On a December day in 1923, in Rome, Peruvian ambassador Pedro Mujica y Carassa received an invitation card signed by Italy’s prime minister and head of the foreign office, Benito Mussolini.Footnote 1 Unaware of the plans brewing among Piedmontese and Milanese businessmen, Mujica joined twelve other Latin American diplomats in Palazzo Chigi’s main hall a few days later, where they were introduced to the Regia Nave Italia, a 22,000-tonne Italian steamship that would reach the shores of South America in 1924 (Figure 1).Footnote 2
Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have documented the journey of the Nave Italia as a vehicle for Italy’s cultural, military and industrial prowess to Latin American audiences. In the late 1990s, Ludovico Inciso di Camerana and Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto documented the making of this enterprise for the first time when contextualising the artwork produced aboard by the art commissioner of the enterprise, Giulio Aristide Sartorio.Footnote 3 These pioneering studies paved the way for Franco Savarino Roggero’s accounts of this mission in the 2010s, focusing on fascism’s cultural diplomacy.Footnote 4 More recently, Laura Fotia has situated the Italia within the broader historiographical debates on fascist cultural diplomacy, while Laura Moure Cecchini has expanded the analysis of artists aboard by examining their visual and rhetorical appeals to the concept of ‘Latinity’.Footnote 5
Figure 1. Map of the ship’s itinerary, in Crociera Italiana nell’America Latina, Programma e piano di Organizzazione (con la cartina dell’itinerario), (G.Spinelli & C., Firenze, 1923). In Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Real Casa, 1921–1925, b.412. Protocollo nº 2854/2025.
In recent years, Latin American perspectives on this case have attracted scholarly attention.Footnote 6 Walter Martínez Hernández has examined the mission’s reception in Mexico, while Eduardo Crivelli Minuti has focused on the voice of Piero Bielli, a journalist aboard the Nave Italia.Footnote 7 Similarly, Edgardo Mondolfi Gudat has explored the Venezuelan leg of the voyage through the private papers of Alessandro Mondolfi, one of the expedition’s organisers.Footnote 8 Among the most innovative contributions is Viridiana Rivera Solano’s exploratory study of the Nave Italia in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, which integrates anthropological and historical methods.Footnote 9
Together, these contributions have expanded our understanding of the Nave Italia. Yet, by foregrounding the decision-making leading to it, and the interactions reported by key actors aboard, this article shifts the focus on the continuities and cleavages of Italian foreign policy towards Latin America. It engages with the historiography on cultural institutions such as the Dante Alighieri and fascism’s ‘parallel diplomacy’, to situate them in the long-term frame of the history of Italian colonial practices in the region.Footnote 10 This study examines the links between economic and ethnographic dimensions of Italian imperialism to understand the differential aspects of fascist foreign policy.
The first section highlights the strategic alignment between Mussolini’s foreign office and Italian business elites in launching the Nave Italia – a convergence of agendas reminiscent of earlier episodes of imperial expansion such as the Corfu Crisis.Footnote 11 As Donna Gabaccia argues, after the First World War, Italian migratory elites turned to ‘the developing world’, yet the making of the Nave Italia shows how communities of Italian migrant labourers were reframed as an asset.Footnote 12 The purpose of the Nave Italia, I argue, was to marry the interests of labour and elite migrants in favour of Italy’s informal empire.Footnote 13
Beyond securing development rights and public contracts, the Nave Italia also serves as a lens to problematise assumptions of uniformity within fascism as ideology and practice.Footnote 14 Following Jennifer Burns and Catherine Keen, this article argues that fascism’s replication abroad was not monolithic but deeply heterogenous.Footnote 15 By adopting an endogenous approach, the second section reveals how polycentrism and pliability shaped Italian identifications with fascism aboard the Nave Italia and in the broader diaspora. Drawing on Federico Finchelstein’s notion of a ‘traveling political universe’, it presents fascism as a malleable, negotiated and mobile political idea rather than a fixed export.Footnote 16
The final sections foreground the coloniality underpinning the Nave Italia. My contention is that the Italia did not diverge from earlier liberal colonial practices; rather, it reanimated them through the diplomatic use of a ‘Latin’ civilisational rhetoric.Footnote 17 Far from just a symbolic gesture by status-seeking local elites, ‘Latinity’ operated as a eugenic tool through which Italians asserted their whiteness, reinforcing racial hierarchies rooted in Risorgimento nationalism.Footnote 18 While cultural celebrations promoted transatlantic bonds, they also legitimised economic arrangements grounded in land dispossession, thus reproducing dynamics of demographic colonialism historically relevant to Italy’s nation-building.Footnote 19 The Nave Italia thus advanced fascism’s racialised vision of empire and sought to contribute to the agrarian colonisation of land through resource deals with Latin American governments.
Ultimately, the Nave Italia demonstrates how fascism’s development among Italians in Latin America was deeply entangled with enduring colonial practices.Footnote 20 Its commercial, cultural and political dimensions must be understood as part of a broader extractive continuity in which migrant labour was reimagined as a strategic asset for a foreign policy aimed at expanding Italy’s informal empire.
Floating Colonial Continuities
The Nave Italia was a floating mobile enterprise shaped by liberal-era institutions and executed by a mélange of actors, from members of liberal political elites to returning migrants. Originally launched as a commercial venture after the March on Rome, it hybridised fascist foreign policing with pre-existing strategies of economic and demographic expansion in Latin America. Its process of formation takes us to the Florentine headquarters of the industrialist lobby group Sindacato Finanziario Italiano (SFI) and reveals its composite nature.
According to the 1924 exhibition catalogue, the idea emerged after a visit by Alessandro Mondolfi, a returnee from Venezuela, to the SFI.Footnote 21 At a time when the Italian industry faced dwindling opportunities in a protectionist European economy, Mondolfi’s depiction of Latin America as a land of untapped potential and a promising market persuaded the SFI president, Silvio Pellerano, and his colleagues. However, two important aspects complicate this account, offering a more nuanced understanding of why and how this project gained traction.
