‘Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio’: The League of Nations' economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice Footnote1

1 The quotation is taken from Mussolini's speech, made from the central balcony of Palazzo Venezia on 7 May 1935, in front of ‘over a hundred thousand women’ in which he told them that the Italian victory in the Ethiopian war was, in part, thanks to the ‘delicate and decisive task’ entrusted to the women of Italy, that of turning every Italian family into ‘a fortress of resistance to the sanctions’ (Mussolini Citation1959: 66). An earlier version of this article was presented at the Modern Italian History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London in November 2004; I am grateful to the convenors and members of this seminar for their questions and comments. At UCL, Axel Körner's suggestions upon reading the draft article have also proved very valuable. I would like to thank the AHRB and the Marie Curie European Doctoral Fellowship programme in social history for the financial assistance that made it possible for me to carry out the research on which this article is based. This article forms part of a larger research project, carried out for my doctoral thesis, into the impact of dictatorship on the everyday lives and life-courses of Venetians during the 1930s.

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