«Sarebbe più logico bruciarli». Una nota sulla censura dei libri nel fascismo

Abstract

The article is devoted to the historiography on book censorship during fascism published in the last twentyfive years. Censorship was not unknown to Liberal Italy, since in 1890 Crispi introduced the need for a control by the Ministry of Interior of any political publication. Censorship acted on political texts, for example intervening on the school edition of Mazzini’s Duties of Man (1903) to erase references to republicanism, or on moral grounds in the case of sexual references contained in Marinetti’s novel Mafarka (1910). During fascism the first moves towards book censorship were made in 1926, and strenghtened in 1930. Censorship was heavily enforced since 1934, apparently after Mussolini was especially irritated by the cover of a novel which displayed an African woman embraced by an Italian man: a situation which the dictator deemed unappropriate on “racial” grounds. The most severe censorship was enforced since 1938 concerning Jewish and foreign authors. But there were relevant political and “moral” cases of censorship throughout the 1930s.