An All-Consuming Nationalism: Winemaking, Consumer Culture, and National Identity in Mussolini's Italy

This paper analyzes the centrality of Italy's viti-viniculture industry within the Fascist regime's intertwined campaigns for encouraging the development of a national identity in Italy and establishing a synchronized community of popular consumption under the auspices of the Corporatist State. Since grape vine cultivation was such a widespread practice in Italy, it offered the dictatorship an agro-cultural platform for projecting its socio-economic program to the Italian masses. By promoting Italy's winemaking heritages via popular campaigns and outreaches, such as the annual National Festival of the Grape and Siena's biennial Exhibition-Market of Typical Italian Wines, the regime and its partners in industry aimed to stimulate consumption of Italy's grapes and wines and, simultaneously, to impress upon the masses that Italians, regardless of their regional affiliations and geographical separations, shared these histories and practices as a singular patrimony. As a result of these efforts, I contend, Mussolini's dictatorship hoped to motivate domestic consumers to recognize themselves as Italians.