The Italian writer Ítalo Calvino in his Invisible Cities notes that “the city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, and scrolls.” (Calvino, p. 11)
Rome can be very much seen under the light of the city of memory that Calvino refers to in his text. Its history, like that of most cities, is etched onto its structure, and fascism features as a poignant part of this history. The Viale del Mare, opened in 1928, was a major focus of Mussolini’s plan for Rome as it was meant to connect the historic center of the city from Piazza Venezia and the Ostia pier.
As Paul Baxa argues: “Although the Via del Mare was opened in 1928 as part of fascism’s program of providing Rome with a modern transportation infrastructure, the brutality and violence of fascism have become the road’s lasting legacy.” (Baxa, xi) He says this is because Viale del Mare has become known as the ‘killer road.’ A massive number of speeding drivers die in the Tarpeian Rock curve, the precipice where Ancient Romans once threw dissidents and criminals to their death. Mussolini’s dream of speed and his fascist party’s ideals of empire stretched to the twenty-first century through the very mark it left in the urban fabric. Once cut through Rome’s Jewish ghetto, the Viale del Mare echoes the affective experience of the fascist state and its ideas until today.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have proposed that we articulate ethics in terms of “lines of flight”— that is inter alia — as conditions for revolutionary political, social, and economic transformation, in hopes to counterpose one of the most tragic aspects of contemporary life: its systematic lack of imagination — our growing inability to imagine new futures. (ed. Jun and Smith, p. 4)
More than constructing the possibility for new futures, ethical thinking, in my view, needs to account for the potential of imagined futures and how much power they contain in their affect. Mussolini’s Viale del Mare is a visible physical marker of fascism’s imagined future and its affective potential and ideological baggage. It remains active, ideologically and physically, over seventy years after the fall of fascism in Italy. It contains this history, its imagined future, this affect, and its ethics like lines in a hand.
Calvino, Ítalo. Le Città Invisibili. Milano, Oscar Mondadori, 2006.
Baxa, Paul. Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Jun, Nathan and Smith, Daniel (ed.). Deleuze and Ethics. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011.