expedition Starts for Everest Climb”, The New York Times, March 27, 1924, p. 1; “Mt. Everest Clim (...)

18The image in the popular imagination of the real Mt. Everest plays into Brancati’s depiction. It was in 1921 that known attempts to reach the summit of 8,849 meters began, and in 1924 a third expedition resulted in the disappearance of two British explorers at nearly 8,600 meters, leaving the world wondering if they had made it to the top (the body of one of them was found only in 1999; the other is still undiscovered). In an interview with The New York Times, one of these men, George Leigh Mallory, had famously responded to the question of why one should try to tackle the mountain with the simple response, “Perché c’è”. Apropos of our discussion, the title given to the interview was “Climbing Mount Everest is Work for Supermen”. In advance of this fatal attempt, its leader, Brigadier-General Charles Granville Bruce nearly mocked the early climbers who “feared collapse” at extremely high altitudes. Instead, Bruce opined, “We now foster the idea that with due training anyone is rather a freak who is not prepared to remain for an almost unlimited period at heights of 21,000 feet and more. It is, in other words, the mental outlook that counts” 20.

• 21 V. Brancati, Everest, op. cit. p. 16.
• 22 Ibid., p. 22.

19On Brancati’s Everest, although the condottiere in the statue is only a distant memory, the residents are clearly his descendants, in their very ability to endure in such a place and in their dedication to a life they themselves recognize as not entirely rational; referring to their reason for establishing a home there, Giacomo comments that if they are truly held back by the statue, they are insane. (“La statua? Ma se è lei a trattenerci siamo dei pazzi veramente”)21. It is clear, however, that this self-labeling is rather self-congratulatory. Their“pazzia” is really a sort of mystique that makes them capable of feats and strength that others do not know. Small episodes come together to give this impression, such as a moment of panic sparked when a small child is spotted on a cliff below; when the boy has heard the calls telling him to stay away from the ledge, his mother begins to slide down to retrieve him. One might now expect the beginning of a long, tension-filled rescue, but, instead, the others turn away, for they consider the danger passed. “So many dangers! My God!” (“Quanti pericoli, Dio mio!”), exclaims Carmela. “One at every turn”, (“Uno ad ogni passo”), Targhi responds, “but one must have patience”, (“ma ci vuole pazienza”), as if the problem were no larger than having forgotten to buy milk at the grocery store, and their attention never returns to Francesca and her toddler on the cliff22.

• 23 “Ci disse che sarebbe andato lontano, a scolpire un colosso, e che una voce lo chiamava. Aveva un (...)
• 24 This attitude had much to do with fascism’s very conception of itself as a movement of new men, th (...)
• 25 “Gli uomini sono illuminati in modo strano e sembrano smisurati”: V. Brancati, Everest, op. cit., (...)

20The group’s perception of others also drives home the point of their exceptionality. For instance, they discuss having found the corpse of the strange sculptor who had left the town below to make the statue. Somehow, he had achieved that miraculous feat, but no one was surprised that he never returned: “He told us he was going to go far away, to build a colossus, and that a voice was calling him. He had a brand new green suit. And, I do not know why, that green suit told us he would not go. It’s hard to do crazy things when you love nice clothes”23. This was the anti-bourgeois argument against the good life (the “vita comoda”) that would become increasingly prevalent in Mussolini’s rhetoric24. Brancati here underscores not just that centuries into the future Mussolini himself would be immortalized, but that his time on earth had left an imprint that was both material and spiritual – a statue on the mountain and a new warrior spirit in the human body and mind. The mirroring effect is suggestively rendered when, once the enormous head has been revealed, thanks to the flames, the men are strangely illuminated and become oversized25.

• 26 The text, d’Amico wrote, “non faceva la predica, non divideva il mondo in bianco e nero […] non of (...)

