A contested legacy. Conflicting images of the Roman and British empire in the Italian imperialist discourse through Liberal and Fascist era

In the public discourse across Liberal and Fascist Italy, Britain continued to appear the epitome of empire: to be admired or despised, to be pursued or challenged, the British Empire was the main reference. Any symptom of its weakening, or even decadence, was closely scrutinised, because it opened the possibility for other countries to compete: in Liberal Italy with prudence and reverence, in Fascist Italy with bold challenge. The shift between the two extremes draws a trajectory which moves from the earnest admiration of the powerful economic British supremacy to the harsh anglophobia intensely proclaimed by the Fascist propaganda, especially during and after the Ethiopian campaign. While there was continuity between the late Liberal age and Fascism in regarding the British Empire as the expression of industrial and commercial modernity, it was a continuity whose values became inverted. What in the Liberal period had represented an unrivalled superiority – individualism, sternness of character and entrepreneurial daring, all of which had supported the expansion of British rule across the world, became the mask of a dominance which Fascism was obliged to contest and overcome. Considering the intersected references to the legacy of the Roman Empire and the claim of its legacy, an interpretation of the entailed conceptions of State and modernity is advanced.