First, floating tradeshows were not a novelty. By 1922, the Trinacria ship had already completed two missions of ‘industrial penetration’ across the Western Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea.Footnote 22 While not commercially groundbreaking, these missions revealed systemic problems with overseas commerce. In his reports, the envoy of the irredentist organisation Lega Italiana per la Tutela degli Interessi Nazionali (hereafter Lega), the Venetian journalist Arturo Calza, warned about ‘self-styled foreign representatives of Italian companies exploiting Italian labour’ and ‘feeding the clever contrivance of unscrupulous trade’ by defrauding Italians – whether of their goods, money or labour.Footnote 23 These warnings resonated with the SFI, highlighting the urgent need for trustworthy representatives abroad. Interpreted as a call to ‘Italianise’ the networks of commercial delegates, it enabled a convergence between liberal business interests and irredentist agendas, fusing economic ambition with nationalist imperatives.Footnote 24
Secondly, Mondolfi’s dealings with the SFI must be understood in the context of broader interactions with the Venezuelan government.Footnote 25 In December 1922, Mussolini met Venezuelan Senator José A. Tagliaferro.Footnote 26 While leaving no trace of their conversation, this meeting followed increased interest from the Instituto Nazionale per la Colonizzazione e le imprese di Lavori all’Estero (INCILE), which had been monitoring oil reserves in Venezuela through engineer Antonio Lanzoni and geologist Fossa Mancini.Footnote 27 Around this time, Lanzoni had returned to Rome to secure financial backing to allow ‘the most rapid exploitation of the results that the technical mission will shortly yield’.Footnote 28 The aims behind the Nave Italia were not only to open new markets but also to facilitate access to natural resources.
Under Emigration Commissioner Giuseppe De Michelis, the INCILE documented support from the Italo-Venezuelan community while overseeing Italian enterprises and promoting strategic settlement abroad. Contemporary expressions from the Italo-Venezuelan community articulated a clear preference for colonisation as the framework for Italian immigration:
The only form in which one can envisage Italian immigration in these quarters is, in our opinion, colonisation. [. . .] Italy should obtain land concessions in order to plant agricultural colonies in the innermost areas, far from the shores.Footnote 29
This perspective likely shaped Mussolini’s meeting with Senator José A. Tagliaferro, extending into concrete discussions around agricultural colonisation and resource extraction. The emerging concept of the Nave Italia offered an ideal platform to operationalise this model of intervention across the South American continent.
Reflecting this evolving strategy, in January 1923, Mussolini issued a directive instructing diplomatic and consular authorities to support ‘all the initiatives aimed at getting our companies to work abroad, with a special reference to the INCILE’.Footnote 30 This marked a governmental shift towards reconfiguring emigration policing as a vehicle for expansion, explicitly tied to resource extraction and settler colonialism. Within weeks, the Duce integrated the Nave Italia into his foreign policy agenda, convening a meeting with the promoters. Mussolini framed the venture as a proof of Italy’s ‘invincible will to act’ and ‘a sure document of our potential’ for Latin American republics.Footnote 31 The Nave Italia was for him, and for contemporaries such as Giuseppe Bottai, a way to project Italy as a naval power and imagine an ethnographic empire.Footnote 32
The Ministry of Industry and Commerce, led by Teofilo Rossi, further institutionalised this alignment of economic and political ambitions. The promoter group included liberal and fascist elites. Alongside Pellerano were notable figures of Italy’s cultural, colonial and economic institutions: Paolo Boselli, president of the Dante Alighieri society, and Deputy Vittorio Emanuele Orlando embodied liberal nationalist principles; Luigi Rava and Marco Cassin represented the Tourism Board and Chambers of Commerce; while Ernesto Artom and Ernesto Presbitero brought in the technical knowledge gathered by the Italian Colonial Institute and the Italian Naval League respectively.Footnote 33 Rather than a purely fascist venture, the Nave Italia thus illustrates how liberal-era elites actively participated in, and legitimised, the articulation of fascist expansionist aims.
The Nave Italia took the form of a chartered company with a dual purpose: commercial expansion and colonisation on the one hand, and elite tourism on the other.Footnote 34 Through negotiations, the Mussolini government formally supported the project by establishing an autonomous ‘moral entity’ via royal decree, charged with managing the cruise ‘to the exclusion of any private profit’. The government contributed with a fund of 300,000 lire to cover technical expenses – without any apparent parliamentary scrutiny – and a repurposed German steamship captured during the war.Footnote 35 Naval oversight was entrusted to Costanzo Ciano, a public figure that bridged fascist and conservative interests.Footnote 36 Furthermore, a general council of contributing societies oversaw operations, each contributing 20,000 lire.Footnote 37 Ultimately, this strategic alliance between state power and private initiative transformed the Nave Italia from a speculative enterprise into a flagship project of overseas ambition.