22What is most surprising (and laudable) about the play is the ambivalence regarding the combat experience – and even the war’s cause. Esteemed critic Silvio d’Amico, in reviewing the premier (to be addressed below), explained that the prize’s jury, of which he was a member, had selected Piave among around 100 scripts precisely because it avoided the dogmatism and preachy propagandistic tone of so many of the other submissions. Brancati’s text, rather, avoided preaching, dividing the world into black and white, or giving a Catechism on the good fight26. The script had flaws, d’Amico did not refrain from noting, but it put a worthy, ordinary, ambivalent protagonist at the center of the story. In an epoch where the intellectual theatre set was fatigued by a commercial repertoire girded by French bourgeois boudoir comedies, this substance was a breath of fresh air, and the non-orthodoxy of expression an encouraging sign about the intellectual independence of the generation of writers to come.

• 27 “Che guerra è stata questa? ... Eravamo ubriachi quando gridavamo per le strade! Il destino ci ha (...)

23Still, Giovanni’s anti-heroism is exactly the problem the drama must resolve, and Brancati provides the very special sergeant to show him (and the audience) the error of his ways. In the final scene, a wounded and despairing Giovanni hunkers in an underground lair, listening to the battle rage around him. He vents his frustrations to Aldo, a fellow soldier who has drifted into death without Giovanni realizing it. He calls their very support for the war (their interventismo) into question, arguing that by now it is clear it was a lost cause: “What war was this? ... We were drunk when we shouted in the streets! Destiny made us shout... Everything, now, seems like a dream. We had a mother: this is a dream, too. And Italy? It’s future? ... a dream”27. His musings are, in other words, wholly defeatist.

• 28 Ibid., IV.ix, p. 164.
• 29 “L’Italia non è mai stato così bene in piedi, come oggi. Se ricadrà, noi la solleveremo”: ibid., I (...)
• 30 Ibid.
• 31 Ibid., IV.ix, p. 166.
• 32 V. Brancati, La mia visita, op. cit., p. 1630.

24The response to his lament is a blast nearby, which causes debris to fall into the grotto and forces the door closed, making everything go black. “Someone” (“Qualcuno”) enters, but there in the dark his only identifying features are his large shoulders (“le sue spalle larghe”)28. We quickly learn that it is the sergeant whom others have mentioned. He has heard Giovanni’s laments and tells him that he has said foolish things, for “Italy has never stood as tall as it does today. If it falls again, we shall pick it up”29. Giovanni counters, saying that they are all doomed to die. The Sergeant demurs: maybe he will not (“Forse non morirò”)30. Then comes a horrific explosion: everything grows blacker yet, and the grotto collapses in upon itself. Quite differently from the later Brancati, the finale of the play works through understatement: Giovanni wails, then whimpers – he is presumably dying – but finds the strength to shout out, “Seargeant Mussolini!” There is a beat, silence, to underscore the revelation. Then Giovanni asks if he is alive: “Siete … vivo?” And the affirmative response comes: “Sì!”31. We then hear distant cries, explosions, and sounds that resemble trumpet calls. The curtain falls. Thus the identity of the inspiring sergeant is revealed. It is Mussolini; his broad-shouldered appearance there in the doorway, it is worth noting, is a sort of negative image of the Duce’s arrival in La mia visita, where the door open and he appears, so large, not in darkness but instead where «the room arounds him sparkles» (“la sala intorno a lui brilla”)32.

• 33 “grandiosa esperienza collettiva che segna uno spartiacqua storico”: F. Frosini, La costruzione de (...)
• 34 “Poiché Giovanni è un uomo finito e deve morire, mentre Mussolini rappresenta la certezza e una (...)
• 35 See R. Ben-Ghiat on Mussolini as a behavioral model in film: Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema, Bloo (...)

25Like Everest, Piave plays with time, speaking both of Italy’s recent past and of its future. Its ideological thrust was perfectly in line with Mussolini’s conception of the Great War as a “grandiose collective experience that marks an historic watershed” determining what the new Italy would be33. We know, because history has told us, that the heroic sergeant would become one of the ritornati – the survivors from the trenches who would suffer greatly but then bring about Italy’s new day, also by bringing a nascent fascism to power. In this new Italy, there was no room for an anti-heroic defeatist like Giovanni, as Brancati himself wrote to d’Amico, recounting a discussion with the Duce, who was concerned about an ending to the performance that would show the protagonist die but him live. It had to be this way, however, from the author’s point of view: “since Giovanni is a finished man and must die, whereas Mussolini represents certainty and a new era”34. In ways similar to Everest, therefore, the Duce functions not merely as an object of worship, but one of study as well: he provides a behavioral model for audiences, here presented in contrast to the soldier who is not committed enough35.

