Surveillance under the Mussolini’s Regime

This paper focuses on state surveillance under Mussolini’s regime (1922–1943) in Italy. While the cultural approach to Italian fascism has been fertile (de Grazia 1981; 1992; Ghirardo 1996; Whitaker 2000), archival research on police state surveillance is very limited and, due to the language barrier, has remained unknown in the field of Surveillance Studies. This short contribution is both an attempt to reckon with a surveillance past that has been neglected until recent times and to engage with revealing studies specifically related to state surveillance and classification. Surveillance under the duce was multifaceted and this paper aims at exploring the twenty years of the regime by focusing on different surveillance stages through a socio–historical perspective. Moreover, the concluding remarks briefly address some important issues which are related to political and cultural legacies of the fascist dictatorship that are essential to understanding some contemporary trends