With its institutional framework firmly in place, the Nave Italia brought together industrial lobbies, the Lega and the Italian Colonial Institute under a shared agenda. Yet in foreign policy, Mussolini also sought alignment with Portugal and Spain, two ‘Latin’ European nations and former imperial powers in South America. He did not rely, however, on formal diplomatic channels, instead tasking Luigi Bacci, secretary of the Italo-Spanish Chamber of Commerce, with proposing a cultural and economic institute uniting Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American foreign policies.Footnote 38 Though unsuccessful, Bacci’s work fostering ‘a communion of the noble Latin blood’ led to the formation of the Istituto Cristoforo Colombo in March 1923.Footnote 39
Jointly presided by Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile, then Minister of Public Instruction, the Colombo institute served as a cultural hub and a practical tool for economic intelligence, collecting data on commodities, customs tariffs and transports.Footnote 40 The institute also appointed several members of the Nave Italia board, notably Artom and V.E. Orlando.Footnote 41 It was designed to host a centre for the study of Spanish America, featuring a specialised library and Spanish language courses accessible to ordinary Italians.Footnote 42 Latinity served as a unifying myth, recycled from the Italo-Turkish war but instrumentalised to claim the existence of a ‘Latin civilisation’.Footnote 43 However, for Mussolini this represented not only ‘a literary expression’ but also ‘an expansive force’, namely the conjunction of positive traits ethnically embodied by ‘the Italian race’.Footnote 44
Key appointments to the institute’s board were Enrico Corradini and De Michelis, marrying demographic colonialism, considered by Corradini as a pathway to imperial maturity, with De Michelis’s expertise in emigration and colonial oversight.Footnote 45 Mussolini’s claim that emigration was ‘a physiological necessity of the Italian race’ reflected this synthesis, echoed in the statutes of the Colombo Institute.Footnote 46 These presented emigration as a civilising imperative to ‘pour [Italy’s] exuberant population onto those distant lands’ of South America. This ‘pouring of blood’ sought ‘to transform barren lands into fertile ones’, a ‘human function whereby families and peoples, by crossing each other, improved and perfected themselves’.Footnote 47
The institute’s first publication, a lecture by its vice-president jurist Amedeo Giannini, evidenced this eugenic and colonial logic. Couched in economic and cultural terms, the text invoked an ‘ethnic reason’ for rapprochement with ‘the peoples in which the seed of the colonisers of Spain and Portugal and the emigrants of Italy lives and thrives’. Referring to ‘the common destiny of the Latin race’, it depicted South America ‘as a land still almost unknown and full of adventure’.Footnote 48 Colonial culture was incipient at the time, inspiring magazines such as the Italian Touring Club’s Le vie d’Italia e dell’America Latina.Footnote 49 Giannini contributed to this discourse in Rivista d’Italia e d’America, aligning the Colombo’s Latin Americanism with the imperial vision of Minister of the Colonies Luigi Federzoni, who considered every Italian abroad an ambassador of ‘the young Italy created by the victory of fascism’.Footnote 50
Fascist racial ideology did not deter Italian business but rather incentivised engagement with the Nave Italia. To attract stakeholders, the Nave Italia campaign leveraged Mussolini’s public image. Italians abroad were celebrated as morally upright, apolitical and ‘non-degenerate’, implying non-involvement in trade unionism and superiority over indigenous and non-white labour.Footnote 51 Their strategy succeeded: over 400 companies invested in the initiative, raising at least 220,000 lire on catalogue advertisements. Ninety-two firms secured on-board stands at 15,000 lire each. Major names, including the gunsmith Beretta, the Fortuny textile company and the automobile manufacturer Ansaldo, participated under the guidance of Commissioner Alberto Passigli, grouped in twenty-three sectors (Table 1 and Figure 2).Footnote 52
Table 1. Table reconstructed from the catalogue in Crociera Italiana nell’America Latina, Programma e piano di Organizzazione (con la cartina dell’itinerario), (G.Spinelli & C., Firenze, 1923). In ACS, Real Casa, 1921–1925, b.412. Protocollo nº 2854/2025
Figure 2. Schematic section of the Nave Italia with group locations, La Mañana (Montevideo), 8 May 1924. In España. Ministerio de Cultura. Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores – Archivo Histórico Nacional (AMAE–AHN), H-1627.
By late 1923, when Mussolini hosted all the Latin American ambassadors at Palazzo Chigi, this ‘floating piece of Italy’ was set ‘to bring the comfort and praise of the motherland’ to the Italian colonies.Footnote 53 He appointed minister Giovanni Giurati – former Lega vice-president and March on Rome veteran – as extraordinary ambassador. Fluent in Spanish and familiar with the Italian Chambers of Commerce across South America, Giurati embodied this project’s political nature, especially after negotiating the dissolution of the Lega and the integration of its nuclei into the Fasci all’Estero.Footnote 54
Rituals of patriotic martyrdom were central to this political theatre. Eugenio Coselschi, Commissar for Culture and Propaganda and spokesperson for Gabriele D’Annunzio, crafted a ritual programme featuring sixteen bronze urns filled with ‘bloodstained sand’ from the battlefields of Monte Grappa, the Kars plateau and Montello.Footnote 55 These were presented to Italian veterans’ groups in Latin American capitals, reinforcing the fusion of a racially defined Italian identity with ‘that fascist and now Italian discipline’.Footnote 56 The Colombo institute provided the foundations for transforming Italian emigrants into colonial agents in Latin America, fascism a renewed ethnonationalist ethos, and the Nave Italia the means to achieve it.
Encountering ‘Other Italies’ in Latin America
The Nave Italia set off on a rainy day in February 1924 from La Spezia (Figure 3), following a visit by King Vittorio Emanuele III.Footnote 57 On board were 750 Italians – from military officers to commercial attachés – whose unruly conduct rapidly turned the voyage into a challenge.Footnote 58 Many regarded it as a leisure trip, prompting the creation of a fascist squad led by the M.V.S.N. consul Francesco Cottafavi.Footnote 59 Although this attempt at shipboard policing had limited effect, discipline was ultimately restored, not by coercion but through the anticipation of arrival in new ports. Encounters with foreign audiences, hostile in Gibraltar and admiring in the Canary Islands, helped contain unrest and boredom-originated indiscipline, while giving Italians aboard a glimpse into how they were perceived abroad.Footnote 60
Figure 3. The Regia Nave Italia anchored in La Spezia, in L’illustrazione Italiana, Anno LI, 8, 24 Feb.1924.
The blend of religious reverence and fascist performance became evident early in the journey, particularly during the visit in the Canary Islands. As Belli recalls in his travelogue, the visit to a cathedral purportedly visited by Columbus in 1492 inspired Roman salutes that were met with enthusiastic acclaim.Footnote 61 With the Atlantic crossing, these performances were internalised aboard the ship. Monsignor Vincenzo Lombardi, the mission’s priest, maintained moral order with sermons blending Catholic liturgy and fascist nationalism.Footnote 62 The Nave Italia became a heterotopia, not because of its halls emulating Venice or Florence, nor the samples of Italian manufactures, but rather because of how it presented Mussolini’s Italy to non-Italians and Italians abroad.Footnote 63
This performativity found a parallel on land, where Italian communities took up similar ritualistic practices, reinforcing the political message of the voyage. In Brazilian ports such as Belém, Rio Grande do Sul and Florianopolis, the ship was received by local Italian committees arriving on little tugboats, sometimes with brass bands aboard playing the anthem of the fascists abroad (Figure 4).Footnote 64 Comparable scenes unfolded in Buenos Aires and Peru, where Italian fishermen sailed out waving Italian flags.Footnote 65 In Guayaquil, Ecuador, Commander Attilio Canzini of the Italian military mission offered an aerial salute.Footnote 66 Upon docking, children from Dante Alighieri schools, fascist groups and war veterans received the Nave Italia with the war-cry Eja Eja Alalà and singing Giovinezza or the Royal March.Footnote 67 These grand receptions functioned as community-binding events through the assumption of the Nave Italia’s fascist identity.
