cultural geographies 2009 16: 381–401

Scipio Africanus: film, internal

colonization and empire
Federico Caprotti
University College London

This paper analyses the film Scipione l’Africano (Scipio the African) (Gallone, 1937), relating it to the fascist land
reclamation and internal colonization project in the Pontine Marshes as well as Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa.
The film, dealing with the defeat of Hannibal by Roman military leader Scipio, posits clear parallels between the
Roman empire and the fascist regime, and between Scipio and Mussolini. The paper argues that the filming of Scipio
the African on the ‘conquered’ landscape of the Pontine Marshes was a metaphorical allusion to the supposedly
successful Italian colonial project in Africa in the 1930s. The landscape of the Pontine Marshes is examined first
of all, followed by analysis of the filming of Scipio the African in the marshes through newsreels from the era. The
paper then examines the film’s content, focusing on representational parallels between a glorious Roman past and
a projected victorious fascist future, mediated through the success of the fascist internal colonization initiative in
the Pontine Marshes.

Keywords: colonial • fascism • film • Italy • nature • Pontine Marshes • visual

I. Introduction
From the sun rising above the marshes of Maeotia
There is no one who may be equal in deeds
If it is right for anyone to rise into the region of the gods
For me alone the greatest gate of heaven stands open.
Quintus Ennius (239–169 BC), Epitaph of Scipio Africanus

Scipione l’Africano (Scipio the African) is an epic film produced in Italy in 1937 and directed by
prolific filmmaker Carmine Gallone.1 The film recounts the events of the battle of Zama (202
BC), which took place south of Carthage in northern Africa (in contemporary Tunisia). Here,
the Roman general Scipio (c.236–184 BC, later known as Scipio Africanus) defeated Hannibal’s
forces, thus ending the Second Punic War (218–202 BC), submitting Carthage to Roman power,
and giving free rein to Roman imperial expansion in the Mediterranean. This paper examines the
linkages between the film’s depictions of Roman victory in Africa and Italian fascism’s colonial
ambitions at the time the film was produced, based on archival documents, newsreels from the
era, and an analysis of the film itself.2 In particular, this paper focuses on the filming of Scipio
the African in the Pontine Marshes, a marshland area south of Rome, which the fascist regime

© 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1474474009105054

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‘conquered’ from nature’s grasp in the 1930s. The location points to the fascist regime’s ideas
of internal colonization (the submission of all lands in Italy to the regime’s productive power).
The process of filming at this particular location is also a reflection of Italy’s imperialistic foreign
policy towards Africa at the time, and highlights the representation of a seductive colonial ‘other’
to be mastered through a geographical project both militant and triumphant.3
Recent enquiries around ‘the visual’ make a case for broadening the range of approaches
and theoretical possibilities inherent in a consideration of visual geographies and visuality.4 In
a recent issue of Geopolitics, Power and Crampton note how the events of 9/11 have placed a
renewed emphasis not only on the use of film to construct identity, territory and boundaries,
but also on the use of film to hold together strands of discourse which often coexist in uneasy
tension with one another.5 Film and its connection with material landscapes has also been the
subject of recent geographical enquiry: for example, Gandy’s analysis of the connection between
Ravenna’s urban industrial landscape and cinematic representation in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1963/64) makes the case for a nuanced excavation of images on the
silver screen.6 In particular, the cinematic landscape is seen as crucial to an analysis of the depic-
tion of space in modern culture. Gallone’s film, produced at the height of Italian fascism’s grip
on power, is a useful example of the fractured construction of geographical imaginations of
African colonies through the moving image.7 This paper also makes a link between film and the
re-mapping and projection of colonial discourse from the chosen, domestic filming location to
fascist imperial projects which were being materialized at the time, such as Abyssinia. The Pontine
Marshes, a reclaimed swampland which the regime had targeted through ‘internal colonization’,
was the landscape on which a colonial palimpsest focused on Africa was set.8 Crampton and
Power have noted how intertextual references course through Second World War and Gulf War
films; in the analysis of Scipio presented here, the intertextual links are between film and previous
Roman histories, and between two historical periods far apart in time.9 Furthermore, a ‘pro-
jected intertextuality’ can be identified in Scipio the African, whereby the film makes reference to
a victorious fascist future in Africa – a future which does not exist, but which is written nonethe-
less. Gallone’s focus on Roman events through the figure of Scipio at the height of the Second
Punic War was a metaphorical reworking of historical colonial discourse into fascist imperial
ambitions. As a result, the process of re-mapping analysed here was not only spatial, but temporal.
Furthermore, through film, concepts, identities and objects (from ‘Nature’ to the colonial ‘Other’)
became ‘fixed’ in the cinematic landscape.10 Lastly, the paper analyses the process of transfer of
colonial discourse not only through a study of Gallone’s film, but through an examination of the
representation of the filming of Scipio the African through propaganda newsreels. This enables the
paper to excavate the way in which the material process of filming on the particular landscape of
the Pontine Marshes was represented in itself. A focus on newsreels also goes some way towards
triangulating the paper’s arguments about the regime’s use of the film to link ideas of internal
colonization to its wider imperial aims, by allowing the regime’s filmic propaganda organ to
speak, through newsreels, about Scipio the African and its meanings.
Analyses of film with colonial overtones may help dissect the manner in which an aspiring
imperial power such as fascist Italy projected meanings upon a mute, monolithic colonial ‘Other’
and inhibited ‘it’ from telling its/their history.11 A review of postcolonial theory is not possible

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within this short space; nonetheless, the paper draws on postcolonial theorists’ engagement
with the contested spaces and identities of colonialism. In utilizing the filmic, discursive link
between a Roman past and a fascist present, the paper remains conscious of the pitfalls inherent
in relegating an excavation of ‘colonial’ spaces to the past; in particular, the analysis does not
cover the various ways in which the Pontine Marshes project was contested during and after
the fascist period.12 This is a key topic for study: an understanding of these processes help to
render colonial (and other) discourses less hegemonic. Furthermore, as Johnson and Murton
have recently argued, much research on nature and colonialism has de facto ignored the voice of
the displaced, marginalized, and silenced ‘Other’.13 In the case of film and the Pontine Marshes, it
is crucial to remain aware of the extent to which the fascist regime constructed visions of nature
which also produced specific representations of the ‘Other’. Regarding the Pontine Marshes,
the ‘Other’ can be seen to be not indigenous and native populations, but the ‘colonists’ who were
coerced into migrating to the area, and which are the focus of a separate study.14 Furthermore, in
the mapping of landscapes of internal colonization in the marshes, and in the extension of these
mappings to future projects in Italian Africa, the regime can be seen to have initiated a process of
projected silencing of indigenous populations in colonial areas outside Italy, to which the regime
could apply ‘modernizing’ drives similar to those in the Pontine Marshes.
The analysis presented here aims to contribute to an understanding of the representational
production of nature in a historically and materially specific case. As Willems-Braun argues with
reference to conflicts about forests in British Columbia, ‘while geographers have paid consider-
able attention to the significance of the production and representation of space for colonial
practices, less attention has been paid to the production and representation of nature’.15 This
leads to an understanding of the production of nature in the Pontine Marshes as an enterprise
closely linked with the fascist regime’s drive towards internal colonization, and towards imperial
projects abroad. Nature, in the Pontine Marshes, was produced, constructed and represented
through organizations, actors and individuals, as well as through film and newsreels. The hybrid,
networked processes through which nature took shape in the marshes can be understood as an
intermeshing of the twin inputs of materiality and conceptual, purified understandings of nature
within modernity.16 Analyses of the production of hybrid natures in this vein have largely drawn
on documentary material, reports and suchlike. This paper emphasizes a third input in the hybrid
production of nature: representational and visual constructions. This is where analysis of film
and newsreels becomes crucial: constructed ideas of nature are communicated and mediated
through visual media. Representations are intimately linked with the twin inputs discussed above:
as with hybrid environments and natures, representations too are materially constructed through
the interplay of individuals, organizations, and capital. Furthermore, modern ideas on nature
gain hold through the material agency of the actors above, and participate in the dialectical
process through which an image of nature is produced. To paraphrase Plumwood, analysing the
representational construction of nature in the Pontine Marshes through film enables this paper
to ‘decolonize nature’, by focusing on the centric thought systems imposed, through film, on
the Pontine Marshes and by association on Italy’s African colonies.17 The following attempts
to examine the facets mentioned above with regards to the Pontine Marshes project, before
analysing the representation of internal colonization in the area.

