The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy
Victoria De Grazia
Language: English
Pages: 324
ISBN: 0521526914
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The efforts of fascism to form a 'culture of consent,' or shape depoliticized activities, in Italy between the world wars, make a unique portrait of fascist political tactics. Professor de Grazia focuses on the dopolavoro or fascist leisure-time organization, the largest of the regime's mass institutions. She traces its gradual rise in importance for the consolidation of fascist rule; its spread in the form of thousands of local clubs into every domain of urban and rural life; and its overwhelming impact on the distribution, consumption, and character of all kinds of recreational pursuits - from sports and adult education to movies, traveling theaters, radio, and tourism. The author shows how fascism was able, between 1926 and 1939, to build a new definition of the public sphere. Recasting the public sphere entailed dispensing with traditional class and politically defined modes of organizing those social roles and desires existing outside the workplace.
Lonely Planet Southern Italy (2nd Edition)
Mediator of the capitalist system as a whole by inspiring in employers who previously had been guided purely by "egotistical motives" a "sense of collective concerns." 28 Persuasion was used to enlighten powerful firms, like Fiat, as to their duty to cooperate with state and party agencies: Its management was finally convinced to enroll its office employees' association (AIF) and its workers' sports group in the OND in March 1928.29 Intimidation was used against small firms - the food processing.
Continue off the job as well. Recreation, in Ponti's view, was to serve as a true leveler: "We have never allowed our dopolavoro to take on an aristocratic air that might have alienated and humiliated our closest associates, nor a saloon-like atmosphere that would have repelled our most distinguished functionaries."78 As a matter of company policy, management and lower-grade employees shared the same leisure organization, unlike most other industrial firms, where separate activities - if not.
Director, described as "special and dignified" facilities that were also "strictly economical in terms of rent, maintenance, and management." 26 Between 1926 and 1936, the railroad administration spent over twenty million lire on conversions and new constructions; the main expenditures were for new buildings at Bologna, Rome, Leghorn, Rimini, Bari, Brindisi, Florence, and Genoa, all designed by the state railroad's architectural office under the direction of A. Mazzoni and R. Narducci (both of.
Motors gunning, sirens howling, commands shouted out, dazzling distances, sea blue-green, landings at bustling ports, palaces that crowd out to meet us. Today, mealtimes are shifted to march in column. The division head steps out of his bureaucratic Olympus to take up position beside the office boy; this is a new style of human sympathy . . . The spiritual, instead of the material, culture, even only "after-work," instead of the rigidity of mechanical manual gestures, quality instead of quantity,.
To passive spectatorship, but also by the limited purchasing power of their sponsors, supporters, and members. 164 The nationalization of the public It was precisely the popular nature of these manifestations that presented both a problem and a potential resource for the fascist regime. As long as the institutional structures of the organizations that sponsored these activities remained intact, as they did in so many circles that had undergone "coordination" after 1926, what was to prevent.