Negotiating Foreign Influence in Fascist Italy: Nicola Festa on Greek Learning in Renaissance Humanism

ABSTRACT This article explores how the classical scholar Nicola Festa (1866–1940) outlined a fascisticized account of Renaissance humanism in a series of lectures later published as his Umanesimo (1935). It specifically examines Festa’s treatment of the role of Byzantine Greek scholars in Italian humanism. Fascism’s preoccupation with romanità and italianità implied a cultural anxiety over indebtedness to cultures regarded as foreign, un-Roman, and un-Italian. Greek language and culture posed a specific challenge as they had traditionally been regarded as both foreign and familiar to Italy’s national culture. This paper analyzes Festa’s response to this friction in his discussion of the Greek presence in Italian humanism, demonstrating how he dissociated the ‘Romans’ of Byzantium from the ‘true’ Italian representatives of humanism. The case study sheds some light on the understudied ways in which non-Italian influences could be negotiated in fascisticized accounts of Italian culture.


Introduction
In its approach to Italy's national culture, Italian Fascism relied on the perceived superiority, originality, and persistence of the Italians' cultural traditions, which it traced and tied to relevant pasts, chiefly ancient Rome and its revival in the Renaissance.Fascism's emphasis on 'Roman' and 'Latin' originality often implied a certain anxiety over the influence of cultures both past and present that were regarded as foreign and 'un-Italian'.This unease with foreign influence manifested itself in different ways -from banning foreign words from public use and avoiding 'foreign' features in architectural styles (for instance, the use of coloured marble) to various strategies of selective and controlled appropriation of non-Italian cultures. 1The Fascist responses to the cultural heritage of ancient Greece -its language and literature, philosophy and science, and art and architectureillustrate this anxiety.In contrast to National Socialism in Germany, which, in a long tradition of German Philhellenism, drew heavily on the Hellenic past, Italian Fascism displays a more complex response to Italy's Greek heritage.Fascist engagements with this Greek heritage have, however, remained understudied, even though ancient Greece shimmers through in almost all Roman culture, literature, and art.This article explores the way in which Italy's Greek past -or rather, one of Italy's Greek pasts -could be negotiated within an outspokenly Fascist framework.For this purpose, it takes an essay by the classical philologist Nicola Festa as its starting point.In 1935, Nicola Festa (1866-1940), professor of ancient Greek literature at the Royal University of Rome, published an essay in the form of a small booklet entitled Umanesimo. 2It aspired to offer a historical account of fifteenth-century Italian humanism for a wider interested audience.While Festa emphasised that Italian humanism was a quintessentially national and patriotic movement, he also paid ample attention to the role of Byzantine Greek scholars and their role in the humanist movement, particularly in the dissemination of knowledge regarding ancient Greek language and literature.The attention Festa gives them is remarkable in its length and level of synthesis compared to the most important earlier and contemporary accounts of Renaissance humanism.It is also notable because of the essay's explicitly Fascist framing, which conflicts with notions of cultural indebtedness as it usually emphasizes originality and purity.
This article explores the ideological tensions inherent in Festa's discussion of Greek learning in Italian humanism and how they relate to Fascist Italy's wider cultural unease with foreign influence.Specifically, it will explore how Festa responded to this ideological friction in his discussion of Greek learning in the Renaissance.How did he make the Byzantine Greeks and the heritage they brought with them consistent with his notion of humanism as a national, deeply Italian project?Before addressing this question, the following three sections will first introduce Festa's scholarly work, academic field, and their political implications, followed by a brief discussion of the immediate context of Umanesimo and its nationalist and fascisticized account of Renaissance humanism and the responses to Italy's Greek heritage in Fascist Italy.These aspects provide the wider framework in which we can better understand his discussion of the Byzantine Greek presence in Renaissance Italy.

