Mussolini’s Gift

One summer day long ago, I walked from a cluster of museums near Chicago’s South Loop southward toward McCormick Place. It’s a stretch of Lake Michigan waterfront I hadn’t previously explored on foot. Imagine my surprise to happen on the oldest outdoor artifact in the city. As best I could decipher the Italian inscription, the 2,000-year-old stone column was a gift to Chicago from Benito Mussolini. Had we and Fascist Italy once been friendly enough for gifts?

Apparently so. The Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, celebrating technological advances of the city’s first “Century of Progress,” gave Mussolini a chance to bring modern Italy out of the shadows. The futuristic Italian pavilion held hundreds of exhibits to showcase Italian technology and medicine. In July 1933, more than 100,000 spectators cheered the arrival of twenty-four seaplanes from Rome, under the command of Italian air force minister Italo Balbo. Americans welcomed the pilots as heroes.

Mussolini’s public relations coup linked modern Italy to Rome’s ancient history as the mightiest empire of its time. Chicago might boast a hundred years of progress; Italy could boast two thousand. He adopted the classic Roman fasces, a bundle thin rods tied together around an axe head for strength, as his symbol of power. The ancient column of the Balbo Monument, Mussolini’s gift to Chicago in honor of Balbo's squadron, was taken from the erstwhile port city of Ostia outside Rome.

The message was clear. Mussolini and his National Fascist Party rose up to Make Italy Great Again.

Image: Balbo Monument, Burnham Park, Chicago. Chicago Park District.