• 36 “Il senso di una progressione dinamica sia negli eventi esteriori sia nella psicologia del protago (...)

27From this point of view, the play is more effective ideologically than dramatically. In terms of genre, it can hardly be said to reach tragic heights, for Giovanni is more of sacrificial lamb driven to slaughter than a hero whose realization comes too late or at too high of a price. These were, indeed, textual weaknesses that Brancati’s two interlocutors, Mussolini and d’Amico, had both noted, the first suggesting that he lessen the effect of the lamb brought to slaughter (“testa d’agnello ucciso e tagliato”) and the second encouraging him to better develop a sense of progression both in the events and in Giovanni’s psychology36. In production, there would be some possibility of greater ambiguity here: Giovanni’s inquiry as to whether the Sergeant has survived, depending on its delivery, could potentially indicate an emerging faith or at least hope, but Brancati’s comments on why Giovanni must die suggest otherwise. It is not the soldier’s eleventh-hour conversion that lends the play its meaning (because there is no clear conversion), but the arrival of a new man – Mussolini.

• 37 “Obbedire ai Vostri ordini, e ad un tempo non tradire la tesi del lavoro”: letter from Anton Giuli (...)
• 38 “Una semplice e poetica allusione: una allegoria in tono alto e spirituale, surrealista anche nel (...)

28In the case of Piave, it is thanks to performance that Mussolini becomes a giant. The piece premiered in a rather high-profile event, de facto as part of fascism’s 10-year anniversary celebration (the decennale): famed avant-garde director Anton Giulio Bragaglia led the Renzo Ricci company in the debut performance at the Teatro Valle in Rome, on October 29, 1932. Although the Duce himself had read the script and had even chosen the ending from three possibilities Brancati offered him, the censor called for a change before the play could go on, because regulations prohibited representing Mussolini on stage and thus calling him by name was too explicit. Bragaglia took advantage of his personal relationship with the dictator, writing him to ask how he was to “obey your orders and at the same time not betray the work’s thesis”37. His proposed solution was to project an enormous image of Mussolini at the time of the Great War – some six meters tall – on the upstage wall. He hoped that it would be “a simple and poetic allusion: an allegory with a high and spiritual tone, surrealist, too, in time”. Mussolini approved38.

• 39 “Conchiusa con una proiezione ahimé simbolica, da lanterna magica di famiglia, e con una retorica (...)

29However, when the show ran, no one was impressed with Bragaglia’s high and spiritual tone. Critics registered the applause earned early in the play but noted that these gave way to whistles and protests at the finale. Silvio d’Amico was utterly dismayed; from his point of view, the six-meter-Mussolini was exactly what the play did not need: the performance, he wrote in his review, was “closed with an unfortunately symbolic projection, like a homemade magic lantern, and with a rhetorical prophecy, hear ye hear ye, of Fascism’s coming. The very rhetoric, that is, that the author had purposely avoided, with a caution for which the Jury had rewarded him!”39. For the critic, this ending shifted the attention from Giovanni to the projection, i.e., to Mussolini – and thus toward the future rather than the moment of the play itself, giving precedence to its propagandistic rather than dramatic function.

• 40 R. Di Tizio, letter from Brancati to d’Amico, November 4, 1932, p. 171.
• 41 Ibid., letter from Brancati to d’Amico, July 27, 1932, p. 170.
• 42 S. d’Amico, Piave, op. cit., p. 651.

30After the fact, Brancati himself confessed in a letter to d’Amico that he felt deeply horrified (he felt an “orrore profondo”) about that fourth act, given that it had been capable of inspiring Bragaglia’s awful idea40. Interestingly enough, when they discussed the scene, Mussolini had also suggested to Brancati that the revelation of his person was unnecessary: he might consider ending the play with the Sergeant’s line about Italy’s standing tall41. But Brancati chose the ending as I have described it here, and although he was unhappy with Bragaglia’s staging, I would argue that the director had rather accurately interpreted the spirit of the piece. From this point of view, the problem with Bragaglia’s staging may be that it exacerbated the script’s defects. Mussolini’s suggestion to close the play earlier would have been more unequivocally triumphant, but it would have kept focus on World War I and on Giovanni and would have had the potential for an open ending that promised further development of his journey. It is noteworthy, then, that of everyone involved, Mussolini was the least enthusiastic about the explicit allusion to his person and the transference of the story into the present. Even d’Amico – who clearly had little sympathy for the most explicitly indoctrinating aspects of the text – had acknowledged that the script’s new and daring finale was its whole point (“la ragione essenziale del dramma stesso”)42.

