Italian Identity during the Fascist Era - Stephanie Berlind
Hometown: Kwajalein, Marshall Islands
Class Year: 2009
Major: History, French
Research Advisor: Professor David Baum.
Project Description:
My research this summer was eclectic, to say the least, involving a couple of different projects that I rotated through every few weeks. My research revolved around the concept of Italian identity during the Fascist era, a time when Italy faced dire social and economic problems and turned to the Fascists to bring back the glory days of the Renaissance or even the Roman Empire. My tasks ranged from compiling a list of bibliographic sources from an Italian encyclopedia called Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettre, ed arti, to evaluating old Italian films such as Roma, citta aperta and 1860. I concluded that while the Fascists helped mold Italian culture and Italy's role in the world during the middle of the twentieth century, important aspects of Italian culture, such as intellectualism, nationalism, and faith, remained, as they always had been, integral parts of Italian identity.