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II. Internal colonization and the Pontine Marshes

The Pontine Marshes, where Scipio the African was largely filmed, are a coastland marshland area
south of Rome. Historically, the whole region was affected by malaria. For this reason it was also
largely uninhabited. Various temporal powers, from the Romans to the Popes to post-Unification
Italian liberal governments until had, until 1922, attempted to reclaim the marshes with little or
no success.18 Land reclamation authorities during the 1920s and 1930s were aware of the fact that
malaria had to be extirpated from the area before the marshes could be colonized. At the same
time, the regime’s agronomists, engineers and demographers increasingly viewed reclamation
as a package of strategies which would affect not only the physical landscape, but which would
have consequences on individual citizens’ lifestyles and ‘moral qualities’ to boot. The regime
embarked on a major national land reclamation drive following the promulgation of the 1928
‘Mussolini Law’ enabling land reclamation and wider agricultural and habitational improve-
ments.19 The centrepiece of this drive was the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes. Precisely
because the marshes had lain unreclaimed for centuries, the regime saw the opportunity to claim
a historical triumph through the wholesale application of technology, science and funds to the
Pontine Marshes land reclamation enterprise. In the symbolic sphere, the regime claimed a direct
link to the Roman empire because the completion of the Pontine Marshes project was seen as a
completion of Roman reclamation projects. At the same time, the fascist regime was represented
as being a positive, more successful evolution of the Roman empire, because of the victorious
accomplishment of the reclamation effort. The mapping of Roman aims onto a fascist project
can be linked to the idea of a colonial appropriation and reworking of the marshes as an ‘empty
space’; it can also be linked to the creation of a mythical history of natural and human decline in
areas to be conquered and colonized.20 The rhetoric of colonialism was utilized in the test-bed of
the Pontine Marshes; this justified the eventual utilization of the same rhetoric, and its material
consequences, in Africa.21 At the same time, the domination and urbanization of nature in the
area point to the workings of technological modernism within fascism in the 1930s. In particular,
the subjugation and rationalization of water in the marshes highlights the deeply modern yet
basic conceptualization of a project which, through film, made the conceptual leap from the
domination of nature to the subjugation of a colonial ‘other’.22
Land reclamation in Italy fell under the aegis of ‘integral reclamation’ (bonifica integrale), which
meant that reclamation itself was not seen in purely engineering or agricultural terms. Rather, the
reclamation of land was meant to precede the moral reclamation of the settlers (known as coloni,
or ‘colonists’) who would settle in the area and increase its agricultural productivity. Therefore,
reclamation comprised engineering work as well as town-building efforts and the provision of
facilities for future colonists. However, there were significant hindrances to the social aspects of
land reclamation. In particular, Desideri has identified a tension between modernity and tradition:
this can be seen in the fact that the state wanted to promote agrarian and agricultural modern-
ization at the same time as it was drawing support from the conservative, rural landholder sectors
of the population (who had no overriding interest in modernizing the countryside, least of all in
social terms).23 Notwithstanding these rifts, the Pontine Marshes project was strongly backed by
the government, and by 1939 the area was declared successfully reclaimed.
The colonizing aspect of the Pontine Marshes project derived from a main policy source,
related to the regime’s essentially anti-urban stance. Italian urban planners and demographers

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during 1922–43 were concerned with demographic indicators of natality and fertility, and were
obsessed with what they thought was a falling birth rate worsened by migration.24 For example,
in a communiqué from the Grand Council of Fascism to local institutions, local authorities were
encouraged not to be indulgent towards ‘celibacy and infecundity’. The demographic problem
was deemed to be ‘the problem of all problems, because without life there is no youth, no military power,
no economic expansion, no regime, no empire’.25 The policy instruments chosen to halt this supposedly
disturbing tendency were double-edged, aimed firstly at curbing the growth of cities, and secondly
at mitigating rural-urban and external migration.26 This was done mainly through a system of
work permits which prevented the rural workforce from being gainfully employed in urban areas.
The assumption was that birth rates in rural areas would compensate for the low birth rates
caused, in urban sociologists’ view, by the sterile lifestyles and conditions of the urban industrial
proletariat. Population growth would subsequently increase national ‘power’ and improve Italy’s
‘moral climate’.27
Thus, land reclamation efforts in Italy were generally seen as part of the wider political aim of
ruralization, ‘giving back’ land to workers who could then enjoy a traditional virile, rural lifestyle.
However, reclamation projects themselves were deeply modern in that they necessarily employed
the latest technology in order to do battle with nature. Knowledge and technology were utilized
to rationalize and plan the project. This included the production of maps by the Opera Nazionale
Combattenti (ONC) veterans and land reclamation institution, in an attempt to ‘colonize’ the
marshes, bringing the power of cartography to bear on lands which were the focus of future
domination.28 As a result, the Pontine Marshes were the jewel in the crown of internal colonization.
The imposition of canal and road grids and urban centres upon transformed land was a colonial
enterprise in itself, at the same time as it was linked to Roman projects (in the past) and future
African colonies. The Pontine Marshes project became a temporal and spatial materialization of
complex ideological, political and economic historical and discursive processes.
It can be argued that the Pontine Marshes project was a dry-run for colonising initiatives
further afield in Africa. Mia Fuller has, for example, highlighted the links between the fascist-
planned EUR suburb in Rome and fascism’s interventions on Addis Ababa’s urban form in
Ethiopia.29 The same parallel could arguably be drawn between the Pontine Marshes project
and Italian colonies in Africa. On a different note, Diana Davis has analysed the construction of
stories of environmental decline and desertification in French North Africa.30 A similar analysis
could be applied to the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes from an ‘uncivilized’ and therefore
degraded natural state. The regime was engaged in a struggle against an irrational, negative nature
which had to be colonized in order to be civilized. The representation, in newsreels, the press and
publications of the time, of a struggle against serious odds in a hostile colonial landscape can be
related to the aim of exploiting an eventual ‘victory’ of fascism over nature. It can also be linked
to a deeper sense of unease towards a colonial landscape.31 The subjugation of nature to tech-
nology through land reclamation can be described as internal colonization through the formation
of a ‘colonial consciousness’, a ‘collective sense of Italy’s imperial status and a mass affiliation to
the colonial project’.32
Sources from the era help illustrate and analyse the regime’s understanding of the Pontine
Marshes project as a colonial, military enterprise. First, land reclamation workers in the marshes
were depicted as soldiers.33 The hiring of workers was paralleled to the ‘raising of an army’,
with the first workers described as ‘assault troops’. The workers ‘descended’ from Tuscany and

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Abruzzo to ‘clear the area’.34 The dual fascist myths of the ‘warrior father’ and ‘child-bearing
mother’ were joined through land reclamation, in a male struggle to conquer a hostile and
gendered environment.35
Second, the fascist struggle to transform and colonize the Pontine Marshes was based in a
re-elaboration of selected traditional and classical Roman values. This is a key point when con-
sidering the filming of Scipio the African in the marshes. In more general terms, Italian fascism
idolized the natural realm when it played into an idyllic view of reality, shorn of the ‘negative’
aspects of modern industrial society. The concept of Romanità (the idealization of Roman values
and ways of life) and the myths associated to the ancient Roman world were used to propagate
this view. A Roman way of life was seen as a rural, moral existence where the (male) individual
could fully develop and where traditional social structures could be maintained. In the words of
a writer in the Universalità Fascista periodical, this would result in a ‘superior humanity’.36 Certain
aspects of ‘traditional’ social structures were depicted as positive by placing them squarely in the
realm of the natural and thus assigning them the characteristics of objective truths. What deviated
from this natural norm was, by the same logic, unnatural and therefore negative and perverse.
Low birth rates, unemployment, communism and the bourgeoisie were seen as symptoms of a
greater malaise stemming from capitalist industrial society, liberalism and the lack of a strong
state. The solution proposed by Italian fascism focused on a ‘return to nature’. For example,
Orsolini Cencelli, a key figure in land reclamation in the marshes, wrote about a return to a rural
Roman world in the Pontine area, a world made possible by Mussolini and inhabited by the
miles agricola of old, with his motto ‘ense et aratro’ (‘with the sword and with the plough’).37 Nature
thus had the full backing of fascism when it was represented as ideologically consonant with the
regime’s goals. The following considers the representational bases which enabled film to become
enmeshed with fascist colonialism.