Figure 4. Presidents of the committee and group of Italian reservists meeting the Nave Italia on a tugboat in Rio Grande do Sul. Frame from Benjamin Celestino Camozato’s film, A real nave itáñia no Rio Grande do Sul (1924), digitised by Cinematica Brasileira, Resgate do Cinema Silencioso Brasileiro, 2007/2008.
Support began to dwindle after the Nave Italia crossed the Panama Canal, as political tensions intensified. In Veracruz, Mexico, Giurati and others on board were startled to see a red banner with a hammer and a sickle hanging from building near the port.Footnote 68 Despite the comparatively small size of the Italian community, the ship stayed eight days in Veracruz while Giurati presented credentials in Mexico City and visited the Italian colony of Chipilo.Footnote 69 Although dissent had previously been limited to boycotting and public scorn, the murder of Matteoti in June 1924 heightened anti-fascist sentiment across the continent. Protests escalated verbally, prompting local authorities to intervene. In Peru, President Augusto Leguía reacted by cracking down on communist leaders and imprisoning them in the San Lorenzo Island during the Nave Italia’s visit.Footnote 70 In Valparaíso, the Matteoti affair emboldened Italian fascists, who welcomed the Nave Italia with pledges of loyalty to a ‘greater and more fascist Italy’.Footnote 71 Yet despite the rising tension, the Nave Italia continued to inspire the formation of new fascist groups among Italian migrants, as occurred in Guayaquil one month later.Footnote 72
Disruptions were not only political. In Buenos Aires, poor crowd control during the exhibit’s final hours led to public disorder and police violence, shocking on-board journalists.Footnote 73 By contrast, ports such as Rio de Janeiro welcomed 30,000 visitors attending peacefully.Footnote 74 Navigating the Magellan Strait in the Austral winter proved less challenging than maintaining order in Talcahuano, Chile, where 15,000 visitors arrived by train, overcrowding accommodations and forcing many to sleep in the streets.Footnote 75 To mitigate such challenges, Lima implemented a solution by preselling up to 14,000 tickets in advance – a strategy later adopted in Guayaquil and other ports, though not always successful.Footnote 76 These logistical challenges reflect, in part, the influence of local Italian communities and their capacity to get local governments involved.
Beyond issues of crowd control, the Nave Italia functioned as a stage for political theatre and symbolic performance. In Montevideo, the arrival of the ship became a moment of convergence of past and present political symbols as Garibaldian veterans participated alongside their fellow fascists (Figure 5).Footnote 77 This overlap of Redshirts and Blackshirts not only illustrated fascism’s selective appropriation of national memory around Garibaldi’s deeds but also vindicated recent ones such as Giurati’s role in the irredentist Trento-Trieste society (Figure 6). Footnote 78
Figure 5. Fascists and Garibaldian veterans receiving the Nave Italia in Montevideo, in La Mañana (Montevideo), 9 May 1924, in AMAE – AHN, H-1627.
Figure 6. Arrival of Giurati in Callao, received by the Italian firefighters holding the Italian flag, in Revista Mundial, No.219, Lima, 28 July 1924, in Archivo Histórico de Marina -Dirintemar - Perú (AHM-DIM-Perú).
Religion, too, played a central role in this symbolic repertoire. Catholicism underpinned much of the nationalist display, with missionaries serving as intermediaries within diaspora communities, often through the lay organisation Opera Bonomelli.Footnote 79 Figures like Lombardi, who acted as both priest and regime representative, helped position fascism as morally legitimate through services held in local cemeteries or churches. These spaces became sites of collective mourning, politicisation and intergenerational transmission of war trauma. In Pará, for instance, Piero Belli described how Italian widows dressed their children in black shirts and adorned them with their fathers’ war medals.Footnote 80 These rituals were not ephemeral: the urn carried by the Nave Italia functioned as a relic in Italian churches, allowing this highly politicised memorialisation to be reproduced well after the ship’s departure.Footnote 81
Within this religious landscape, Salesian missionaries emerged as particularly enthusiastic supporters of fascism. In Italian colonies like Mato Grosso and Rio Grande do Sul, their reputation was well established and reinforced through their interactions with Giurati and the Nave Italia.Footnote 82 The ambassador primarily met them at their schools, encountering veteran military priests in Bahia Blanca, Argentina, and younger missionaries across the Magellan strait, where the Salesians revered Mussolini as Italy’s saviour from revolutionary chaos.Footnote 83 The bishop of Concepción, in Chile, further exemplified this alignment by sending Giurati a pastoral letter echoing anti-communist Catholic propaganda, reproducing all the red scare themes against unionised workers and their ‘thirst for blood’.Footnote 84 Giurati and the ship’s leadership concluded that Salesians were ‘apostles of civilisation’ and guardians of ‘the purest Italianness’ in Latin America.Footnote 85
This fusion of religion and fascist nationalism was also reflected in public ceremonies. The bronze urn brought by the Nave Italia functioned as a transitional object, mediating between the Italy of the peninsula and its diasporic ‘other Italies’. It became the focal point of emotionally charged rituals that, while varying by community, shared a common purpose: to shape collective memory and foster cohesion. Its delivery was typically organised by the local fascio – either in its headquarters or aboard the ship’s Florentine Hall – and involved the Dante Alighieri society, Chambers of Commerce and Garibaldian societies. Following the ceremony, Giurati, Captain Grenet and Father Lombardi, joined by Italians of all social classes, solemnly paraded the urn on a cannon muzzle through city streets to its final resting place.
These processions culminated at Italian institutions such as churches, schools and hospitals that served as anchors of memory and belonging.Footnote 86 While major cities like Lima and Montevideo hosted the urn in civic sites, in Mexico it was enshrined in the Pantheon of Dolores. In smaller communities, such as La Guaira and Barranquilla, the urn found a home in the Italian Club or legation.Footnote 87 Across these various settings, the urn functioned as not only a relic of war and sacrifice but also a portable shrine to the imagined unity with Mussolini’s Italy.
