Giulio Emanuele Rizzo. Lo studio della Grecità contro la romanescheria fascista

The author looks at Giulio Emanuele Rizzo, a professor of Classical Archaeology and his difficult relationship with the Fascist regime. The advent of fascism in Italy had a significant impact on its academic life. Scholars were forced to make difficult political choices sometimes leading to contradictory behaviour. While his political conduct never opposed him to the regime, Rizzo never fully accepted its directives on cultural and scholarly matters. The Fascist propaganda employed the heritage of ancient Rome to exalt its public image and to justify its policies, both domestic and foreign. Rizzo, however, in an official presentation delivered in 1929, openly expressed the admiration held by the Romans for Greek art. His relationship to the regime deteriorated and in 1935 he was dismissed from his chair at the Università di Roma. The study of Greek art became for him the expression of individual freedom and, in political terms, a form of intellectual antifascism.