III. Film, internal colonization and empire

The 1930s were, in Italy, a period of heightened colonial and imperial ambitions. The solidification
of fascist power made possible through the achievement of what Renzo de Felice describes as a
broad and implicit consensus enabled the regime to start looking outside its own boundaries and
entertaining grand colonial ambitions.38 Film played a significant part in focusing and channelling
these ambitions in the public domain, and enabled the formation of creative avenues for the
display of imperial ambitions. Films such as Scipio the African were the cultural and political pro-
ducts of a particular historical period focused on specific geographical objectives in Africa. And
yet, Scipio the African was not filmed on African soil. This may seem like a point of no parti-
cular interest: after all, how many Westerns have been filmed in Spain? However, what is intri-
guing and worthy of analysis is that filming was carried out on the specific landscape of the
Pontine Marshes, close to Rome. This area had been earmarked by the fascist regime for internal
colonization through land reclamation, urbanization and agricultural development in the 1930s,
and was marketed by the authorities as one of the achievements of fascism. Scipio the African was
filmed in an area which the regime regarded as its own internal uncolonized territory, a domestic
frontier which even the Roman empire had been unsuccessful in taming. The use of the camera
made sure that the Roman empire finally won a celluloid battle, through the intervention of

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fascism, in the Pontine Marshes. As Richards states, the film of empire is defined not only as film
set within the geographical boundaries of imperial territories, but film which details the ‘attitudes,
ideals and myths’ of imperialism.39 This is the case with Scipio the African.
A consideration of director Carmine Gallone’s filmic production can be utilized in order to
grasp how African and colonial themes featured in his work. As a director, Gallone was very
much concerned with an almost operatic approach to film. Scipio the African was in many ways
a precursor of his later, post-1943 development as a film director who attempted to represent
operatic themes, mainly from the wide Italian tradition (from Rigoletto and Tosca, to Madame
Butterfly, Gallone directed 8 films with operatic themes between 1943 and 1962).40 However, his
reliance on operatic method is also found in earlier works such as Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (The
Last Days of Pompeii), released in 1926.41 This early film’s focus on Pompeii also shows that Roman
themes featured in Gallone’s repertoire at least a decade before the filming of Scipio the African. It
can be argued that this influenced his filming of the type of epic scenes which would later appear
in Scipio. Furthermore, the fascist themes found in the film may have contributed to the reaction
found in Gallone’s strikingly anti-fascist Avanti a Lui Tremava Tutta Roma (All Rome Trembled Before
Him), produced in 1946.42
Even though explicit propaganda films were not produced with consistent frequency in fascist
Italy, the evolution of film in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s reflected, and responded, to
events in the history of the regime and transformations in its ideology.43 Indeed, the structural
organization of the Italian film and propaganda industry evolved significantly in the 1930s, as a
result of political pressures and the state’s increased involvement and interest in film.44 However,
whilst direct, overt film propaganda was judged to be unnecessary and potentially harmful to the
regime’s aims, indirect propaganda was rife. Direct propaganda through other media and sub-
media such as the press and newsreels was also highly organized.45 Casadio has argued against
the characterization of Italian films made during the regime as non-fascist and politically neutral.
Rather, the recourse to ideological symbolism in the moving image is seen as profoundly fascist
and conservative.46 Self-censorship and the appeasement of political authorities may have played
a part in film-makers’ decisions about content, but what seems evident through analysis of films
such as Scipio the African is that indirect propaganda and aggrandizement of the regime and its
(self-proclaimed) Roman imperial past formed avenues of covert political expression exploited
by film directors.
Culturally and politically, Gallone’s film was produced at a time when the regime, although
looking outwardly in terms of imperial ambition, was becoming increasingly culturally restrictive,
especially on foreign imports. In 1937, the year that Scipio the African was produced, competition
in the Italian film market was healthy and focused predominantly on Hollywood movies. In that
year, for example, 187 American films were screened in Italy, as opposed to 37 Italian ones.47 The
situation was to change dramatically after 1939, when legislation which promoted a state mon-
opoly on film distribution and awarded economic incentives to Italian films caused the withdrawal
of the major American production companies (Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Paramount, Warner Bros
and 20th Century Fox) from the Italian market. Thus, by 1942, the number of American films
screened in Italy had decreased to two, while a record 119 Italian films were screened in the
country in the same year. This had an impact on the messages transmitted to the national audi-
ence. Although Gallone’s film cannot be situated within this more heavily restricted period, it
was nonetheless made at a time when international friction and positioning was starting to affect

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Italian politics and the country’s internal cultural landscape. As a result, the visual landscape
offered to audiences was also in a state of flux.
Brunetta identifies three phases in the development of fascist themes in Italian 1930s film.48
These phases are thematic rather than chronological, even though key events (such as the 1935
invasion of Abyssinia) are recognized as temporal initiators of new phases. The first identified
phase concerns the promotion of the ideology of rurality, through films such as Sole, Terra Madre
and Camicia Nera.49 These films, in particular Sole and Terra Madre, were influenced in part by the
concept of strapaese, the glorification and mythologization of Italian rurality which was one of
the bases of fascist ideology.50 Sole, for example, focused on the land reclamation project in the
Pontine Marshes. This project was in its first stages at the end of the 1920s, following the promul-
gation of reclamation legislation in 1928 and the regime’s increasingly anti-urban policies.51 Terra
Madre, on the other hand, focused more closely on the negative aspects of urban bourgeois life as
opposed to more ‘healthy’ rural lifestyles.52
The second phase attempted to create linkages between the characteristics of historic and
mythical leaders of the past, and Mussolini himself as the leader of totalitarian fascism.53 Films
such as Scipio the African belong more closely to this phase. Although contemporary film critics
have criticized Gallone for the film’s overly lyrical composition, and for the script’s reliance on
archaic forms of expression derived from Latin, nonetheless the film makes clear references to
Italy’s colonial enterprise.54 Scipio the African invites comparisons and historical parallels between
fascist colonialism and the depicted heroism of ancient Roman imperialism. War, furthermore,
is justified in the film by referral to the peace, prosperity, productivity and stability which must
follow a successful struggle against nature and unruly future colonial subjects. This ensures the
translation of spectators’ gaze from the bleak present to a positive future whose outlines are,
however, still confused in the haze of time. The justification of colonial war through a film such
as Scipio the African highlights the meanings attached to imperial projects by the regime.
From 1935 onwards, in the third thematic phase, Italian film can be characterized as overtly
focused on colonization and empire.55 This new emphasis in film resonated closely with the
regime’s increased attention to colonial expansion, as evidenced by the Ethiopian war of 1935.
What may be termed a ‘colonial turn’ in Italian cinema was not an isolated national infatuation
with empire; similar foci for film can be found in other national cinemas in the early twentieth
century. The United States, for example, saw the production of Morocco, Beau Geste and The Lost
Patrol, prominent for their colonial themes, during the 1920s and 1930s.56 Although Scipio the
African belongs more closely to the second phase, it is also closely connected with this third,
colonial phase.
Carmine Gallone was a director trained largely outside Italy. He did not restrict himself to one
particular genre. He is seen as the least politicized of the film directors of the fascist era, when
compared to figures like Alessandro Blasetti and Giovacchino Forzano.57 Yet he was chosen to
celebrate fascist Italy’s colonial wars on the silver screen. This is not wholly surprising, nor is it
coincidental. Iaccio notes that in the mid-1920s Gallone was one of the first directors to posit
a direct historical link, on film, between a glorious past and the fascist present. It was a short
conceptual leap to the construction of a link between ancient imperial leaders and Mussolini. In
the 1925 film Cavalcata Ardente, for example, the director linked the heroism and idealism of the
Risorgimento, Italy’s struggle for national unity and independence, with fascism’s struggle for
power in twentieth century Italy.58 Garibaldi, the eponymous Risorgimento leader, is portrayed