Beyond their symbolic function, these rituals served a practical purpose: they enabled Giurati to evaluate the strength and alignment of each local fascio. As fascist intellectual Cornelio Di Marzio noted, the fascist movement mutated its characteristics and methods across Italy’s colonial landscapes.Footnote 88 Despite local variations in how fascism was interpreted, most met Giurati’s approval, except for Buenos Aires, where, despite an earlier purge by its founder Ottavio Dinale, the fascio still harboured Freemasons and Mazzinean anti-clericals. Giurati responded by removing its leadership again and appointing Vittorio Valdani, a former Lega member, as president.Footnote 89
For Giurati, these ceremonies were also opportunities to cultivate relationships with prominent emigrants, gain insights into local and economic networks and secure elite support for fascism. At luncheons and teas hosted by the Italian Chambers of Commerce, Giurati met business leaders and traders. In São Paulo, he toured factories and the Umberto I Hospital with Count Francesco Matarazzo, a Salerno-born magnate whose Matarazzo and C. empire spanned textiles, metallurgy and oils.Footnote 90 In Lima, amidst a boom in bachiche-owned enterprise, Giurati visited major sites such as the San Jacinto and Santa Catalina textile mills, the Sanguineti-Dasso sawmill and Banco Italia.Footnote 91 In Buenos Aires, he was received by Tommaso Ambrosetti, a Lombardy-born founder of the Chamber of Commerce and the city’s most senior Italian businessman.Footnote 92 In Quito, bank manager Giovanni Meloni welcomed the delegation, guided them through Chimbacalle, and introduced them to Veneto-born aviator Elia Antonio Liut and his wife, Carmela Angulo.Footnote 93 These encounters allowed Giurati to present Mussolini’s Italy as a protector of Italian capital abroad and rally influential support for the regime.
The Nave Italia’s mission extended beyond the Italian diaspora, engaging foreign institutions and diplomatic circles.Footnote 94 In Santiago, Chile, Spanish dignitaries and intellectuals welcomed Giurati in the Spanish Circle, where they praised Italian fascism and toasted to Italo-Spanish friendship.Footnote 95 The Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in Rio de Janeiro, while more restrained, sent a congratulatory telegram hailing the arrival of the Nave da Raça (Ship of the Race).Footnote 96 Elsewhere, diplomats visited the exhibition or joined the delegation on expeditions, such as in Pernambuco, where Belgian consul Paul Le Cointe – married to an Italian – guided the group through the rainforest, showcasing guarana plants, rubber trees and timber resources.Footnote 97 European war veterans serving as diplomats also participated in urn ceremonies.Footnote 98 These interactions reflected not only symbolic diplomatic outreach but also efforts to cultivate commercial, scientific and political ties to the region.
Latinity, Fascism and Diplomacy
The interplay of fascism and Latinity in diplomacy was central to the Nave Italia’s role as an itinerant embassy. The mission followed the Colombo Institute’s strategy of leveraging shared emotional and cultural connections. Giurati’s diplomatic discourse aimed to merge admiration for Italy as ‘mother civilisation’ with an image of Mussolini’s fascism as a guarantor of order and peace. The delegation – comprising Giurati, Grenet, Lombardi and the local Italian consul or ambassador – was received with varying degrees of enthusiasm by Latin American presidents and ministers. Within this framework, the analysis of emotional and formal diplomacy, through the delivery of credentials, offers insight into how local political elites perceived the Nave Italia, Mussolini’s Italy and its fascist governance.Footnote 99
Nowhere was Latinist rhetoric more racially pronounced than during the Brazilian leg of the journey. From the outset, national and regional newspapers adopted the Portuguese phrasing Nave da Raça, which resonated through official receptions in Pará, Pernambuco and Bahía.Footnote 100 In Pará, the delegation, welcomed with full military honours alongside Consul Antonio Luzadri, received high praise from governor Antonio Emiliano de Souza Castro, who celebrated this as a gesture of goodwill towards ‘the young nations of Latin America’. Castro emphasised shared ‘fundamental doctrines of Christian civilisation’ and called the ship a harbinger of ‘the higher winds of civilisation’, a rhetoric that persisted in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 101 There, joined by Ambassador Pietro Badoglio and Consul Sebastiao Sampaio, the delegation presented credentials to President Artur Bernardes with speeches celebrating Italian-Brazilian friendship. Yet it was Foreign Minister Felix Pacheco who most explicitly lauded Mussolini, calling fascism a ‘pacific revolution’ and ‘a persuasive lesson of faith’. For Pacheco, Mussolini deserved ‘the respect, admiration and gratitude of the conservatives worldwide’ for having defeated Bolshevism.Footnote 102
In response, Giurati, ‘as Italian and fascist’, embraced this endorsement, recognising fascism’s appeal beyond Italy, especially among Brazilian elites.Footnote 103 Months earlier, the industrialist Matarazzo had informed Mussolini about Carlos Campos, a gubernatorial candidate admirer of the Duce and what fascism represented.Footnote 104 The Nave Italia arrived in São Paulo just as Campos won the election, celebrated alongside ambassadors from Chile, Argentina, Japan, Cuba, Britain, Uruguay and Mexico.Footnote 105 While Giurati confirmed Campos’s sympathies, he misjudged the political fallout: the outgoing governor, offended by the implicit endorsement, refused military honours. This diplomatic slight forced Pacheco and Badoglio to negotiate a compromise, balancing Giurati’s military expectations with local politics. Through this, Giurati grasped the complex entanglement of São Paulo’s Italians in domestic politics.Footnote 106
In contrast, references to racial affinity were more muted in Uruguay than in Brazil, though still present. Despite a minor anti-fascist boycott, Giurati’s credential ceremony in Montevideo proceeded without incident. President José Serrano expressed deep admiration for Italy, calling Mussolini an ‘immortal caudillo [chieftain, leader]’, while Foreign Minister Pedro Marini Ríos adopted a more restrained tone, emphasising their ‘spiritual commonality’.Footnote 107 Nevertheless, relations soured by the visit’s end after Nave Italia passengers assaulted two photographers from El Pais.Footnote 108 Although the incident drew attention from diplomats and journalists, the Nave Italia’s reputation remained largely unscathed, especially in Argentina.Footnote 109
Moving on to Buenos Aires, Giurati welcomed Foreign Minister Ángel Gallardo aboard the Nave Italia with full honours. Argentina held a special place in his itinerary, not only for its vast Italian community and burgeoning nationalist movement but also because Italy maintained a naval mission there.Footnote 110 At the Casa Rosada, President Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear praised the ‘blood of the Latin race’, attributing Argentina’s development to the industriousness and sense of justice of ‘the sons of Italy’, and affirming a fraternal bond between the two nations.Footnote 111 Giurati, clad in his black shirt, echoed this sentiment, re-imagining the ocean not as a divide but as a creator of unity.Footnote 112
Amid this shared Latinity, such praise gave way to revisionist claims whereby Argentine symbols such as Manuel Belgrano were reinterpreted as bearers of Italian lineage.Footnote 113 This strategy revealed a crucial tenet of fascist foreign policy in Latin America: projecting Italian ‘virtue’ into the foundational myths of these ‘young nations’. The Italo-Argentinian nexus was prominently displayed during the Independence Day military parade on 25 May, where Nave Italia marines marched alongside Argentine forces and showcased the ship’s Fiat tank.Footnote 114 The visit thus underscored a narrative of transcontinental fraternity – though one not without contradictions.
