Well, I'll frankly admit that I had never precisely thought about this before – that is, whether the Italian Renaissance, outside of it being one of the most obvious highlights in Italy's history, occupied a special place in Mussolini's personal conceit of it.

It goes almost without saying that it was seen as a decisive moment in the establishment of a “historical continuity” of the Italian civilization, from the glory of Rome, through the Dark Ages, when Italy had lit the fire of an Italian, and European, Renaissance; and then again through the subsequent period of decline and servitude, until the Risorgimento had opened a new march forward, briefly slowed down during the last decades of inept parliamentary liberalism, and now resumed by Fascist Italy under his leadership.

This was in line with the basic narrative promoted in common education, and Mussolini's own summary (delivered to a party gathering in October 1930) didn't add much to it, except to particularize this historical process through its impact on the character of the Italians, and to stress the martial traits of the early Renaissance, rather than the artistic feats of the mature one:

We need time, a great deal of time, to complete our work. And I am not speaking here of the material but of the moral work. We have to scrape off and crush the sediments that have been deposited in the character and mentality of Italians by those terrible centuries of political, military and moral decadence between 1600 and the rise of Napoleon. It is a prodigious undertaking. The Risorgimento was merely the beginning, as it was the enterprise of just tiny minorities. The world war was profoundly educative. It is now a question of continuing on a daily basis the task of remaking the Italian character. For example, we owe it to the culture of those three centuries that the legend grew up that Italians cannot fight. It required the sacrifice and heroism of Italians during the Napoleonic wars to demonstrate the opposite. The Italians of the early Renaissance, of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be precise, had temperaments of steel, and brought all their courage, their hatred and their passion to bear in war. But the eclipse we suffered in those centuries of decadence weighs still upon our destiny, as yesterday, as today, the prestige of nations is determined almost exclusively by their military glories, their armed might […]

You can compare this with the same ideas framed in a more “scholarly” setting, in this excerpt from a publication by historian-archaeologist Carlo Galassi-Paluzzi (and Nationalist and propagandist Forges-Davanzati) in 1935

The Italy of Mussolini, with Rome as its capital, means that Roman history […] is not a detached history, located at some kind of fixed point in time. […] It is even less a history that some group of foreign scholars can cut off at a given point.[...] The history of Rome is continuous, uninterrupted, as is exemplified in this incomparable City, which has undergone sacks, struggles, misery, suffering, but has never been annihilated, which has never disappeared. […] Rome has lived on, and will continue to live on, in the history of its Empire, as the seat of Catholicism and the Littorio; and the great events of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all the way to the Risorgimento and the March on Rome, are connected in perpetual succession. . . . [Rome] therefore belongs to the Italian people, who enrich it with new values, never as parasites on the past, but with the incomparable genius of an eternally young race.

And similar words were used to introduce the Mostra Augustea in 1937

The imperial Roman idea was not extinguished with the fall of the Western Empire. It lived in the heart of the generations, and the great spirits testify to its existence. It endured the mysticism throughout the Middle Ages, and because of it Italy had the Renaissance and then the Risorgimento. From Rome, restored capital of the united Fatherland, colonial expansion was initiated and achieved the glory of the Vittorio Veneto with the destruction of the empire that had opposed the unifi cation of Italy. With Fascism, by the will of the Duce, every ideal, every institution, every Roman work returns to shine in the new Italy, and after the soldiers’ epic enterprise in the African land, the Roman Empire rises again on the ruins of a barbaric empire. Such a miraculous event is represented in the speech of the great, from Dante to Mussolini, and in the documentation of so many events and works of Roman greatness.

Broadly speaking, Mussolini tended to rely on this ideal connection in the glorious moments of Italy's history; for instance, speaking to his audience in Fiume (May 1919), he explained how Italy deserved its “place under the sun”, since it had

created modern civilization with the Roman empire and the Renaissance and should now for the third time speak its word of light.

There were probably deeper – and more conscious – choices at the root of the Fascist interpretation of the Renaissance (recent investigations in the relations with Italy's Roman past have led to quite insightful arguments); for instance, for Hitler's state visit in May 1938, a copy of Michelangelo's San Giorgio had been put on display, rather than the possibly more famous David. And, given the significant involvement of the “classicist” and archaeological community with the Regime's cultural campaign, there is probably some specific reason for such a choice. Joshua Arthur's Excavating modernity - which I have unfortunately been unable to read in its entirety – appears to offer a proper survey on the interactions between academical investigation and Fascist “re-casting” of the past into the future.

Indeed one may ask how strongly felt was this necessity of interconnection between the past – a past which the Fascist Regime sought to consciously (or, at times, subconsciously) reshape in its ow image, or better, in the image of its ideal, imagined, trans-historical future – and the “present to become” of the Regime (for an introduction to the theme of “fascist time” in a similar context, see Esposito, F. - Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity).

The efforts of archaeologists and classicists were crucial to establish the sense of “authenticity” which had to surround the “restoration” works promoted by the Regime. In this sense, the Regime was “re-enacting” an idealized past; but still, a “true” and “authentic” one.

The significance of this heritage as living evidence of the enduring qualities of italianità was as indispensable to Fascism as it had been to the Liberal state-builders of the post-Risorgimento period. - explains A. Kallis (The third Rome, 2014) - gradually the Fascist regime asserted an unprecedented level of centralized dominion over Italy’s medieval-Renaissance heritage [...] The trope of ‘authenticity’ that underpinned these restorations belied the intention of ideological appropriation.

Mussolini himself tended to identify, at times, with the “trans-historical” image of the Renaissance condottiero; but, to be fair, Mussolini's image tended to be overlaid with many different historical figures (for the Roman past alone, he could be August and Caesar, Sulla and Constantine, depending on the particular trait the author wanted to stress), or rather, those figures were overlaid with the image of the Duce. Itself a quite Roman-sounding name, especially in its DUX version, but also the name reserved for the appointed leader of many former Italian municipalities between the XII and XIII Century (like a basic education text of the time explained, Duce only meant Duco, or Duca, which is to say “leader” or condottiero).

John Pollard - The fascist experience in Italy, 1998 – commenting a series of archive pictures, the first depicting Mussolini from the left side, reading from a scroll, a fascio engraved into the background, explains

As these photographs show, however, the image projected by Mussolini was multifaceted: Mussolini as ‘Renaissance Man’, Mussolini as the very epitome of virile, military virtue, and Mussolini as the common man, shirt stripped off, side by side with the peasants.

There are good reasons, I believe, to regard the Rome of the Caesars as a more suitable dimension for the imagined past, than the complex and often ambivalent past of the Italian Renaissance, where artistic and literary virtues had coexisted with modest martial fortunes and not infrequent episodes of corruption and intestine wars. Nonetheless, Fascism certainly meant to interpret and retell the tale of the nobler side of the Renaissance, just as it wished to represent the Roman past in its ideal glory and re-imagined splendor.

References, in addition to the ones cited above:

Adamson, W. - Fascism and Political Religion in Italy: A Reassessment. - Contemporary European History, 2014, 23(1), 43-73

Arthurs, J. - Excavating modernity, 2012

Duggan, C. - Fascist voices, 2013

Paul, C. - Italian Fascist Exhibitions

Pollard, J. - The fascist experience in Italy, 1998

Salvatori, P. - FASCISMO E ROMANITÀ. - Studi Storici, 2014, 55(1), 227-239