Contemporary European History (2020), 29, 394–415 doi:10.1017/S0960777319000377 ARTICLE Bacchus among the Blackshirts: Wine Making, Consumerism and Identity in Fascist Italy, 1919–1937 Brian J Griffith University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, 90095-1473, USA
[email protected] This article explores the way in which wine came to be viewed as a quintessentially ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy’s middle- and upper-class households during fascism’s twenty years in power. Due to signifi- cant increases in wine consumption among the labouring classes during the years immediately following the First World War, wine, as a general category of beverage, had become closely associated within the minds of many bourgeois and wealthy consumers with the country’s popular taverns and saloons, alco- holism and physical and moral ‘degeneration.’ In response, fascist Italy’s typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists worked feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage’s downtrodden reputation via a series of wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns during the 1920s and 1930s. By pro- moting the beverage’s hygienic and alimentary qualities, as well as systematically intertwining the moder- ate consumption of the peninsula’s standardised wines with the dictatorship’s nationalisation and popular mobilisation programmes, this article will show, the Industrial Wine Lobby successfully re-established ‘wine’s honour’ and, simultaneously, recontextualised the country’s typical wines as Italy’s wholesome, family-friendly, ‘national beverage’. In November 1933 an extraordinary paperback appeared on the shelves of Italy’s bookstores and news- paper kiosks. Titled The Art of Drinking (L’arte di bere), Umberto Notari’s ‘fictional essay on econom- ics’ addressed the origins of, as well as proposed various solutions to, what many contemporaries considered to be the country’s burgeoning ‘wine crisis’.