Even the most casual tourist in Rome cannot avoid the imposing Via dei Fori Imperiali—Street of the Imperial Forums—the broad four-laned thoroughfare stretching straight from the Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, a modern boulevard worthy of any European capital that contrasts with the city’s more modest avenues, narrow streets, and winding alleys. Nowadays, armies of tourists surge along the wide sidewalks on both sides of the Via as they make their rounds to and from the Colosseum, passing the ragtag array of ancient ruins on both sides of it, completely unaware of the historical meaning of the street itself. Indeed, many of the Italians speeding along the Via in their cars and motorbikes may likewise not appreciate the profound psychological significance this street had for most Italians in the 1930s and 1940s. The myriad layers of memory found everywhere in the Eternal City include this seemingly ordinary roadway, and a brief examination of the psychic power this avenue once had illustrates the subconscious power that ancient Rome has wielded into the 20th century.

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Originally named the Via dell’Impero—Street of the Empire—the Via dei Fori Imperiali was inaugurated in October 1932 when Mussolini, on horseback, led a massive military parade down it to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his taking power in the 1922 March on Rome, which, like many tales in Rome over the millennia, was in fact much less dramatic than advertised since the government capitulated to his army of Blackshirts without a fight. As a political-philosophical movement, Fascism was an Italian invention that appeared a decade before Nazism in Germany. In repudiating the precepts of liberal democracy, it was an intensely nationalistic response to the humiliation and poverty Italy suffered after the First World War. Italy had been a unified country only since 1870, and Fascism nurtured a strong national identity as a powerful counterforce to communism, which in the early 20th century was viewed as a primal threat to capitalism and religion, especially in a Catholic country like Italy. On first glance, all Mussolini had when he assumed power in 1922 was a disparate nation of wayward Italians--in a moment of pique over their not sharing his goal of national resurgence, he allegedly once referred to his countrymen as "a nation of waiters." Although Italy was then a country not even two generations old, Mussolini quickly latched onto a transcendent image and ideal: the shimmering and eternal greatness of Rome and its Empire, the universal commonwealth that, countless centuries after it disappeared, has haunted the conscious and subconscious psyches of western humankind. The Fascists believed that they were the natural heirs to this empire and that raw military power, an attribute of both Fascism and ancient Rome, would restore Rome and Italy to its prior greatness.

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Once again, Rome’s ongoing, never-ending triumph of image, or ideal, over the less impressive reality on the ground was being played out in Fascist Italy, and the Via served as a backdrop to this political psychodrama. In his incisive online article Fascism and the Via dei Fori Imperili (September 18, 2005, University of Washington Honors Program in Rome), Joel Nishimura noted that “during the Fascist regime the road held a deep symbolic meaning, physically linking Mussolini’s government with the ruins of ancient Rome [which lined it].” Nishimura concludes that “In many ways the method in which Fascism used construction and reconstruction to build consensus for their government followed in the tradition set up 2,000 years earlier by the Ancient Romans. Construction is again married with propaganda, where monumental architecture and ritual are designed in order to humble the spectator to the ideas of power, strength and endurance. It is on these terms that both the Ancient Romans and the modern Fascists made their emotional pitch to the masses.” (Italics added) 

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As he was riding his noble steed down the Via dei Fori Imperiali lined with cheering masses crowding and pushing to see him, Mussolini, head held high with imperial hauteur, may well have imagined himself, however briefly, as Titus or Trajan leading his triumphant legions past glittering forums and temples on his way to accepting god-like tributes from the Senate. Most likely the soldiers haughtily marching goose-steps behind their great leader also felt shivers of pride in their role of resurrecting Rome to its former greatness. Of course, over the millennia Rome—and perhaps the few surviving gods haunting its ruins--had impassively witnessed such hubris many times before, as barbarian chieftains, Holy Roman Emperors, foreign invaders, and political revolutionaries marched down the Via Sacra in the Forum or through one of the city’s major gates, envisioning themselves as heirs of Augustus, never mind the rubble of ruins piled up around them. There has always been something hypnotic and intoxicating about the siren call of Imperial Rome, the concept of the universal commonwealth that has been engrained into the DNA of Western humankind for countless centuries—it is an alluring dream, an irresistible illusion that for the ruthless and ambitious has evoked reveries of unlimited power and adulation. But these dreams always ended poorly. A mere 11 years after his triumphal march down the Via dei Fori Imperiali—a nanosecond in Rome’s long history—Mussolini would be on the run, and occupying Nazi tanks would be filing down the Via, to be followed a year later by American ones. Soon thereafter the Via’s name was changed to its current one, Via dei Fori Imperiali. 

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Part of being a dictator like Mussolini was that once he declared he wanted something done by a certain date, heaven and—in the case of the Via dell’Impero—tons of earth would be moved to accomplish it. When he willed the Via into existence, to be completed by the October 1932 anniversary of the March on Rome, there were only 11 months left to meet the deadline, and an army of workers set to the task of removing the densely populated neighborhoods built between the Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum, an area that dated from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into modern times. Hundreds of homes, businesses, and five small churches were swept away. An aerial photograph of the area taken before the Via was built shows a thick hodge-podge of buildings and narrow streets, and subsequent photographs taken during the Via’s construction show large swaths of denuded earth. Demolition of the medieval and Renaissance accretions over the centuries revealed the imperial forums of Julius Caesar, Augustus, Vespasian, Nerva, and Trajan that had largely been hidden from view, but as soon as they were uncovered, they were then promptly paved over by the Via, with only parts of them visible alongside it. Clearing out any area in Rome, especially one so close to the heart of the ancient city, always brings forth a wealth of artifacts such as statues, bronzes, and items of daily life, but the frantic pace of the Via's construction resulted in many of them being hastily thrown into boxes and crates without any cataloguing of where and in what context they were found. Many of these crates are still in the vaults of various museums in the city. But at least the ruins of the imperial forums were not destroyed by Mussolini’s grand boulevard, and from time to time there has been serious discussion of removing it to create a true archeological park—as a partial concession for tourists, the municipal government has periodically closed it to vehicular traffic, a move that has incensed the Romans accustomed to tooling down it at breakneck speed. As part of their agenda of emphasizing their being the true heirs of ancient Rome, the Fascists embarked on an aggressive program of clearing away the accretions of the millennia—houses, churches, businesses, entire neighborhoods--to expose other ancient monuments throughout the city. Il Duce made clear the agenda of such restoration:

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“We must liberate all of ancient Rome from disfigurements. Next to the ancient and the medieval we must create the monumental Rome of the twentieth century. Rome cannot, must not simply be a modern city in the banal sense of the word. It must be a city worthy of its glory and this glory must be continuously renewed in order to be handed down as the heritage of the Fascist era to future generations.”

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Enjoying nowadays the fruits of this “ancient urban renewal,” one might feel a bit conflicted about how it was the Fascists who made much of this possible.