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in the film as a Duce figure, and his red-shirted followers wear shirts which appear to be almost
totally black – a visual link to Mussolini’s black-shirted followers.59 The following year, Gallone
progressed to a consideration of Roman themes with his Last Days of Pompeii (Ultimi Giorni di
Pompei), in which the excavations which brought Pompeii to light after 1900 years are showcased,
over three hours.60 This highlights the regime’s fascination with ancient Rome, an infatuation not
only present in film but also in the regime’s overt support of disciplines like archaeology.61 In
Scipio the African, Gallone developed this approach by making the conceptual and historical leap
which attempted to link the past, in the shape of imperial Rome, to the fascist imperial project in
the present. The next section will explore the filming of Scipio the African in the marshes, and will
analyse the film in order to understand how Carmine Gallone linked internal colonization in the
Pontine Marshes with imperialism and the fascist colonial enterprise in Africa.

IV. Beating Hannibal at his own game: film, internal

colonization and fascist imperialism
Film is not widely regarded in Italian and fascist studies as the regime’s propaganda medium of
choice. Indeed, only 34 overt propaganda films were produced by the state in 1930–43.62 This may
create the false impression that film was not fascistized, or that it was not one of the main planks
of fascist propaganda, and the argument below outlines the linkages between media regulation
in fascist Italy and the construction of imaginaries in film.63 Furthermore, the notion that film
was somehow marginal to fascist propaganda efforts can be disputed through two arguments.
Firstly, even though the fascist regime may not have produced a great number of overt works of
cinematic propaganda, the influence of self-censorship on filmmakers should not be discounted.
Political aims need not be exclusively expressed through official propaganda films, as has been
shown by MacKenzie in his study of the cinema and radio in the formation of ideas of British
identity and empire.64 For example, director Cesare Zavattini clearly argued that such subtle
‘internal’ censorship played a part in determining the content of films produced in Italy under
Mussolini.65 Secondly, through the use of economically restrictive and monopolistic legislation
(from 1938 onwards), the Italian film market became increasingly closed to external influences
as the 1930s progressed. This helped to notionally support the national film industry, but it also
created the possibility for the regime to control and direct what was screened in Italy’s cinemas.
For example, various scholars have examined the manner in which subtle subversive meanings,
focusing on sexuality and gender, were present in mainstream Italian feature cinema during the
1930s.66 They also analyse audiences’ reactions to cinema’s constructed meanings (Pickering-
Iazzi, for example, analyses female audiences and the discursive and textual construction of
Italian East Africa through fascist colonial cinematic imagery).67 It would be a fallacy, therefore,
to characterize feature films produced during the fascist period as escapist, ‘white telephone’
(telefoni bianchi) products free to pursue any politically undesirable theme.68
Film in fascist Italy was regulated from 1937 onwards by the ministry of popular culture (known
as MinCulPop). It had evolved directly from the ministry of press and propaganda, founded in
1935; however, the MinCulPop had deeper institutional roots which cannot be fully explored here.69
Films and documentaries were regulated through the ministry and its officials. Newsreels were
regulated through another state-sponsored institution, the LUCE (‘Light’) institute, an acronym

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for L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (‘The Union of Educational Cinematography’). It is through

the newsreels of the LUCE institute that the filming of Scipio the African can be analysed, as a
way of triangulating the film’s representation of fascism and empire with the regime’s mediation,
through newsreels, of meanings pertinent to the film itself, and to the location in which it was
filmed.
Archival research has revealed that LUCE produced a total of 70 newsreels and nine docu-
mentaries focused on the Pontine Marshes internal colonization project. Because LUCE main-
tained a largely complete moving picture archive, the study of LUCE newsreels does not suffer
from the limitation of the ‘selective survival of materials’ whereby only a biased record of
historical material is allowed to survive.70 Around 90% of the newsreels, documentaries and other
cinematic material produced by the LUCE institute have survived to this day, as was found when
the USA returned them to Italy in the 1970s.71 Therefore, the 70 newsreels which have been
identified as focusing on the Pontine Marshes project can be judged to form a fairly complete
record of cinematographic coverage. This paper uses a smaller selection of newsreels, of which
only two focus explicitly on the Pontine Marshes: the rest are concerned with the filming of
Scipio the African. The following examines firstly the manner in which newsreels concentrated on
the film’s national importance, before analysing newsreels’ representation of the filming of key
scenes from the film. These exemplify the idea of struggle for colonial expansion through the re-
enactment of an epic battle on the ‘conquered’, reclaimed land of the Pontine Marshes.
The importance of Gallone’s film in the eyes of the regime can be partly assessed through
the attention paid to the filming process by key political figures. The filmmakers of the LUCE
institute produced several newsreels showing famous personages visiting the studios, sets and
locations of the filming of Scipio the African. For example, newsreel B115972 shows various fascist
dignitaries watching the screening of Scipio the African at the 1937 Biennale di Venezia (the Venice
film festival, where it won the Mussolini Cup for best Italian film).73 Reels focusing on the more
technical aspects of filmmaking were also produced.74 Dignitaries were present throughout the
making of Scipio the African, for example at the commencement of recording for the film in 1936
and at other moments in the filming process.75 This clearly shows the regime’s support for the
subject, content and timing of Gallone’s film. Mussolini himself took an interest in the making of
the film, travelling to the Cinecittà film studios in Rome to spectate at the recording of part of the
soundtrack.76 Furthermore, newsreels aimed to link the Roman empire’s presumed civilizational
mission in Africa with the fascist regime’s representation of colonial ambitions as harbingers of
progress. For example, a 1939 newsreel focused on the destruction of Carthage by Scipio the
African, but also included footage highlighting the urban improvements built by the Romans, and
by Augustus in particular. The newsreel’s focus was on aqueducts, bringing water into the city.77
Thus, the conquest of Carthage was framed and justified through a discourse which made war
and destruction of the ‘Other’ a prerequisite for the betterment of that selfsame ‘Other’ through
engineering and imported ‘civilization’. Tellingly, the newsreel ends with the screening of a fascist
parade. This posits a further link with ancient Rome through the intermingling of Roman imagery
(aqueducts, ruins) and the regime’s present (urban parades), a parallel is made between the armies
of Scipio and fascist power.
Newsreels about Scipio the African focused heavily on content, and in particular on the filming
of the battle scenes, military engagements and sweeping vistas of armies on the move across the
plain. For example newsreel B1004, screened nationwide in December 1936, featured elephants