• 43 Already in the debates on fascist culture, Pavolini had refuted what he called a Romantic prejudic (...)

31Piave is thus an exemplary case study of fascist theatre-making, revealing the difficulty of the regime’s quest to create its own dramatic art, which was supposed to bolster the anthropological revolution but not necessarily via direct propaganda. This was, however, a point of debate. Some camicie nere had few qualms about explicitly pro-fascist performance; Alessandro Pavolini, Minister of Popular Culture from October of 1939 to February of 1943 was one of these, and the very existence of plays like Brancati’s suggests that some artists were intrigued by the challenge of writing plays whose politics, though explicit, would not result in the disappearance of art43.

• 45 AA. VV., Il teatro drammatico (atti del Convegno Volta), Rome, Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1935, pp. (...)

34Approaching the question from a different, non-politician’s, point of view, d’Amico was one authority who was more open to the possibilities, despite his lack of passion for fascism. Speaking at the Volta Convention on the Dramatic Arts in October of 1934, he would cite none other than about-to-be-crowned Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello in arguing that it was acceptable to do propaganda if it was artful, and not done on purpose. There was no reason to be against “thesis plays”, for some of the best plays written by the best playwrights, from Aristophanes to Bernard Shaw, began as thesis plays. What was important, d’Amico suggested, was that the impetus come from within, not be proscribed (“non da una proscrizione esteriore”). Thesis plays were fine – as long as they were also art45. Put another way, we might say that his problem with Piave was not that it had a propagandistic intent, but that what was already clear to everyone had been insisted upon too strongly. The fault was not that Mussolini had appeared, but that he had been unnecessarily oversized, literally and figuratively, because the point of the play was would have been clear all the same. In any case, Sergeant Mussolini appears as a sort of an ideal-Everyman soldier and, at the same time, the Italy of the future. With this is mind, it is perhaps not surprising that the real Duce was generally content whether the play closed with the Sergeant’s line or with that explicit revelation of his identity – either way, Italy’s reawakening would emerge as the true point of the story.

• 47 See M. Bontempelli, Come la pensavo nel ’32 and Per il tifo a teatro (May 1933), now in Id., Avven (...)

37This was common rhetoric at the time: such figures as D’Annunzio and Bontempelli stressed that taking the theatre back outside into the outdoor arenas, the ancient Greek and Roman theatres, would spark poetic revelation and recall to audiences the ritualistic function of theatrical performance. Returned to the city squares and ancient amphitheaters, the drama would once again take up its natural task: to provoke collective sensations, rendering attendance at a performance a spiritual (if not religious) encounter47.

• 49 M. Bontempelli, Per il tifo, op. cit., pp. 263-264.
• 50 See J. T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses, Stanford, Stanford (...)

39Bontempelli quickly took up Mussolini’s prodding, noting that he himself had for years been championing a type of performance that would have the passionate, overflowing crowds that were now being seen in stadiums (“passionale, eccessivo straboccante che abbiamo cominciato a conoscere negli stadi”)49. Thus would begin a rush of activity and experimentation dedicated to imagining a new theatre of the masses that culminated in the staging of the fascist epic 18 BL on the banks of the Arno in Florence one year later, on April 29, 193450.

• 51 Brancati specified that he chose to print the piece because he had gotten wind of a person whom he (...)
• 52 L’Urto seems to be an explicit comment upon Luigi Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore: t (...)