Nicola Festa, Greek Studies, and Italian Fascism
Nicola Festa, trained in the Florentine philological school of Girolamo Vitelli (1849-1935), was a prolific editor of ancient Greek, Byzantine Greek, and Renaissance Latin texts, including Petrarch's epic Africa (1926), for which he is mostly remembered today. 3While Festa authored several studies on a range of philological subjects, his primary research focus revolved around Greek philology, encompassing both ancient Greek and, especially, Byzantine Greek literature.Following his training with Vitelli, Festa pursued his work within a tradition shaped by German classical philology, which resulted in several disputes with its critics, particularly with Ettore Romagnoli.With the wider contemporary audience, he was mainly known for his translations of Greek classics, some of which he authored together with his wife Hilda Montesi, as well as his translations from the Russian, including works of Nikolai Gogol and Apollon Maykov.When he published Umanesimo for the first time in 1935, he had been professore ordinario of classical philology at the Royal University of Rome since 1900 (he retired in 1937) and was serving as director of the Department of Classical Philology.He also presided over the committee for the national editions of the Greek and Latin classics, which oversaw the publication of new, scholarly editions of Greek and Latin literature considered especially relevant to the history or culture of the nation, and was among the founding members of the Institute for Eastern Europe, which included the study of the Byzantine Empire.Due to his prolific publishing and firm institutional position, Festa was a major figure in Italy's academic landscape in the first few decades of the twentieth century.Historians of scholarship have, however, not paid particular attention to Festa's philological work, perhaps due to his reputation for being competent yet 'unexciting '. 4 2 Nicola Festa, Umanesimo (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1935).This edition is cited throughout; see also note 28 below.In contrast to its fervent promotion of Roman studies, the Fascist regime showed a comparatively limited interest in Festa's primary field: Greek studies. 5While Fascism's receptions of ancient Rome have been researched intensively, its receptions of ancient Greek culture have generally received little systematic attention.Scholarly focus has centred on Greek language education in schools and the academic study of ancient Greek history in Fascist Italy, 6 with some exploration of academic pursuits related to Greek language and literature, as well as Greek archaeology. 7A comprehensive understanding of the overall reception of ancient Greek culture during this period has yet to emerge. 8While the academic study of ancient Greek history was, according to Dino Piovan, 'depressed and marginalized with regard to the appointment of university chairs', 9 it has also been argued that the relative detachment of Greek studies from the regime's ideological concerns facilitated its ongoing methodological advancements. 10Moreover, the regime's overall indifference towards the ancient Greek heritage allowed some scholars to view its study as a refuge from the heavily Fascist-influenced discourses on Rome.In fact, for some of Festa's academic colleagues, studying Greek literature, history, and art became a source of inspiration for anti-Fascist criticism, providing alternative perspectives and intellectual resistance against the prevailing Fascist ideology centred on Rome. 11The study of Byzantine Greek literature received even less attention from the regime than ancient Greek studies, except perhaps insofar as Fascist ultranationalism further fuelled the prevailing anti-Byzantinism.In Italy, Byzantine philology remained on the margins, while Byzantine literature and culture were commonly associated with notions of decadence, corruption, and effeminacy.Nicola Festa occupied a distinct position as the sole professor of Byzantine Greek in Italy. 