ABSTRACT
The rediscovery of Dante by the Catholic world, and the re-appropriation of the divine poet as a supreme symbol of Christianity, occurred between the eve of the First World War and the advent of Fascism in Italy. During the twenty years of Fascism, Mussolini had no need to go out of his way to underscore the myth of Dante: the clearly codified political rites and liturgies he had inherited from a liberal Italy more than sufficed. If anything, Fascism accentuated the poet’s Catholic essence in order to establish him as the principal symbol of the compact between the Italian State and the Roman Catholic Church in 1929; and it used the findings of certain anthropologists during the recognition of his mortal remains in 1921, to exalt Dante’s belonging to the “Mediterranean race”.