Even in South America’s most remote and inhospitable lands, the diplomacy of Latin fraternity found fertile ground. In Punta Arenas, on the shores of the Magellan Strait, the Spanish Club’s tribute to Columbus inspired Piero Belli’s claim that ‘Mussolini had won them [Spaniards in Latin America] over’ and many were experiencing ‘Italophile fervour’.Footnote 115 Similarly, in Valparaíso’s Spanish Club, Spanish ambassador Bernardo Almeida y Herreros hosted the Nave Italia delegation. There, the focus shifted from shared discovery myths to fascism’s allure, with a talk on Italian fascism highlighting Mussolini’s global influence.Footnote 116
However, this enthusiasm soon faced a backlash. The assassination of Giacomo Matteoti triggered widespread condemnation, casting a shadow over the Nave Italia. In his memoirs, Giurati identified the event as the beginning of an international ‘crusade against fascism’, which curtailed the support he received from Rome.Footnote 117 Feeling abandoned, he telegrammed for repatriation, arguing that his health had deteriorated due to his ‘fight against Freemasonry’, but Mussolini never replied.Footnote 118
Despite this setback, Latin American presidents and ministers continued to accept Giurati’s credentials without hesitation. In Chile, the mission was still hailed as the embodiment of ‘the creative and renewing power of the Latin soul’. President Arturo Alessandri praised Mussolini’s fascism as a politics of decisive action, proclaiming, ‘Peoples are saved by deeds and not by words’.Footnote 119 This official support nonetheless coexisted with public dissent. During an address at the University of Santiago de Chile, Giurati was interrupted by shouts of ‘Viva Matteotti’, which led to a furious reaction by President Alessandri. This, in turn, prompted a spontaneous ovation in Giurati’s favour.Footnote 120
While Chile revealed the tension between elite support and public dissent, in Peru dissent was largely absent. With the opposition pre-emptively imprisoned, President Augusto Leguía fully embraced the Latinist diplomatic discourse and extended full military honours, ceremonial carriages and official hospitality to Giurati and Grenet (Figure 7). When presenting credentials, Giurati depicted Italy as a model of ‘progress and peaceful international cooperation’, while Leguía hoped to attract Italy’s ‘hard-working population, industrial technicians and illustrious artists’ to support their development.Footnote 121
Figure 7. Giurati (in military uniform), President Leguía and their aides visiting the exhibition in the Nave Italia, in Revista Mundial, No.220, Lima, 1 August 1924, in AHM-DIM-Perú.
Giurati navigated an already favourable environment in Ecuador, shaped by Italy’s prior military involvement in reorganising the Ecuadorian army. Since early 1922, Alessandro Pirzio Biroli, head of the Italian military mission, had been earning the favour with local authorities – unlike earlier German efforts.Footnote 122 This translated into President José Luis Tamayo’s reception speech, which lauded Italy as a force for ‘peace, harmony and progress’, and described it as ‘the cradle of the Latin race’.Footnote 123 The emphasis on Italy’s pacifying role was also echoed by Foreign Minister Clemente Ponce, in the presence of German, French, British and other Latin American diplomats, probably a calculated gesture reacting against Mussolini’s damaged reputation.Footnote 124
After an uneventful stop in Panama, the mission encountered a markedly different reception in Mexico and Cuba, where indifference gave way to hostility. In Havana, no banquets or official receptions were held, as a staff strike instigated by an anti-fascist campaign disrupted diplomatic proceedings.Footnote 125 Giurati observed that, by this stage of the expedition, the influence of the United States was far more dominant in the Caribbean than in the Atlantic or Pacific regions, and he attributed the region’s instability and anti-fascist sentiment to the US geopolitical presence.Footnote 126 Across the Caribbean, the diplomatic tone shifted further as the Italian mission was overshadowed by entrenched French, British and US interests. Yet this weakening also offered an ideological opportunity to re-frame Latinity as a cultural and political counterweight to the hegemony of English and French-speaking power.
Despite the differences ‘in blood and race’, the mayor of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, emphasised that a ‘Latin temperament’ united them with Italy.Footnote 127 This rhetoric, framed as a way ‘to confront the Anglo-Saxons’, echoed across other Caribbean ports.Footnote 128 In Cartagena, Colombian Minister of Industry Diógenes A. Reyes welcomed Giurati with references to a common Latin heritage rooted in civilisation and religion and praised Mussolini’s ‘iron hand’ in restoring order to Italy.Footnote 129 A similar fusion of Latin unity and fascist governance resonated in Caracas, Venezuela, under the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez Chacón, which Giurati approvingly called ‘a real dictatorship’.Footnote 130 For both Colombian and Venezuelan officials, the Italian brand of diplomatic Latinity presented fascism as a credible model of authoritarian stability and economic development.
Demographic Colonialism and Infrastructure Development
Beyond Latin civilisational narratives, cultural diplomacy and manufacture showcasing, Giurati’s face-to-face meetings marked the first concrete step towards a state-led policy of migrant colonialism. Aligned with the Colombo institute, this policy was built on liberal-era colonial ideas and instruments such as the INCILE. Although the Nave Italia mission was profoundly shaped by fascism’s racial worldview, its encounter with local and regional plans to ‘whiten’ or ‘aryanise’ demographic landscapes in Latin America reveals how ethnicity and culture were contextually configured. The intangible concept of ‘Latin’ civilisation was constantly measured against the tangible assumed whiteness of Italians in contrast to indigenous, black and Asian migrant labour.
