Laboratoire Italien (Sep 2023)
Brancati’s Gigantic Mussolinis
Abstract
Best known for such novels as Il bell’Antonio and Paolo il Caldo, Sicilian writer Vitaliano Brancati (Pachino, 1907) was also a playwright and, in his younger years, so enthused about dictator Benito Mussolini that he was a propagandist for the fascist regime. This article explores his figuration of Mussolini as he appears in three of the dramatic works written in this period: Everest (1928), Piave (1932), and L’Urto (1934). The discussion focuses on Brancati’s depiction of the “Duce” as “larger than life” – a metaphor that becomes literal in the plays’ characterizations of the dictator – to address, first, the ways in which Brancati’s vision of Mussolini intersects with the regime’s mythologization and sacralization of the leader, and, second, how the plays shed light on fascist intellectuals’ ambitions to create propaganda art for the would-be new era.
