Inter-War Italy: The Fascist Appeal and Socially Detrimental Effects in Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara

Inter-war Italy: The Fascist Appeal and Socially Detrimental Effects in Ignazio Silone's Fontamara

There are people in the world who base their knowledge of the past on what they read in novels. As media influences peoples' perception of history, we must analyze how authors depict landmark events to understand why some people have perverted interpretations of the past. While some texts distort history, Ignazio Silone's Fontamara is a fictional tale of a village in southern Italy, but nonetheless provides an accurate description of the country's struggle with fascism in the 1930s. The hardships of Silone's cafoni open the reader's eyes to the depth of the liberal political crisis. Silone appropriately recounts the crisis of the liberal movement, as well as the social and economic consequences of weak governance as it contributed to a political power vacuum and fascist uprising. Political and economic institutions in Silone's narrative are ambiguous, illustrating the indeterminacy of fascist philosophical application. As fascist policies and the country's realities were not in line, Silone accurately describes a community of people (stuck in an exploitive system) who reject a despotic fascist society through revolution; Silone's cafoni revolted against the government because established policies and laws that "straddle the fence" were detrimental to the masses.

Before we can understand why fascism flourished, we must first understand why liberalism failed in Italy. One of the greatest weaknesses of the