The inscription can be read over the pillar at the centre of the crypt inside the Garibaldian Ossuary Mausoleum (Via Garibaldi 29e), which was personally financed by Benito Mussolini and erected in 1941. The inscription was authored by Antonio Reggiani, general secretary of the executive commission for the construction of the mausoleum and vice president of the Giuseppe Garibaldi Society, which suggested the idea for the monument to preserve the remains of soldiers who had fallen for Rome’s freedom between 1849 and 1870.

The inscription is sculpted in sans-serif capitals in relief. The Latin text quotes a statement attributed to Mucius Scaevola in the famous history of Rome, Ab urbe condita, written by the Roman historian Livy. In the episode from Livy (2. 12. 9), Scaevola sneaked into the Etruscan camp to kill the king, Lars Porsenna. After his failed assassination attempt, Scaevola was captured and brought before the king. There, he famously declared: Romanus sum civis; C. Mucium vocant. Hostis hostem occidere volui, nec ad mortem minus animi est quam fuit ad caedem: et facere et pati fortia Romanum est (“I am a Roman citizen; they call me C. Mucius. I wanted to kill my enemy as an enemy, and I am as ready to die as I was to kill: to act and to suffer bravely is Roman”). The phrase et facere et pati fortia Romanum est became proverbial and was very popular in Italy during the first decades of the twentieth century: for example, Enrico Corradini (1865–1931), the founder of the Italian Nationalist Association, often used it in his speeches (Ceccarius 1942: 202, 203, 209). It became even more popular during The Great War (Tosi 2017: nr. 2188) and remained so under Fascism (Lamers and Reitz-Joosse 2016: 225).

In 1930, the phrase was carved on the wall of the “Bulletin Terrace” (“Terrazza del Bollettino”), in the National Monument to King Vittorio Emanuele II, called “Vittoriano”, in a context relating to the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, and the Great War, without reference to Fascism. In the Garibaldian Ossuary Mausoleum, by contrast, the inscription stands in an architectural, symbolic, and ideological context that evokes Fascism, even though the monument refers to historical events predating Fascism (Arthurs 2014: 293). In 1941 the words gained new significance in connection with the Second World War (Nastasi 2020: 187–90).

The Garibaldian Ossuary Mausoleum was built in 1941 to replace a former and smaller monument dating to 1879 and located at the same site. The new building was designed by the architect Giovanni Jacobucci (1895–1970), member of the Garibaldi Society, and was inaugurated on 3 November 1941 by Mussolini. The building presents a large number of inscriptions, all of them in Italian except this one. After the war, Reggiani took care of eliminating the fasces from the monument as well as the Italian inscriptions mentioning Mussolini and the Fascism (Di Peio 2008: 71; Cartocci 2015: 5). The Latin inscription remained.

Bibliography

Arthurs, Joshua. 2014. ‘«Voleva essere Cesare, Morì Vespasiano»: The Afterlives of Mussolini’s Rome’. Civiltà Romana 1: 283–302.

Cartocci, Alessandro. 2015. Il mausoleo ossario Gianicolense e la società di Mutuo Soccorso “Giuseppe Garibaldi”. Quaderni storiografici dell’Istituto Internazionale di Studi “Giuseppe Garibaldi” 40. Rome: Istituto Internazionale di Studi “Giuseppe Garibaldi”.

Ceccarelli, Giuseppe. 1942. ‘L’idea imperiale romana nel pensiero di Enrico Corradini.’ In Atti del V congresso nazionale di Studi Romani, edited by Carlo Galassi Paluzzi, 199–210. 3. Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani.

Di Peio, Giovanni. 2008. ‘L’ultimo omaggio di Mussolini a Garibaldi: il monumento ai caduti per la causa di Roma italiana (1849-70).’ Nuova Storia Contemporanea 12 (5): 51–90.

Lamers, Han, and Bettina Reitz-Joosse. 2016. ‘Lingua Lictoria: The Latin Literature of Italian Fascism’. Classical Receptions Journal 8 (2): 216–52.

Nastasi, Antonino. 2019. Le iscrizioni in latino di Roma Capitale (1870-2018). Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 214–15.

Nastasi, Antonino. 2020. ‘L’epigrafia in latino negli anni del fascismo. L’uso dei classici tra continuità e fratture’. In Studies in the Latin Literature and Epigraphy of Italian Fascism, edited by Han Lamers, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, and Valerio Sanzotta, 175–97. Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 46. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Reggiani, Antonio, and Mario Lizzani. 1942. Ai caduti per Roma MDCCCXLIX – MDCCCLXX. Rome: Atena.

Tosi, Renzo. 2017. Dizionario delle sentenze latine e greche. Milan: Rizzoli.

Antonino Nastasi