Saluting gestures in Roman art and literature -- Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii -- Raised-arm salutes in the United States before fascism : from the pledge of allegiance to Ben-Hur on stage -- Early cinema : American and European epics -- Cabiria : the intersection of cinema and politics -- Gabriele d'Annunzio and Cabiria -- Fiume : the Roman salute becomes a political symbol -- From D'Annunzio to Mussolini -- Nazi cinema and its impact on Hollywood's Roman epics : from Leni Riefenstahl to Quo vadis -- Visual legacies : antiquity on the screen from Quo vadis to Rome -- Cinema : from Salome to Alexander -- Television : from Star trek to Rome -- Conclusion.

The compelling story of Pope Pius XI's secret relations with Benito Mussolini. A ground-breaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives by US National Book Award-finalist David Kertzer, it will forever change our understanding of the Vatican's role in the rise of Fascism in Europe.

We do it over and over again, day after day, and never seem to get enough of it. Albanians do it. Zulus do it. Movie stars and plumbers do it. All around the world, people say hi and bye in innumerable languages and countless ways: they wave and bow and curtsey and shake hands and rub noses and fist-bump and mwah-mwah and perform a vast array of greeting and farewell rituals, so common and natural that no-one stops to notice ... Tales of Hi and Bye provides a delightful, witty, and intriguing insight into the sometimes strange and often wonderful customs associated with an ordinary, everyday event. For more information, book extracts and cartoons visit www.talesofhiandbye.com

This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history. Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.

Rome is one of the world's greatest archaeological sites, preserving many major monuments of the classical past. It is also a city with an important post-Roman history and home to both the papacy and the modern Italian state. Archaeologists have studied the ruins, and popes and politicians have used them for propaganda programs. Developers and preservationists have fought over what should and should not be preserved. This book tells the story of those complex, interacting developments over the past three centuries, from the days of the Grand Tour through the arrival of the fascists, which saw more destruction but also an unprecedented use of the remains for political propaganda. In post-war Rome, urban development predominated over archaeological preservation and much was lost. However, starting in the 1970s, preservationists have fought back, saving much and making the city into Europe's most important case study in historical preservation and historical loss.

This book examines the arrival of jazz in Italy, its reception and development, and how its distinct style influenced musicians in America.

A remarkable new history evoking the centrality of Italy to World War II, outlining the brief rise and triumph of the Fascists, followed by the disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign. While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. At that moment, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies in the hope of making territorial gains in southern France and Africa. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties, and an Allied invasion in 1943 that ushered in a terrible new era for the country. John Gooch's new history is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight. Everywhere—whether in the USSR, the Western Desert, or the Balkans—Italian troops found themselves against either better-equipped or more motivated enemies. The result was a war entirely at odds with the dreams of pre-war Italian planners—a series of desperate improvisations against an allied force who could draw on global resources, and against whom Italy proved helpless.