A nation's parks: failure and success in Fascist nature conservation

Abstract

Nature conservation is a complex venture, with a great impact, among other things, on local and national power relationships. Nature conservation also depends on a wide set of variables to determine any one planned initiative's long-term success or failure. This article explores what made the difference between success and failure in the history of nature conservation under Mussolini's regime. Many parks were planned in those years in Italy, but only a handful were effectively instituted. This essay will address the following questions: What were the reasons behind the planning and creation of these national parks? What was the role of Fascist ideology in determining the long-term success of a park proposal? Was there anything specifically Fascist in Italian nature conservation in the 1920s and 1930s? Which other variables impacted on the involved decision-making processes?

Keywords::

• national parks
• nature conservation
• Fascism
• economic issues
• propaganda

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by a postdoc at the University of Trento in Italy (funded by the Provincia Autonoma di Trento) and a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. The author would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers and this special issue's editor for their extremely useful remarks and comments. Finally thanks are offered to Laurel Gildersleeve, the author's graduate student project assistant funded by the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for her suggestions regarding this essay's style and her careful review of the text.

Notes

^1. The first 20 years of the twentieth century were marked by the creation of numerous parks in many European countries: Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Poland, and, as a project, the USSR (Dogliani 1998).

^2. One of the main questions in the debate about the institution of national parks in Italy just after the First World War was what sort of parks Italy needed: ones focused on scientific research (the ‘Swiss’ model in contemporary parlance) or on the promotion of tourism and recreation (the, then so-called, ‘American’ model)? On this issue see Hardenberg (2013, 53–54).

^3. See Royal Decree-Law 1584, 3 December 1922.

^4. See Hardenberg (2013) for a comparison of the cases of the Gran Paradiso and the Stelvio.

^5. A national park was actually established on the Sila only in 1968, with the creation of the Parco Nazionale della Calabria. A Sila National Park was officially (re-)established under this name in 1997.

^6. Selling or attempting to sell land to interested private parties or the state on the occasion of the planned institution of nature conservation institutions was not an uncommon practice in the early history of European conservation. For, respectively, a French and an Austrian example of such a practice, see Zuanon (1995, 67–78, 93–95, 115–120) and Würflinger (2007, 79). It is still to be assessed whether it was the buyers who were taking advantage of money-starved municipalities or the local communities who were trying to profit from conservationist hype by selling relatively unproductive land.

^7. It is worth mentioning here that, while in June 1922 the Parliament, still with a Liberal majority, had passed a law on the preservation of ‘natural beauties’, Italy did not have, under Fascist rule, any coherent legislation as regards the criteria to be adopted to set up and manage a national park. See Law 778, June 11, 1922 and Piccioni (1999, 242–250).

^8. In the same years the Fascist regime was very active in promoting a reordering of common and customary access rights to land and resources. In particular see Royal Decree 751, 22 May 1924 and the Law 1766, 16 June 1927, which instituted a legislature charged with the task of ascertaining and settling or liquidating any existing common or mixed use.

^9. See the stance taken by the Minister of National Economy in respect of the proposal for a national park in Latium discussed previously.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg is DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He mainly focuses on socio-political aspects of nature perception and management in modern Europe, digital history and the history of the environmental sciences. His two most recent research projects focus respectively on the history of nature conservation, management and rhetoric in the Alps, and on the development of the concept of the mean sea level in both geodesy and the climate sciences.