40Although Brancati never got that open-air production of Everest, he kept imaging works to be staged in such a context. Just two weeks before 18 BL, he published his own mass spectatcle, L’Urto, which contains the third gigantic Mussolini under investigation here. Publishing the piece in Quadrivio, where he worked as an editor under Telesio Interlandi, Brancati sought to declare for himself and Interlandi primacy in the area of mass spectacle, noting that Interlandi had given him the idea a few years earlier but that he had only now decided to publish it, despite the more mature vantage point that left him finding it both too immature and too literary (“troppo ingenuo, troppo letterario”)51. Brancati’s intimation, of course, was that he was not among the hordes who were merely answering the Duce’s call, but someone who had been thinking about this kind of performance for years (and given his comments about Everest, there is no reason to doubt the general truth of this claim). L’Urto, un dramma da rappresentare all’aperto in uno stadio thus made its print debut, but it was never performed. It is an experiment in the fusion of sport and performance, highly spectacular and hyper-modernist, as well as quite highbrow, engaging with philosophical traditions and recent theatrical trends – presumably the reason that its author dubbed it “too literary”52.

• 53 “Anche perché, fra poco, a Roma, parlerà uno che noi vogliamo ascoltare”; “Attenzione! Egli parla: (...)
• 54 “Egli si è affacciato al balcone e saluta con la mano”; then, “Attenzione! Egli parla.”: ibid., p. (...)

41To briefly summarize the action of the piece, a troupe of Russian orators barge into a Milan stadium just as the interval between the two halves of a soccer match begins. The fans are shocked by their desire to give a speech, but they are also curious, so they agree to listen. When they begin to dislike what they hear, they ask the group to leave, “also because, before long, in Rome, a person we want to listen to will speak”53. The commissioner struggles to explain who this person is, but eventually finds the words: “someone – the clearest of us all” (“Uno – il più chiaro di noi”), whose speech will be broadcast on the radio. When the moment comes, the loudspeakers on the stadium’s perimeter, which are so big they arise “like a door in the sky” (“più grandi che s’alzano come una porta nel cielo”), take on a life of their own. They begin to hum – the moment is arriving – and all attention turns to the speakers themselves. A first voice emanates from high above, describing the large crowd gathered in the piazza, shouting in anticipation. The voice narrates: “He’s come on to the balcony and waved”; then, “Pay attention! He is speaking”54. Even the Russians visitors are captivated now, almost hypnotized: they wish to quench their thirst, to get drunk on the voice. They dance in his honor. Finally, he speaks. In a mixture of ecstasy and desperation, The Woman of the troupe, who has been most strongly drawn to the voice, responds to what she has heard and to music “that draws the image of a temple in the sky” (“che disegna l’immagine del tempio nel cielo”). To console her, a chorus of girls dressed in white dance a gloomy dance: but the woman climbs up the speaker tower and breaks down into sobs. She falls to the ground, but then rises, and shoots herself in the head. The sun, which in the piece’s conception represents youth, still shines. The referee blows the whistle so the second half of the soccer match may begin.

• 55 V. Brancati, “L’Urto”, op. cit., p. 4.
• 56 “O combattenti di ieri, giovani, combattenti di domani… Chiunque, dalla soglia della fanciullezza (...)
• 57 See M. Carli, Vedere il fascismo. Arte e politica nelle esposizioni del regime (1928 – 1942), Rome (...)

42L'Urto is an extremely complicated text that cannot be entirely unpacked in this essay, but, of course, the broadcast of the unnamed orator’s speech is relevant here. By 1934, Brancati had learned his lesson: nowhere is the Duce named, but the reference is as clear as the sun that shines on the stadium, explicitly linked to the giovinezza of the crowd. This time, Mussolini’s largeness is communicated both with sight and sound – the immensely tall towers, the voice permeating the air. He is architectonic again, too, represented by those speaker towers that reach high into the sky. Like in Everest, the sacralization is pronounced: the Russian troupe wants to dance for him and drink the thirst-quenching voice (“bere alla sorgente questa voce che disseta”). They align themselves on the stairs like statues in a sacred vestibule (“come statue di vestibolo sacro”), making gestures that signify serenity55. But the orator’s speech, too, is that of a person who is a leader and seemingly some kind of preacher: everyone should work hard, fearlessly, for they are never alone – God is always with them. Since he then tells his listeners to honor their father and their mothers, however, one might think that the omnipresent god he speaks of is himself, for this is of course one of the supreme commandments. L’Urto echoes Piave as well, making frequent references to the youth in the crowd, whom the voice addresses directly: “you, yesterday’s combatants, young people, tomorrow’s combatants… Anyone, from those on the threshold of childhood and from the extremes of old age, has the right to speak of the future”56. This final piece, then, functions in some ways as a synthesis of the author’s vision of the Duce. It is perhaps most suggestive, however, against the backdrop of Giuseppe Bottai’s theorization of fascism made visible, or, as Maddalena Carli has summarized it, his sense that there was “a particular relationship between fascism and form”. For the Minister, Mussolini’s power to unify his people around him was strengthened by the “force of expression that translates an enormous moral force into material signs”57 – signs that in Brancati’s plays become both physical representations and symbols of the leader.

