BJG

I along with my co-editor Dr. Amy King am pleased to announce the official launch of our jointly-curated digital archive of contemporary Italian neo-fascist propaganda materials, Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019 (WMAB).

Consisting of some 45 propaganda materials by some of Italy's most active neo-fascist groups that I personally collected from the streets and alleyways of Rome (usually under the cover of nightfall), WMAB aims to make a modest contribution to the struggle against neo-fascism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean by illuminating the primary visual and spatial strategies deployed by far-right groups within Italy’s public sphere.

Named after Antonio Gramsci's observations of post-World War I Italy's struggles with ultranationalism, political violence, and creeping dictatorship, WMAB is intended as an Open Access resource for exploring the visual and spatial strategies deployed by contemporary Italy's neo-fascist community between October 2018 and July 2019 towards the popularization of their illiberal worldviews.

While this collection represents a snapshot of one year in Rome, however, its lessons are, sadly, applicable to many socio-political contexts throughout the contemporary West. Given these conditions, scholars of twentieth-century fascism, authoritarianism, and far-right populism have a duty to share their knowledge of these types of movements and organizations with the public.

Viewers can take several pathways through the collection. In the "About the Project" section, visitors will find a scholarly introduction for WMAB. In the Groups section, users can find an alphabetical list of the neo-fascist organizations and political parties represented in this collection. In the Materials section, viewers are presented with the individual posters, stickers, handbills, and banners that Griffith “harvested” in Rome. The Themes section showcases the thematic overlaps between the collection's various materials, ranging from "Patriarchs," or the early neo-fascist leaders who laid the ideological foundations for today's Italian far-right community, to "Resistance," which highlights Rome's anti-fascist opposition via those groups' street-level memory politics. In the Tags section, users are provided with some of the collection’s key topics which, in one way or another, are either textually or visually referenced by the various materials. For viewers interested in exploring the materials chronologically, the Timeline displays the order in which the materials were collected. And for users interested in examining the materials spatially, the interactive Map compiles the locations in which they were “harvested.” Lastly, the Pedagogy section includes classroom-related resources, including lesson plans, films and documentaries, and a bibliography.

If you'd like to follow along, you can follow this social media account, which will post samples from the website every so often.

Griffith, Brian J and Amy King, eds. Where Monsters Are Born: Documenting a Fascist Revival in the Streets of Rome, 2018-2019 (November 2024). Available at: https://www.wheremonstersareborn.com.

To view the broader research project that this digital archive is associated with, click on the button provided below.

To launch this digital archive, click on the button provided below.