The inscription, no longer extant, was realised in 1936 inside the porch of the National Monument to Victor Emmanuel II (inaugurated in 1911) on the explicit command of Mussolini himself (Ferraironi 1937: no. 265). 

The inscription, in big Roman square capitals, was executed in plaster laid over the frieze’s tempera decoration which was intended as a temporary decoration but is still in place (a reproduction can be found in Sapori 1946: tab. CLXVI). The text quotes a famous line from Vergil’s Aeneid (6.851), addressed to Aeneas by his father Anchises. The original continues with the words Hae tibi erunt artes, pacique imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (“These will be your arts: to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and to crush the proud”). The Virgilian lines convey the imperialistic ambitions of the Augustan Principate. Therefore, they were continuously reused, rearranged, and repeated after Italy’s reunification, with heightened popularity during the ventennio fascista as a manifesto of an increasingly imperialistic foreign policy (Strobl 2013: 101–14; Nastasi 2020: 180–87; see the inscription inside the Ministry of Public Education and the one in the "Aula Giulio Cesare" in Palazzo Senatorio on Capitoline Hill).

The inscription was still recorded in 1946 (Sapori 1946: 128) but had already been removed by 1953 (Ferraironi 1953: 228).

The inscription, attached to the National Monument to the first king of a united Italy, crowned the monument’s Fascist appropriation. The memorial was at an ideologically central place for the Fascist regime. It was in Piazza Venezia (then Foro Italico), where Mussolini held some of his most famous speeches from his balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. Moreover, Rome’s central avenues, constructed by the regime, started from the foot of the monument: Via dell’Impero (now Via dei Fori Imperiali) and Via del Mare (now Via del Teatro di Marcello).          

Bibliography

Ferraironi, Francesco. 1937. Iscrizioni ornamentali su edifici e monumenti di Roma con appendice sulle iscrizioni scomparse. Rome: Industria Tipografica Romana.

———. 1953. ‘Iscrizioni ornamentali di Roma scomparse’. Strenna dei Romanisti 14: 226–30.

Nastasi, Antonino. 2019. Le iscrizioni in latino di Roma Capitale (1870-2018). Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 192–93; 685.

———. 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.

Sapori, Francesco. 1946. Il Vittoriano. Rome: Libreria dello Stato.

Strobl, Wolfgang. 2013. ‘“Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento…”. La ricezione di Virgilio e Orazio nell’ Italia fascista: il caso di Piazza della Vittoria a Bolzano’. Quaderni di storia 78: 87–135.

Antonino Nastasi