Terragni also evoked the atmosphere of 1922 in his Sala O, where the walls surged out toward the visitors in a burst of new volumes. Every space was full; panels sliced through the room diagonally, with Mussolini’s profile rendered in metal; the phrase “Paradiso bolscevico” served as a caption for a photograph of starving children; a photomosaic represented agricultural and industrial labor; and, finally, he offered an image of “Italy at work trapped against the wall by an enormous steel spiderweb: strikes.”11
Thus, the strikes that erupted between 1919 and 1922, and that so alarmed the bourgeoisie that they welcomed Fascist promises of a return to order, were characterized as having blocked labor and [delayed] production and, by implication, progress. In addition, certain phrases were rendered in oversized letters: Disciplina Assoluta; Inquadramento delle Forze Corporative; Chi dice GERARCHIA dice DISCIPLINA; Chi dice gerarchia dice Scale di Valori Umani, and so forth.
Such images and phrases suggesting the enforcement of draconian social control were not forced on Terragni and the other designers; instead they freely chose them as motifs for the rooms.
[…]
The final version of the exhibition opened in 1942, at the height of World War II. […] The relationship of this exhibit to its predecessors was clear in some of the new sections added: a room dedicated to doctrine, another to artifacts recovered during the campaigns in Africa, and yet another against Jews and Communists, who were blamed for the war.15
Click here for events that happened today (March 23).
1919: Benito Mussolini established the Fasci di combattiment (Fighting Fascists) organization in Milan with two hundred members.
1933: The Reichstag passed the Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich (‘Enabling Act’), giving dictatorial powers to Adolf Schicklgruber (starting on March 27 that year).
1936: Seishiro Itagaki became the chief of staff of Kenkichi Ueda (Japanese Kwantung Army in northeastern China).
1938: Imperial troops wiped out Chinese outposts north of Tai’erzhuang, Shandong Province.
1939: The Lithuanian representatives aboard Fascist heavy cruiser Deutschland gave in to Berlin’s demands, signing the city of Klaipeda, Lithuania (known as Memel in German), to the Third Reich in the early hours of the day. That afternoon, the Chancellor visited the newly gained territory. Apart from that, Erwin Rommel returned to his position as the commanding officer of the military academy at Wiener Neustadt in southern Germany, and Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vojtech Tuka signed the official document in Berlin that declared Slovakia as an independent nation under the Reich’s protection. Coincidentally, the Slovak–Hungarian War, also known as the Little War, began (and further suggests that WWII started earlier than September 1939). At dawn, the largest bombardment of the Second Sino‐Japanese War commenced on Chinese positions at Wucheng near the Xiushui River in Jiangxi Province, China where Chinese defenses held down Imperial troops since March 18, 1939; this bombardment would continue for three more days. Nearby, the Imperialists captured Fengxin County and Anyi County.
1940: Deportation of Jews in Wehrmacht‐occupied Eastern Europe continued despite Hermann Göring’s order for a temporary pause. Eiji Nishimura became the head of Unit 1855, an Imperial medical unit for human experimentation, in Beiping, China.
1941: Erwin Rommel departed Europe for Libya, and Axis submarine U‐97 sank British tanker Chama six hundred miles west of Land’s End, England, slaughtering the entire crew of fifty‐nine.
1942: Berlin ordered a build up of defenses in coastal areas.
1943: The Axis deported a group of Greek Jews to the Auschwitz‐Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.
1944: Axis troops assaulted an Allied defensive position in the crater of an extinct volcano near Sangshak, India, initially failing to take the position.
“Italy at work trapped against the wall by an enormous steel spiderweb: strikes."
Anti-labor movement sentiment, it seems.