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which were used for battle scenes featuring Hannibal’s mounted elephant troops.78 The reel
focuses on the elephants performing circus tricks. However, as is so often the case with visual
sources such as film, it is the margins and the context which are truly enlightening. Thus, the
elephants are shown performing in a square in the New Town of Sabaudia, in the Pontine Marshes.
Sabaudia was founded in 1934 and inaugurated the following year by Mussolini, who laid its first
stone in an elaborate ceremony in which he also traced the boundaries of the town using a tractor,
linking back to Roman town-building traditions. The screening of tamed elephants (feared non-
human members of an army vanquished by Rome in modern-day Tunisia) in a town built by
fascism upon marshes reclaimed from nature and colonized after a national struggle highlights
the constructed victory of fascism over nature on the one hand, and over ‘uncivilized’ colonial
lands (both domestic and foreign) on the other.79
Newsreel B1014 is particularly interesting in its narrative structure.80 It features the filming
of the battle of Zama in the Pontine Marshes. The newsreel opens with actors and extras getting
ready, followed by scenes showing visiting dignitaries, including Mussolini, Dino Alfieri (minister
for press and propaganda), and the president of LUCE touring the sets. The narrator states that
the dignitaries are there to witness ‘one of the greatest battles of history and of cinematography’,
hinting at the historical background to the film but also at the novel medium utilized to represent
the battle. Mussolini and his followers then mingle with the actors and extras, who are shown
(and heard) acclaiming the Duce. Following this, Mussolini climbs onto a tower-like structure
on which a camera is located, ready to film the scene of ancient armies sweeping across the flat,
reclaimed land of the Pontine Marshes. In a captivating newsreel sequence, vast armies of actors
walking across the landscape are interspersed with views of Mussolini witnessing this spectacle
through the eye of the camera at the top of what is almost a panoptic tower. At the end of the
scene, the newsreel focuses on the multitude of mounted troops, and as the narrator states that
‘it is impossible to contain ten thousand fascist hearts’ in Roman legionary uniform, the mounted
actors break ranks and gallop over to where Mussolini is standing, shouting slogans celebrating
the Duce. The narrator explains this by referring to the irresistible attraction exerted by Mussolini,
described in the newsreel as the enabler behind ‘Italian cinematography and all other activities
of the nation’.81 Thus the reel posits a link between fascist armies and the new Roman leader
Mussolini, who, in the eyes of the regime’s propagandists, had initiated the battle for the Pontine
Marshes and prevailed.
Whilst several newsreels were concerned with the filming of Gallone’s film per se, archival
research has also revealed that newsreels concentrating on a historical or archaeological focus
on Italy’s African colonies were also produced in the 1930s, contributing to the creation of an
atmosphere of interest in the colonies, and constructing a shared sense of history whereby the
Roman past of the Italian nation was also seen to apply to Italy’s African colonies through the
Roman empire. Film was utilized to build a historical justification for colonialism.82

V. Mediating fascist ambition

The following examines Gallone’s 1937 film per se. The film’s classical storyline is outlined and
paralleled to fascist messages of the era, focusing on: a.) the film’s use of colonial rhetoric and
imagery to justify and glorify Roman and fascist imperialism, and b.) the parallels between Scipio’s

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conquest of Carthage and Mussolini’s land reclamation drive and colonization project in the
Pontine Marshes.
The storyline of Scipio the African follows the classical story of Scipio, a Roman proconsul.
After the Roman defeat at Cannae in 216 BC, he was chosen by the Roman Senate to repel
Hasdrubal from Spain and to stop Hannibal from ravaging Italy. Scipio successfully defeated
Hasdrubal’s troops in southern Spain, utilizing ingenious and rapid troop movements by land
and sea, and culminating in the conquest of New Carthage (where the current city of Cartagena
in Spain now stands). This ensured the solidity of Roman rule over the Iberian peninsula for the
next 500 years. However, Hannibal still threatened Rome. As the story goes, Scipio believed that
the struggle should have been taken to the doors of Carthage, close to modern-day Tunis. After a
period of political struggle and indecision, the Senate gave Scipio control of Sicily as a base from
which to launch his attack on Carthage. Scipio’s calculation was that a direct threat to Carthage
would cause Hannibal to redeploy his army in Africa, where he would be confronted face-to-face
and destroyed. There is a clear initial parallel between Scipio, depicted as a natural leader taking
hold of Rome’s destiny from squabbling political elites, and Mussolini’s taking over power from
‘weak’ liberal governments after the promised reparations at the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, had
not materialized. In Gallone’s film, Scipio is often shown in profile, resembling a Roman bust –
or resembling the poses in which Mussolini was often himself photographed (Figure 1).
The film opens with a rolling script giving the historical background to events in the film –
much like he opening of Star Wars films, except that the background is not one of interstellar
space, but of Roman carvings showing key battles. The movie’s starting point is the Roman
defeat at Cannae on August 2, 216 B.C., when, as stated in the film, ‘fifty thousand Roman
soldiers were massacred on the Plain of Cannae’. The first landscape shown in the film is that

FIGURE 1

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 Caprotti: Scipio Africanus

of the battlefield, strewn with Roman bodies. The Roman army’s standard lies on the ground. A
hand suddenly appears on-screen and raises the standard, with its imperial eagle symbol, over the
bodies, while a voice shouts ‘Avenge the dead of Cannae!’ This same exhortation appears again
at the end of the film, when Scipio is rallying his troops for a final assault. The link between war
and its cause in past wrongs is made before actors play any role in the film.
We are introduced to Scipio when the camera’s focus shifts to Rome, with Scipio about to
make his case to the senate for a pre-emptive strike against Carthage. Scipio – played by he ironic-
ally named Annibale Ninchi – is shown making his entrance walking to the forum to argue for
the ejection of Hannibal from Italy by attacking Carthage directly. He walks to the forum through
throngs of citizens with their hands raised in the Roman salute. There is a clear parallel with
scenes of Mussolini being hailed by crowds. Gallone’s film then proceeds to show his battles near
Carthage until the epochal event at Zama. Here, in 202 BC, with an army inferior in numbers,
the Roman commander prevailed over Hannibal through superior tactics, including the use of
mercenary Numidian cavalry led by Massinissa, and the defeat of Hannibal’s elephants through
the strategic manoeuvring of troops in cohorts (a formation invented by Scipio). This enabled the
elephants to be overwhelmed and slaughtered.
The first ideas for Scipio the African took form in 1935, the year in which Italy invaded Ethiopia.83
Luigi Freddi, the head of the directorate-general for cinematography in the fascist regime, stated
that the film’s aim was to ‘translate into images the essential identity of spirit which unites the
Great Rome of African conquest to the Great Rome of the Ethiopian conquest’.84 Carmine
Gallone’s film catalysed several strands inherent within Italian political and ideological dis-
course in the 1930s. Firstly, the film focused on colonial victory, which had been the goal of
successive Italian governments since the 1890s. In particular, Roman victory at the battle of
Zama (Scipio’s revenge for Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at Cannae) was an on-screen
catharsis for the 1896 defeat of the Italian army at Adwa, avenged by fascist Italy’s conquest of
Ethiopia in 1935. At the end of the screened battle, the camera pans over a landscape strewn with
bodies, and the exclamation ‘The dead of Cannae are avenged. Hannibal is defeated’, is heard
superimposed upon this panorama of destruction.
Secondly, the film posited a clear dividing line between ‘civilized’ Roman armies, paralleled
with fascist ‘civilization’, and ‘uncivilized’ Carthaginian armies. Carthaginians make their appear-
ance 14 minutes into the film, as a raucous band of soldiers raiding a Roman villa. They are
depicted as dishonourable and cruel, kidnapping women and enslaving Romans, meting out
random violence to women and men alike (Figure 2). They are also represented as less than
civilized – in one scene, a Carthaginian warrior is shown drinking from a water trough meant
for horses and other animals. Gallone represents these non-Roman soldiers as warriors (not
professional soldiers or legionaries) dressed in what was regarded as strange garb, and utilizing
fearsome ‘wild’ animals (elephants) in their formations. The focus on civilization and technology
in opposition to indigenous landscapes is not a feature exclusive to Gallone’s film. In Il Cammino
degli Eroi, for example, director Corrado d’Errico represented war, in this case the colonial war in
Ethiopia, as a civilizing enterprise aimed at rationalizing a part of Africa.85 The film’s imaginary
focuses on the invading Italian forces as harbingers of benevolent and efficient regime change.
A fascination with technology is evident in the film, which focuses in detail on the logistics
of invasion and the machinery and technology of war and civilization, such as road-building
projects, new hospitals and hygiene education for Ethiopian children.86