• 58 “Hai capito, Giovanni? Si vuol parlare anche negli stadii, adesso!”: ibid., p. 1. This is just one (...)

43As noted, although a full analysis of L’Urto is impossible here, some general considerations can be made. The script is, as Schnapp has observed, an intriguing “experiment in line with the era’s fantasies about fusing the new theatre and mass athletics”, but it also explicitly – and metatheatrically – engages in current discussions of mass performances itself, when one disconcerted member of the crowd scoffs over the fact that people now want to give speeches in stadiums58. The sum of all the play’s parts demonstrates a rather comprehensive vision about what the new theatre could be. The foreigner’s public reckoning, the soccer match, and the sacralized leader’s appearance are placed on a single “stage” and in the same temporal loop, rendering each of them similarly performative and thus collapsing divides between art and life in ways that nod to the play’s Pirandellian echoes. At the same time, the different elements seem hierarchized, for when The Woman commits suicide, the piece suggests that there is no more room left for anguish, or even for dialogue, but only for the agonism of sport and the spiritualism of the political liturgy.

• 59 This modernizing approach to antiquity was a constant in fascist performance, including the shows (...)

44Brancati seems to have some fun with the sort of fusion of sport (and bodily exercise) and theatre that Bontempelli – but also the Futurists before him – had celebrated. For all the machine-worship the Futurists are known for, the force of human energy was never far from their mind, and the same is true in a piece like L’Urto, which brings together massive stadium architecture, the metallized voice heard through a loud speaker, and dancers reminiscent of the Greek chorus, seeking constant interplay between old aesthetics and new ones, between mechanical marvels and the human body59. Brancati’s spectacle, in short, encapsulated what many fascists had in mind when they spoke about creating a unique theatre of their own: large scale productions with high emotional impact but heady themes, mixed media and genre, and the purposeful blurring of any personal-political or artistic-political divides.

• 60 “Pubblico questo piccolo drama che fra vent’anni mi piacerà certo chiamare, non so se con severità (...)
• 61 “Nuove forme di vita”; “‘nova materia’ di poesia”; “di aver compiuto abbondantemente nel ristretto (...)

45In his preface to L’Urto, Brancati distanced himself somewhat from his composition, writing, “I’m publishing this little drama which twenty years from now I will surely want to call, I don’t know whether with severity or with nostalgia, youthful”60. In reality, he would just barely live twenty more years, dying in September of 1954, and his attitude toward his younger self was indeed both severe and empathetic. He would overcome his infatuation with that enormous personality Benito Mussolini but have a hard time letting it go. After fascism’s fall, Brancati would do a great deal of thinking and writing about Italy’s future but also about its past. He would consider the country’s fascist past, and his own. In a series of articles collected posthumously as Diario Romano, he fretted for the future of a nation under Christian Democrat rule whose only opposition would be a generation that had been raised to believe and obey. He counted himself among those who had erred in believing that “new lifestyles” and “‘new matter’ for poetry” were necessary, and acknowledged “having abundantly done within the restricted area of my faculties my share of bad things to culture in fascism’s name”61. That he wrote of these matters with such vehemence and frequency – of his succumbing to that grandiose Duce – suggests that he was, to be metaphorical again, haunted by this past. Thus, it may not come as a surprise that Mussolini appears as a ghost in more than one of Brancati’s post-war writings. But that it is another metaphor, for another essay.