12enerally speaking, classical scholars such as Festa tended to align more closely with the regime's concerns in their writings on Roman subjects, while their works on Greek topics are generally less influenced by such ideological issues.When engaging in comparative discussions of Greece and Rome or Italy, concessions to the regime's rhetoric of Romanness could emerge and the preeminence of Rome was consistently emphasised. 13Subjects that explored the intersection of Greek and Roman culture posed particularly delicate issues during the Fascist regime, especially when considering the Greek heritage of the Italian peninsula, which encompassed not only antiquity but also the Byzantine era, the Middle Ages, and the early Renaissance.Generalising from her work on Umberto Zanotti Bianco's excavations of Greek settlements in southern Italy, Nathalie de Haan observed that 'official' Fascist attitudes towards the Greek heritage of the Italian peninsula were ambiguous, as the regime struggled with its appreciation of Italy's Greek past. 14For example, the Greek heritage of southern Italy did not play a significant role in popular culture and propaganda, 15 but the Greek temples in Paestum (Poseidonia in Greek) were restored during the ventennio, 16 and the regime encouraged the performance of Greek tragedies in the ancient Greek theatre of Syracuse, a tradition going back to 1914. 17n the majority of his scholarly work, particularly before the Fascist ventennio, Festa did not directly address political subjects. 18His Umanesimo, on the other hand, is considered to be one of his works that most clearly aligns with Fascism. 19The essay's political overtones are evident both in fascista', Fragmenta, 2 (2008), 215-32), and Umberto Zanotti Bianco (Nathalie de Haan, 'Umberto Zanotti Bianco e l'archeologia della Magna Grecia nell'Italia fascista', in Scritti per il Centenario (1920-2020)   Festa did, on the other hand, recognise a general connection between scholarship and patriotism.For example, he dedicated his book on Greek prosody to his father, whom he credited with teaching him 'a non separare il culto severo della scienza dal fervente amore all'Italia', a clear indication that for him, as for so many others of his generation, scholarship was definitely also a matter of national interest.See Nicola Festa, Ricerche metriche.Saggio di un nuovo metodo per lo studio della metrica greca (Rome and Palermo: Sandron, 1926), p. iii. the way in which the author presents his arguments within the cultural framework of Fascism and in its publication in the Collezione Hoepli series, which aligned with the regime.The publisher, the Swiss-born Ulrico Hoepli (1846-1935), who also published Mussolini's opera omnia, clearly stated that the series 'vuole aderire strettamente al tempo di Mussolini'. 20Indeed, a glance at the other titles in the series reveals its ideological orientation.In addition to Benito Mussolini's La dottrina del Fascismo, the series included titles such as Ugo D'Andrea's Mussolini, motore del secolo, Julius Evola's Il mito del sangue, and Gastone Silvano Spinetti's Mistica fascista.Umanesimo was framed as a product of Fascism by more than its paratexts: Festa also emphasised that it was substantially inspired by the realities of Mussolini's Italy.Explaining something of his method in his preface, Festa declared that Fascism emphasised that the past could not be understood in terms of abstract economic or sociological mechanisms, a hint at his criticism of Marxist approaches to history writing.Instead, he embraced a man-based (or rather 'Man'-based) approach that focused on the achievements of exceptional individuals.All too abstract approaches to history, he explained, had been refuted by the example contemporary Italy, 'dove tutti sentono che un meraviglioso progresso compiutosi in pochi anni è dovuto alla volontà, all'energia, alla mente illuminata di un Uomo, il cui nome non è necessario qui scrivere, perché tutti noi Italiani lo abbiamo nel cuore'. 21Festa therefore wanted to explore real personalities, their personal vision, and their role in the historical evolution of national culture.