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FIGURE 2

Something which is original to Gallone’s film is the material as well as symbolic annihilation
of an ‘othered’ nature through the slaughtering of some of the elephants which took part in the
film. A cast of 32,848 human extras and 50 elephants were utilized during filming. In the final
battle scene, the attacking elephants are shown being defeated through a strategy of encirclement.
Many of these animals were actually slaughtered on screen, hacked and speared to death while
the cameras were rolling. This supposedly produced a realistic and spectacular effect of carnage
before victory. In the battle proper, elephants are shown crushing Roman soldiers, who let them
through their ranks in order to slaughter them. The film shows a succession of attacks on the
elephants: one pachyderm is hobbled when a javelin hits his rear leg; another is stabbed by a
soldier’s sword; another rears its head in pain as a spear penetrates its eye. It is in these gruesome
and gory moments of Gallone’s film that elephants, representing the wild and barbaric aspects of
African Carthage, are defeated. A Roman catharsis is born out of the subjugation and dominance
of Carthaginians – who are in this case represented by animals. At the same time, the film drives
home the point that the Roman army was a ‘civilized’ army: when a legionnaire is about to spear
an elephant which has a baby elephant by her side, Scipio stops the soldier, looking meaningfully
towards the baby elephant. Drawing on Anderson’s analysis of animal-human interaction, the use
(and, in this case, the killing) of elephants in the filming of Scipio the African points to a view of
nature as a colonized space.87 ‘Exotic’ nature was dominated through the spearing of elephants by
‘civilized’ Roman legionaries; at the same time, newsreels’ representation of filming and of the use
of elephants on the reclaimed Pontine Marshes points to fascist success in internal colonization
and in the construction of a positive, ‘fascist’ nature overlaying a primordial ‘first’ nature.
In Scipio the African, civilization and orderly, technological soldiers led by a strong leader were
depicted as prevailing over African multitudes. This leads to the third point, which is that the

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figure of Scipio parallels that of Mussolini. The film’s depiction of Scipio as representing a break
with a ‘weak’ past is evident at the start of the film in the representation of the raising of an army
to combat Hannibal. Gallone shows Scipio, in a Duce-like pose with chin lifted high, talking to his
commanders, who inform him that none of the veterans of Cannae have enlisted to join the new
army. Scipio unflinchingly puts them to work manufacturing weapons – the new Roman army
was, instead, to be composed of loyal followers, characterized by the conviction of victory. Scipio
is first and foremost portrayed in the film as a leader of people, in mass form, who constantly
considers the good of the motherland. Thus the rhetoric employed by Scipio in the film is heavily
reminiscent of Mussolini’s rambling but rousing speeches (Figure 3).88
In sharp contrast to this, Hannibal is characterized, in a rather facile way, as evil. This impres-
sion is partly conveyed through physical appearance: the Carthaginian leader is portly, has unruly
hair, and wears an eye patch (Figure 4). His motivations are also different to Scipio’s: while Scipio
attacks Carthage to ‘defend Rome’, Hannibal states that his destiny is to destroy Rome, his only
motivation being hate: ‘When I was nine my father demanded I swear hatred for the Romans;
for this hatred I put aside everything’. In a face-to-face exchange with a captured Roman woman,
Hannibal laughs when she boldly calls him an ‘ogre who eats little children’. Her boldness is repaid
by violence. This is contrast to Roman behaviour: when Queen Sophonisba is captured and kills
herself with poison, Scipio is shown considerately sending her body back to Carthage with full
honours. Likewise, he shows mercy to captured Carthaginian soldiers, in one case stopping his
legionaries from using a captured spy as a projectile for a catapult. When the captured spies are
returned to Hannibal unharmed, the Carthaginian leader disdainfully states that ‘This insolent
generosity of his is more dangerous than his sword’. The contrast between the inhuman Hannibal
and his barbaric city, and honourable Scipio and disciplined Roman armies, is evident.

FIGURE 3

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FIGURE 4

Gallone’s film also screened parallels between newly conquered, productive lands, and the
‘new’ landscape of the Pontine Marshes. Scipio’s last words in Scipio the African are: ‘The grain
is good. And tomorrow, with the aid of the gods, we begin to plant it’. This is a clear reference,
firstly to Mussolini’s Battle for Wheat, which aimed to increase national production and eventually
exploit African colonies for agriculture as well as raw materials. Secondly, in light of the Pontine
Marshes project, it can be seen as a signifier pointing to fascism’s ‘victory’ in the marshes against
swampland and an inimical nature, and the subsequent transformation of reclaimed areas into
agriculturally productive land which could fulfil Mussolini’s aims in the Battle for Wheat. In
the film, at the end of the battle, a Roman standard is raised over the field of battle where the
struggle between the two armies had taken place. This is reminiscent of a fascist newsreel on land
reclamation in the Pontine Marshes, showing noisy scenes of reclamation and struggle against
nature (including the dynamiting of land), followed by the Italian flag flying over the mastered and
conquered marshes.89 Another newsreel, from 1933, can also be used to support this point: the
reel focuses on the negativity of the marshes’ ‘first’ nature; this is followed by the imposition of
the fascist symbol on the landscape, heralding a civilizational transformation.90 Therefore, Scipio
the African made clear reference both to key political events of the era, and to the fascist project
in the Pontine Marshes which, through film, was re-mapped onto projected African landscapes
which pointed to the wider fascist colonial enterprise in Africa.

VI. Conclusion
Almost every nation under the sun bows down before the might of Rome;
and will you alone go to war, not even considering the fate of the Carthaginians,
who boasted of great Hannibal and their glorious Phoenician ancestors,
but fell beneath Scipio’s hand? (Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War)

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An analysis of Carmine Gallone’s Scipio the African, and its representation in newsreels, highlights
the potential for analysis of the intricate interconnections between representation and material
construction during the latter half of the second decade of Italy’s fascist regime. In particular, the
film shows evidence of a directed reflection and glorification of the regime’s civilizational project
in the Pontine Marshes, and, through the film’s cultural subject matter, in its African colonies.
The screening of the filming process through newsreels blended the supposed objective reality
of reclamation of the Pontine Marshes with images of historical victory and empire in Tunisia.
The marshes’ landscape was seeded with symbolic signifiers pointing to a direct link between
fascism and the Roman empire, thus justifying the mastering of the marshes (through internal
colonization) and of colonies further afield (through aggressive expansion). The successful
reclamation of the marshes by the fascist regime thus became, through film, a dry run or a large-
scale experiment which justified and assured a victorious outcome in the subjugation of Italy’s
African colonies. The film itself, as has been shown, was replete with embedded meanings con-
necting ancient Roman victories with colonial ambitions in the 1930s, and constructing parallels
between a general of the past and the figure of Mussolini. The central importance of the Pontine
Marshes lies in the fact that Scipio the African pointed at a future totally victorious situation in
Italy’s African colonies, but, by being filmed on the conquered land of the marshes, its claim
was partially justified through the literal parallel between unconquered natural landscapes devoid
of human agency and the conceptually ‘empty’ lands to be conquered in Africa. Through film,
the Pontine Marshes project became a metaphor for eventual success in fascist Italy’s imperial
ambitions.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Matthew Gandy, James Ryan and Jason Dittmer for commenting on an earlier draft of
this paper. I am also indebted to Phil Crang, and to the editorial board of Cultural Geographies, for assistance
during the review process. The use of film images was made possible by LUCE. This study was presented at
the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, 10 March 2006.

