Enrico Del Debbio

Speranza

In Italy, Mussolini's government promoted sport with an ideology tied to the recreation of the Roman Empire.

In 1926, the government set up the Opera Nazionale Balilla and to years later the "Accademia di Educazione Fisica" was established.

Mussolini saw sport as a way to mirror the glory of his regime, prepare Italians for war, and improve the physical and moral health of the nation.

The Duce exaggerated boasted about his own physical prowess and skill at sports ranging from boxing to motorcycle riding and aviation.

In 1928, the government commissioned Enrico Del Debbio to design a series of statues, each four metres tall, to decorate the Foro Italico, a complex of tennis courts and playing fields, a gigantic stadium and other sports facilities.

The statues, each of which represented an ITALIAN PROVINCE, demonstrated various sports.

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Naked or semi-naked, they are modern (and rather pretentious) reinterpreations of classical statues of warriors and discus-throwers, as well as swimmers, tennis players, and boxers.

All are male and, not surprisingly, handsome and muscular.

For Marcello Piacentini, writing at the time, these showed 'the traits of eternal Rome', and the Foro Italico, with its statues 'chastely nude' was 'a picture of Hellenic beauty'.

For Carlo Cresti, however, there is a certain SEXUAL message in the statues:

On reflection, this VIRILITY is TOO ostentatious and thus suspect as well.

It is true thar marble and bronze male nudes maliciously attracted the squadrons of GIOVANI ITALIANI (members of the fascist youth movement), but they probably also exorcised the frsutrations and powerlessness of many anonymous and sensitive fascists and embodied the aesthetic preferences of some official with rather special tastes.

For Alberto Arbasino, the statues do nothing less than represent the unconscious collective memory of a traditional and naive MEDITERRANEAN BI-SEXUALITY which, Alberto Arbasino claims, no longer exists (because of permissive society) even in the Greek islands, and survives only in some remote Tunisian or Moroccan oasis not yet touched by Islamic fundamentalism.

None of these views proves that a homoerotic impulse lay behind the creation of the Foro Italico, and fascism officially rejected homoeroticism.

But the homoeroticism of the statues remains -- an example of male beauty and virility for all, males and females, a reprseentation with a special meaning to homoerotic viewers.

Other connections between authoritarian ideologies and homoerotic desires suggest that this connection is NOT FORTUITOUS.

The Foro Italico also shows that the CLASSICAL IDEA OF MASCULINITY, beauty, and sexuality, could be appropriated by varying political ideologies and put to quite different uses.