Negotiations over natural resources, land concessions and infrastructure development almost invariably involved leveraging the Italian workforce as a key bargaining asset. Indeed, Giurati’s field observations demonstrate that his mission mobilised trade, diplomacy and fascist political expansion to serve the present and future establishment of Italian migrant colonies, as envisaged by the Italo-Venezuelan community in late 1922. To this end, Giurati produced two studies identifying optimal destinations, sectors and partners for settlements, concluding that North and South Brazil, Uruguay, Perú, Bolivia and Ecuador were the most favourable.Footnote 131
In northeastern Brazil, the Nave Italia expedition gave local governors, such as Souza Castro in Pará, a platform to advocate for ‘hygienising the race’ on their fazendas by attracting ‘Aryan’ immigrants.Footnote 132 Giurati faced the region’s entrenched racial hierarchy in agrarian labour, recognising systemic violence directed at the black, mestizo and indigenous workforce, often stereotyped as lazy, unhygienic and unruly. On-board engineer Enrico Carrara observed that Brazilian elites preferred Italians over ‘yellow races’ – namely Japanese and Chinese migrants – viewed as racially undesirable.Footnote 133 Although historians note that Italian migrants perceived themselves as marginalised to labour roles such as land development and the cultivation of tobacco, cocoa, coffee, cotton and sugar, Giurati’s findings reveal a different reality: local elites regarded Italians as racially superior to non-white groups.Footnote 134 While Italians experienced an inferiority complex towards other white European migrants, this did not undermine their status of racial superiority.
This dynamic heightened the appeal of fascism, which was presented as a means of overcoming this inferiority complex. Despite fierce competition from British, Dutch and German companies, Pará and Bahía remained relatively untapped, especially in land and mineral development. Italy had the means but lacked agricultural machinery, a logistical issue Giurati believed could be solved by establishing regular Compagnia Transatlantica Italiana shipping routes.Footnote 135 He urged Rome to send a scientific commission and secure hectares of land to gain a foothold and ensure the ‘beautiful, shapely and glorious Italian race’ could supply these states with the ‘European white blood’ desired by local elites.Footnote 136
In southern Brazil, São Paulo stood as a testament to the viability and autonomy of Italian migrant colonialism. The Nave Italia delegation toured colonies like Sorocaba, Ipaussú, Salto Grande and the fazenda Santa Lina, where Italian settlers greeted them with flowers and cheers for Mussolini, the King and Italy. Giurati gauged the sympathy of Salto Grande’s prefect, Colonel Sinfrosio Falcão, and eventually met Giuseppe Giorgi, the Italian landowner of Santa Lina. After assessing Giorgi’s fascist loyalty and local official support, Giurati evaluated with them the feasibility of coordinating migrant dispatches through an efficient consular network.Footnote 137 Fascist supporters, on the other hand, founded the colony Vila Mussolini in the southern Paulistano countryside, backed by the Companhia Italo-Brasileira de Seguros Gerais, exemplifying the kind of land colonisation they aimed to expand across South America.Footnote 138 Although competition from German, Polish and Japanese settlers, as well as the outbreak of revolutionary mutinies, disrupted their plans, São Paulo remained, for Badoglio and Giurati, a model of fascist colonialism.Footnote 139
In Uruguay, the Nave Italia helped launch the agrarian ‘Colonia Agricola Reduci di Guerra’ in Salto, aimed at transitioning from grazing to agriculture. It was led by two engineers, G. Sforza Fogliani and F. Albertoni, supported by local authorities, and funded by Uruguayan banks.Footnote 140 Bolivia showed promise with abundant reserves of wolfram, tin, gold, zinc mines and oil, but required a major investment in developing large-scale infrastructure. Furthermore, in La Paz, Giurati found British diplomatic representation already in charge of the company ‘Bolivian Oil and Land Syndicate’ in London. While the Bolivian government welcomed Italian interest, it could not provide the necessary details on land quality, irrigation or yields.Footnote 141Although Bolivia held potential for the Italian colonisation plans, it required extensive development.Footnote 142
Giurati’s scouting extended into Peru, where he observed US capital firms such as the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and the Vanadium Corporation of America extracting resources in Cusco. Though mining of gold, tungsten and copper held potential, untapped oil wells – requiring only an access road to Lima – seemed even more lucrative.Footnote 143 En route to Lima, Giurati explored the possibility of dispatching controlled migrant groups to regions such as Ica, Arequipa and the Marañon River basin in the Amazon.Footnote 144 As in Brazil, Italians were preferred over Japanese in Peru, where only 18 per cent of the population was white and nearly half was indigenous. In his report, Giurati envisioned the ‘colonial enterprise’ as ‘an instrument of imperial assertion’, projecting that Italians could achieve racial dominance within five years through a strategic migration policy.Footnote 145 In Lima, Giurati secured presidential approval from Leguía and his cabinet for the expropriation and development of land in Pampas de Imperial, south of Lima. He saw this as the ideal pilot for a new model of land colonisation, requiring Italian engineers and labourers for land reclamation (bonifica). Giurati quickly informed De Michelis and the Fasci all’Estero to begin preparations.Footnote 146
After the opening of the Panama Canal, Ecuador anticipated an influx of European migrants but instead received Chinese, Japanese and Indian arrivals, prompting government interest in attracting Italians. Together with agricultural engineer Dr Italo Paviolo, Giurati negotiated a concession of 200,000 hectares, primarily for tobacco and cotton, granted to Italian colonising companies and backed by government plans for deforestation and the assimilation of the indigenous population. Additionally, Paviolo scouted the border provinces of Manabí and Esmeraldas, rich in rubber, tagua, vanilla and other tropical products.Footnote 147 Italy had a foothold in the Ecuadorian military, a legacy of the previous liberal cabinet, and the government remained receptive to further Italian investment and migration.