Biographical note
Federico Caprotti is a lecturer in human geography at University College London (UCL). He has published
on nature/society interactions, as well as on urban cultural and historical topics. His forthcoming work
includes a study of the representation of the Abyssinian War (1935-6) in newsreels and documentary film.
He can be contacted at: Department of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building, London
WC1E 6BT, UK; email: fkaprotz1@yahoo.co.uk

Notes
1 C. Gallone, Scipione l’Africano (Consorzio Scipione-ENIC, 1937).
2 The paper is based on documents from the Segreteria Personale del Duce, Carteggio Ordinario (SPDCO),
Mussolini’s 1922–1943 personal archive in the Central State Archive (ACS), Rome, as well as Mussolini’s
private archive within the Central State Archive, the Segreteria Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Riservato

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(SPDCR). Furthermore, propaganda newsreels from the historical archive of the LUCE Institute,
Rome, are utilized to show how the process of filming Gallone’s movie was related both to 1930s
colonial expansionist themes as well as Roman themes through the silver screen. Newsreel segments are
referenced according to their archival classification: they do not have titles but serial numbers beginning
with the letter B followed by four numbers. For example, B0391.
3 D. Gregory, The colonial present (Oxford, Blackwell, 2004). See also E.W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1995).
4 See G. Rose Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (London, SAGE, 2001);
G. Rose ‘On the need to ask how, exactly, is geography “visual”?’, Antipode: a radical journal of geography
35 (2003), pp. 212–21; D. Matless, ‘Gestures around the visual’, Antipode: a radical journal of geography 35
(2003), pp. 222–6; F. Driver, ‘On geography as a visual discipline’, Antipode: a radical journal of geography
35 (2003), pp. 227–31; J.R. Ryan, ‘Who’s afraid of visual culture?’, Antipode: a radical journal of geography
35 (2003), pp. 232–7; M. Crang, ‘The hair in the gate: visuality and geographical knowledge’, Antipode:
a radical journal of geography 35 (2003), pp. 238–43; D.Z. Sui, ‘Visuality, aurality and shifting metaphors
of geographical thought in the late twentieth century’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90
(2000), pp. 322–43.
5 M. Power and A. Crampton, ‘Reel geopolitics: cinemato-graphing political space’, Geopolitics 10 (2005),
pp. 193–203.
6 M. Gandy, ‘Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers 28 (2003), pp. 218–37.
7 D. Gregory, ‘Between the book and the lamp: imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849-50’, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 20 (1995), pp. 29–57; Said, Orientalism.
8 R.A. Rosenstone, Visions of the past: the challenge of film to our idea of history (Cambridge, MA, Harvard
University Press, 1995), p. 60; see also P. Iaccio, Cinema e storia: percorsi immagini testimonianze (2nd Edition)
(Naples, Liguori Editore, 2000), p. 14.
9 A. Crampton and M. Power, ‘Frames of reference on the geopolitical stage: Saving Private Ryan and the
Second World War/Second Gulf War intertext’, Geopolitics 10 (2005), pp. 244–65.
10 D. Dixon and L. Zonn, ‘Confronting the geopolitical aesthetic: Fredric Jameson’, The perfumed nightmare
and the perilous place of third cinema’, Geopolitics 10 (2005), pp. 290–315.
11 Gregory, The colonial present, p. 10.
12 B. Willems-Braun, ‘Buried epistemologies: the politics of nature in (post)colonial British Columbia’,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997), pp. 3–31.
13 J. Johnson and B. Murton, ‘Re/placing native science: indigenous voices in contemporary constructions
of nature’, Geographical research (2007), pp. 121–9.
14 F. Caprotti, ‘Internal colonization, hegemony and coercion: investigating migration to Southern Lazio,
Italy, in the 1930s’, Geoforum 39 (2008), pp. 942–57.
15 Willems-Braun, ‘Politics’, p. 5.
16 E. Swyngedouw, ‘Technonatural revolutions: the scalar politics of Franco’s hydro-social dream for
Spain, 1939–1975’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (2007), pp. 9–28; E. Swyngedouw,
‘Modernity and hybridity: nature, regeneracionismo, and the production of the Spanish waterscape, 1890–
1930’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (1999), pp. 443–65. See also B. Latour, We have
never been modern (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993).
17 V. Plumwood, ‘Decolonizing relationships with nature’, in W. Adams and M. Mulligan, eds, Decolonizing
nature: strategies for conservation in a postcolonial era (London, Earthscan Publications, 2002), pp. 51–79.
18 G. Traina Paludi e bonifiche nel mondo antico (Rome, ‘L’Erma’ di Bretschneider, 1988). See also C.W. Koot,
‘Marching through marshes: an historical survey of the Agro Pontino’, in A. Voorrips, S.H. Loving and
H. Kamermans, The Agro Pontino survey project: methods and preliminary results (Amsterdam, Instituut Voor

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 Caprotti: Scipio Africanus

Pre-en Protohistorische Archeologie, 1991), pp. 9–20; V. Orsolini Cencelli, ‘Le paludi Pontine nella
storia, nell’arte e nella scienza’, in Istituto di Studi Romani, La bonifica delle paludi Pontine (Rome, Casa
Editrice Leonardo da Vinci, 1935), pp. 1–36.
19 G. Tassinardi, Ten years of land reclamation under the Mussolini Act (Faenza, Fratelli Lega Publishers, 1939).
See also Desideri, L’amministrazione.
20 D.K. Davis, ‘Desert “wastes” of the Maghreb: desertification narratives in French colonial environmental
history of North Africa’, Cultural geographies 11 (2004), pp. 359–87.
21 D. Spurr, The rhetoric of empire: colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing, and imperial administration (Durham,
NC, Duke University Press, 1993).
22 E. Swyngedouw, ‘Modernity and hibridity: nature, regeneracionismo, and the production of the Spanish
waterscape, 1890–1930’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (1999), pp. 443–65. See also
E. Swyngedouw, Social power and the urbanization of water – flows of power (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2004); M. Kaika, City of flows: water, modernity, and the city (London, Routledge, 2005).
23 Desideri, L’amministrazione.
24 See C. Ipsen, Dictating demography: the probem of population in fascist Italy (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1996); C. Ipsen, ‘Population policy in the age of Fascism: observations on recent literature’,
Population and development review 24 (1998), pp. 579–92.
25 Communiqué from Grand Council of Fascism to state, provincial and communal institutions. Date
unknown. ACS, SPDCR, B.32, f.1937. Italics mine.
26 See D.G. Horn, Social bodies: science, reproduction and Italian modernity (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University
Press, 1994).
27 Front page article, Il Messaggero, N.54, 4 March 1937. ACS, SPDCR, B.32, f.1937.
28 See D. Atkinson, ‘Geographical knowledge and scientific survey in the construction of Italian Libya’,
Modern Italy 8 (2003), pp. 9–29; D. Atkinson, ‘Geopolitics, cartography and geographical knowledge: envisioning
Africa from fascist Italy’, in M. Bell, R. Butlin and M. Hefferman, Geography and imperialism, 1820–1940
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 265–97; A. Godlewska, ‘Map, text and image. the
mentality of enlightened conquerors: a new look at the Description de l’Egypte’, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 20 (1995), pp. 5–28; J.B. Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in D. Cosgrove and
S. Daniels, The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 277–312. See also ONC map La Bonifica e la
Trasformazione Fondiaria dell’Agro Pontino al 30 Aprile 1934–XII E.F. ACS, SPDCO, B.372, f.132.862.
29 M. Fuller, ‘Wherever you go, there you are: fascist plans for the colonial city of Addis Ababa and the
colonizing suburb of EUR ’42’, Journal of contemporary history 31 (1996), pp. 397–418.
30 Davis, ‘Desert “Wastes”’.
31 R. Phillips, ‘Dystopian space in colonial representations and interventions: Sierra Leone as the “white
man’s grave”’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography 84B (2002), pp. 3–4, 1–12. See also
G. A. Myers, ‘Colonial geography and masculinity in Eric Dutton’s Kenya Mountain’, Gender, place and
culture – a journal of feminist geography 9 (2002), pp. 23–38.
32 Atkinson, ‘Geographical knowledge’, p. 15.
33 V. Orsolini Cencelli, ‘L’organizzazione tecnica e agraria della redenzione Pontina’, in Istituto di Studi
Romani, La bonifica delle paludi Pontine, (Rome, Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci, 1935), pp. 159–72.
34 Ibid., pp. 161–2.
35 A. Traldi, Fascism and fiction: a survey of Italian fiction on fascism (and its reception in Britain and the United States
(Metuchen, The Scarecrow Press, 1987), pp. 66–7.
36 Anonymous, ‘Civiltà romana’, Universalità Fascista 12 (October 1934), pp. 581–2.
37 V. Orsolini Cencelli, ‘La bonifica e la trasformazione fondiaria dell’Agro Pontino’, in Istituto di Studi
Romani, La bonifica delle paludi Pontine, (Rome, Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci, 1935), pp. 231–58.

