ABSTRACT
Communists and Fascists in the years following the World War I were dramatized as battles over the soul of the nation leading up to the triumph of fascism with the March on Rome in October 1922. The importance of the 1932 exhibition grew out of how the show fabricated the myths of fascism. It materially exaggerated and invented narratives that the regime depended on, turning them from myth into reality. The exhibition invented a victorious government takeover, the Fascist Revolution, out of an inglorious event, the 1922 so-called March on Rome. The World War I dead were represented, for example, in the 1932 exhibition alongside so-called fascist martyrs, connecting the nationalism that inspired the sacrifices of the First World War and fascism. Efficient linoleum, among the many materials celebrated as native or Italian was linoleum. Promoted as modern, hygienic, flexible, and above all efficient, linoleum became “the poster child for native design.”.