Giurati dismissed Colombia as unsuitable for Italian colonial expansion, citing its ‘social-democratic constitution’ and the earlier failure of the Nitti government to respond to Bogotá’s 1919 request for a military mission – an opening later seized by the Swiss. Though a small group of Italian railway engineers was eventually sent, Giurati considered it an insufficient base for infrastructure-led development.Footnote 148 Despite some potential for a fourfold increase in coffee production, the political climate remained a deterrent.Footnote 149 Venezuela, by contrast, offered optimal political conditions. The limited presence of Italian products in its market suggested room for export growth. Although Giurati offered little insight into the outcomes of Lanzoni and Mancini’s earlier missions in his report, he did mention a proposal by engineer Amerigo Suriano to establish an Italian oil company in Maracaibo – an initiative that ultimately remained unrealised.Footnote 150
In Argentina, Giurati toured the colonies of La Plata, Rosario and Santa Fe and concluded that Rio Negro, Chaco, Rio Chubut and Rio Colorado could be ‘swarmed with Italian migrants as their rights and safety were better guaranteed there’.Footnote 151 Buenos Aires’s booming economy, comparable to that of European metropoles, attracted many Italian emigrants. Furthermore, a fascist migrant settlement was already functioning in the Rio Negro Valley called Villa Regina, founded by the fascist delegate Ottavio Dinale and supported by the Italo-Argentinean colonisation company.Footnote 152 The Argentine countryside seemed perfect for colonies of Italian migrants, but Giurati was profoundly displeased by how new Italian migrants were treated by established Italo-Argentineans. He was particularly critical of how readily Italians shed their identity and embraced Argentine chauvinism, which Giurati saw as a serious drawback.Footnote 153
The austral landscape of Chile was dominated by livestock farming and a latifundium property regime that discouraged agrarian enterprise.Footnote 154 Only Llanquinhue and Bio-Bio offered viable conditions, but these regions were mostly cultivated by indigenous Mapuches and rotos – a peasant mestizo class known for their chauvinism and abhorrence towards European émigrés.Footnote 155 Notwithstanding the exceptional colony Nueva Italia in Pitrufquén, Giurati found the environment too hostile, especially in Antofagasta.Footnote 156 There, nitrate mines were monopolised by private producers, and the prevalence of communist militants among the workforce, along with the discovery of an exclusive sales contract with London, dissuaded any further scouting.Footnote 157
Mexico, too, was to be avoided. Giurati deemed its revolutionary climate and low security conditions unsuitable, especially after visiting Chipilo, a colony of 1,000 Venetians near Puebla. The Mexican government’s hostility towards the settlers and their ongoing clashes with what Giurati described as ‘turbulent hordes of Bolshevik Indians’ confirmed his assessment.Footnote 158 He further cited US interference as another reason to exclude not only Mexico but also Panama and Haiti from consideration.Footnote 159
Liberal Foundations, Fascist Futures
Migrant colonialism was as central to the Nave Italia as cultural diplomacy, fascist political propaganda and economic expansion. Regardless of its outcomes, Giurati’s reports reveal a deliberate effort to extend Italy’s colonial ambitions through both economic and demographic means. Even if it became a vehicle for fascist propaganda, the Nave Italia was unavoidably anchored in previous efforts to access Latin America’s natural resources and land concessions such as the INCILE. Examining this case within the wider history of Italian foreign policy, this study illustrates the continuity of colonial policing and its role in shaping fascist approaches to Latin America. It also reveals how liberal political elites facilitated expansionist aims by participating in shared decision-making structures, thereby legitimising fascist visions of empire.
The Nave Italia was intended to expand Italy’s informal empire. Yet, its hybrid nature made it a mid-way enterprise balancing trade and cultural diplomacy with the goal of establishing migrant enclaves in regions where sovereignty was fluid. Giurati’s mission mapped existing Italian enclaves – settler colonies – anchored in agriculture, infrastructure and resource extraction, offering insight into their social standing and land access, which was often contingent on favourable relations with local and regional authorities. Local political elites, in turn, reproduced a context-specific racial hierarchy that regarded Italians as racially superior and preferred over indigenous, black and Asian labourers. While the aim of this enterprise was loosely defined, the ‘planting of agricultural colonies’ was one of its core aspects, and so it projected a racialised vision of empire that fused labour mobility, land acquisition and colonialism under the guise of development.
Giurati’s diplomatic mission instrumentalised the narrative of a shared civilisational ‘Latinity’ to facilitate the creation of new colonies and contribute to improving the image of local diasporic communities. His delivery of credentials throughout the voyage reveals various degrees of sympathy, acceptance and opposition to Mussolini’s politics. As a literal ‘travelling political universe’, the Nave Italia reveals how the fascist phenomenon was received, understood and practiced in the peripheries. Aboard the Italia, religion, the cult of nationalist martyrdom and fascist spectacle and violence were not mutually exclusive. In fact, their interactions with Salesian priests and diasporic fascists illustrate the malleable, polycentric and negotiated nature of their political identity.
Upon his return, Giurati expressed doubts about the overall outcomes of the Nave Italia, citing the obstacles for a ‘genuine imperial policy’. His concerns were well founded: Italian schools were scarce, many migrants assimilated into national host cultures and the consular and diplomatic networks were under-resourced. Yet, the Nave Italia also revealed that fascism and Italian ambitions did have extraterritorial reach, as evidenced by the viability of certain migrant colonies and the commercial success of participating companies – who reported over 100,000,000 lire in sales and commercial agreements. Ultimately, the Nave Italia embodied the limits and possibilities of fascist expansionism, exposing the uneven terrain of Italy’s informal empire as it navigated the intersections of migration, race and imperial ambition in Latin America.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Lucy Riall and Pieter Judson for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editor of Contemporary European History for their insightful feedback. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the EUI workshop ‘Below the Waterline: Actors, Spaces, and Practices of Informal Empire’ and the ASMI–SISSCO workshop ‘The Transnational Making of Italy’. I am indebted to the staff of the archives consulted, especially Riccardo Andreozzi, and to Victor Emilio Alvarez Ponce and Denisse Rodríguez-Olivari for their guidance in navigating Peruvian archives. My thanks also extend to Will Sims and Gabriel Farrugia for their insights. Research for this article was supported by the Salvador de Madariaga Programme, funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades.
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