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38 R. De Felice, Mussolini il Duce. Gli anni del consenso, 1929–1936 (Turin, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1995).
The emergence of consensus in 1930s Italy also been analysed as the rise of a ‘secular religion’. See
E. Gentile, The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy (London, Harvard University Press, 1996).
39 J. Richards, Visions of yesterday (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 2.
40 P. Mereghetti, Dizionario dei film 1998 (Milan, Baldini&Castoldi, 1997), p. 2306.
41 Palermi and Gallone, Pompei.
42 C. Gallone, Avanti a Lui Tremava Tutta Roma (Rome, Excelsa Film).
43 G.P. Brunetta Storia del cinema Italiano: il cinema del regime, 1929–1945 (2nd Edition) (Rome, Editori Riuniti,
2001), p. 122. Fascist ideology has been described by Schnapp as unstable at the core. See J.T. Schnapp,
‘Heads of state’, Art Issues (1992), pp. 23–8; J. T. Schnapp, ‘Epic demonstrations: fascist modernity
and the 1932 exhibition of the fascist revolution’, in R.J. Golsan, Fascism, aesthetics and culture (London,
University Press of New England, 1992), pp. 34–62.
44 F. Caprotti, ‘Information management and fascist identity: newsreels in fascist Italy’, Media history 11
(2005), pp. 177–91.
45 Brunetta, Cinema Italiano, p. 123.
46 G. Casadio, ‘Il cinema dei telefoni bianchi’, in G. Casadio, E.G. Laura and F. Cristiano, Telefoni bianchi:
realtà e finzione nella società e nel cinema italiano degli anni quaranta (Ravenna, Longo Editore, 1991), pp.
11–30.
47 G. Casadio, ‘Premessa’, in Casadio et al., Telefoni bianchi: realtà e finzione nella società e nel cinema italiano degli
anni quaranta, pp. 7–9.
48 Brunetta, Cinema Italiano.
49 A. Blasetti, Sole (Augustus, 1929); A. Blasetti, Terra madre (Cines, 1931); G. Forzano, Camicia nera, (LUCE,
1933).
50 W.L. Adamson, ‘Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism: cultural politics in the era of Mussolini’,
Journal of modern Italian studies 6 (2001), pp. 230–48.
51 C. Desideri, L’amministrazione dell’agricoltura: 1910–1980 (Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1981).
52 Brunetta, Cinema Italiano, p. 127.
53 Schnapp, ‘Heads’.
54 Brunetta, Cinema Italiano, p. 147.
55 Ibid., p. 136.
56 J. von Sternberg, Morocco (Paramount, 1930); H. Brenon, Beau Geste (Paramount, 1926); J. Ford, The lost
patrol (RKO, 1934). See also Brunetta, Cinema Italiano, pp. 137–8; Richards, Visions.
57 Iaccio, Cinema e storia, p. 38.
58 C. Gallone, Cavalcata ardente (1925).
59 Iaccio, Cinema e storia, p. 38.
60 A. Palermi and C. Gallone, Ultimi Giorni di Pompei (Grandi Films, 1926); G.P. Brunetta, Cent’anni di cinema
italiano. 1: dalle origini alla seconda guerra mondiale (Rome-Bari, Editori Laterza, 1995), pp. 146–7.
61 D. Manacorda and R. Tamassia, Il Piccone del regime (Rome, Armando Curcio Editore, 1985).
62 M. Morandini, ‘Italy from fascism to neo-realism’, in G. Nowell-Smith, The Oxford history of world cinema
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 353–61. See also N. Reeves, The power of film propaganda:
myth or reality? (London, Cassell, 1999).
63 K. Dodds, ‘“Have you seen any good films lately?”, Geopolitics, international relations and film’,
Geography compass 2 (2008), pp. 476–94.
64 J.M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and empire: the manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 67–95.
65 J. Reich, ‘Mussolini at the movies: fascism, film, and culture’, in J. Reich and P. Garofalo, Re-viewing
Fascism: Italian cinema, 1922–1943 (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 3–29.

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 Caprotti: Scipio Africanus

66 D. Forgacs, ‘Sex in the cinema: regulation and transgression in Italian films, 1930–1943’, in Reich and
Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. 141–71; W. Van Watson, Luchino Visconti’s (homosexual) ossessione, in
Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. 172–93; B. Spackman, ‘Shopping for autarchy: Fascism and
reproductive fantasy in Mario Camerini’s Grandi Magazzini’, in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp
276–92; R. Pickering-Iazzi, ‘Ways of looking in black and white: female spectatorship and the miscege-
national body in Sotto la Croce del Sud’, in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. 194–219.
67 Pickering-Iazzi, ‘Ways of looking’.
68 See P. Garofalo and J. Reich, ‘Preface’, in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. vii–xiii; see also
M. Landy, ‘Theatricality and impersonation: the politics of style in the cinema of the Italian fascist
era’, in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. 250–75; M. Stone, ‘The last film festival: the Venice
Biennale goes to war’, in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. 293–314; S. Gundle, ‘Film stars and
society in fascist Italy’, in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, pp. 315–39; Reich, ‘Mussolini’; Forgacs,
‘Sex’; Van Watson, Luchino Visconti.
69 For a fuller exploration of the institutional roots see Caprotti, Information management.
70 M. Emmison and P. Smith, Researching the visual: images, objects, contexts and interactions in social and cultural
inquiry (London, SAGE, 2000), p. 149.
71 Brunetta, Cinema Italiano, p. 362.
72 B1159, (LUCE, 1 September 1937).
73 Mereghetti, Dizionario.
74 B0937 (LUCE, 12 August 1936).
75 See B0938 (LUCE, 19 August 1936) about the start of recording. See the following newsreels: B0978
(LUCE, 21 October 1936); B01018 (LUCE, 30 September 1936), for more focused emphasis on the
filming process.
76 B1090 (LUCE, 5 May 1937).
77 B1448, (LUCE, 25 January 1939).
78 B1004 (LUCE, December 1936).
79 F. Caprotti, ‘Destructive creation: fascist urban planning, architecture and new towns in the Pontine
Marshes’, Journal of historical geography 33 (2007), pp. 651–79.
80 B1014 (LUCE, 23 December 1936).
81 Ibid.
82 Furthermore, a revisitation of the conflict between Rome and Carthage was produced in 1940 by the
LUCE institute, in a short documentary by director Liberio Pensulti titled Roma e Cartagine (Rome and
Carthage). Whilst ‘docufilms’ are generally understood to belong to later cinematic eras, this documentary
fused historical accounts with fictionalized scenes from ancient times.
83 Mereghetti, Dizionario.
84 Freddi, date unknown, in Mereghetti, Dizionario, p. 1681.
85 C. d’Errico, Il cammino degli eroi, (LUCE, 1936).
86 Brunetta, Cinema Italiano, p. 140.
87 K. Anderson, ‘Culture and nature at the Adelaide Zoo: at the frontiers of “human” geography’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20 (1995), pp. 275–94.
88 Mereghetti, Dizionario.
89 B0391, (LUCE, December 1933).
90 B0390, (LUCE, December 1933).

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