I'm working on a creative project, and I'm struggling to find good sources on what day-to-day life would have been like in rural Italy around the time Mussolini came to power. I'm most interested in Calabria and Southern Italy.
I'm finding a lot of stuff about larger geopolitical history at that time, and it's not too hard to find discussions of the role of fascism in changing industrial and city life, but struggling to find things that would help me picture day-to-day life in less developed areas. Does anyone have any recommendations in that vein?
Thanks!
It’s arguably a primary source, but you may consider Ignazio Silone’s ‘Fontamara’ (Bitter Stream). He wrote it in 1933 whilst in exile in Switzerland and he describes the social and economic reality of a fictional rural village in Abruzzo, the region Silone came from. You can take it as the interpretation of rural life under fascism from a socialist point of view. The man also wrote two other books which, with ‘Fontamara’, form the ‘Abruzzo Trilogy’. These are all novels and often exaggerate the level of violence (even thought it was omnipresent), but they’re a good insight of you want to have a socialist interpretation of life under fascism.
Unfortunately Italian rural life under the Fascist regime isn’t my field, so I can’t give more primary sources, but having read and enjoyed Silone I thought I’d mention his works.