Festa's overall stance towards Fascism remains poorly understood and appears to have changed over the years.He signed Benedetto Croce's manifesto of anti-Fascist intellectuals in 1925 and paid tribute to Giacomo Matteotti (1885-1924), Mussolini's socialist critic, on the anniversary of his tragic death. 22From the latter half of the 1920s onwards, however, some of Festa's writings occasionally display an assertive cultural nationalism that was also promoted by Fascism.Tellingly, it is not in his work on Greek literature that we find political statements, but rather in his writings on Roman or Latin topics, such as Vergil, Horace, and Petrarch. 23Moreover, like the overwhelming majority of Italian academics, he took the giuramento di fedeltà in 1931.This oath committed him to fulfilling his duties as a teacher and imparting knowledge to diligent, patriotic citizens devoted to both the Fatherland and the Fascist Regime.Declining to take the oath would have resulted in losing his position without any form of redundancy pay or entitlement to a pension.Five years later, Festa published a Latin translation of Mussolini's 'imperial speeches', including the proclamation of empire of 9 May 1936. 24In December 1939, five months before his death, he was nominated senator of Italy, a position that he received, in his own words, 'per opera 23 Nicola Festa, Saggio sull''Africa' del Petrarca (Palermo: Sandron, 1926), dedicated to Teresina, the daughter of Mussolini's philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Nicola Festa, 'L'Originalità di Virgilio', La Nuova Antologia, 351 (September 1930), 3-33, and Nicola Festa, 'La letteratura nell'età di Augusto', in Augustus.Studi in occasione del bimillenario augusteo, ed. by Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome: Tipografia della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1938), pp.250-305 (pp.281-94).The dedication letter accompanying Festa's essay on Petrarch, authored by his wife Hilda Montesi, expresses the hope that Africa would become Italy's national poem of Roman rebirth (Festa, Saggio, pp.vii-viii).It was, according to Montesi, no coincidence that 'il poema della trionfante romanità vegga la luce nei giorni in cui il nome di Roma torna a suonare come qualcosa di mistico e di augusto'.On Festa's edition of Petrarch, see also Agbamu, pp.89-90.When it came to Horace, Festa asserted that previous generations had overlooked his 'produzione civile, patriottica e morale,' and emphasised that it was now up to 'Italia fascista' to establish a more comprehensive interpretation of the poet's multifaceted work (Festa,  del Duce'. 25On the other hand, Festa never became a member of the prestigious but regime-bound Accademia d'Italia, perhaps due to his early anti-Fascist leanings. Scholars have presented different interpretations of Festa's shifting stance towards the Fascist regime.Some view it as conformism pure and simple, while others emphasise the influence of Festa's Catholicism and his eagerness to maintain his elevated position in Italian academia. 26While Festa has been cited as a clear-cut example of a scholar with Fascist leanings, determining the extent of individual scholars' approval of Fascism is generally difficult.This difficulty extends not only to intellectuals who openly endorsed or condoned Mussolini's regime but also to those who remained silent and refrained from criticising it.Recent scholarship emphasises the complexity of attitudes, cautioning against oversimplifying pro-Fascist statements or lack of vocal opposition as either 'mere concession' or 'full adherence' to the regime.In order to analyse individuals' attitudes towards Fascism, it is important to examine a wide range of factors, including the cultural, social, and economic aspects that shape behaviours and choices, on a case-by-case basis.Support for Fascism, or for specific aspects of it, was frequently influenced by more than just reasoned political conviction; it could be guided by a multitude of motives including opportunism, cynicism, indifference, and cowardice.Recent research in the field of Fascism studies has emphasised the significance of recognising and understanding the impact of the regime's wide array of mechanisms of manipulation, repression, and control, including forms of 'blackmail' through implicit and explicit threats and promises.These mechanisms had tangible effects on the choices individuals made, particularly those who relied on state-supported institutions such as schools and universities for their livelihood.In many instances, therefore, we encounter ambiguities in the way scholars related to Fascism, and their responses to the regime may have changed over the course of the ventennio fascista, as did, apparently, Festa's. 27he present article maintains a clear analytical distinction in this regard.It does not take Festa's Umanesimo as a starting point to understanding the author's personal stance on Mussolini's regime and the motivations inspiring his rapprochement with Fascism.Instead, the analysis primarily focuses on how Festa, in his essay on Italian humanism, weaves the thorny topic of foreign influence, particularly Byzantine Greek influence, into a nationalist narrative that centres around the revitalisation of national culture and overtly aligns itself with aspects of Fascism.Consequently, this article is not primarily concerned with studying Festa's personal stance on fascism but rather uses his Umanesimo as a case study to explore how intellectuals, through their written work, could contribute to ratifying and reifying Fascist discourses on Italy's national heritage.At the same time, Festa's discussion of the Greek presence in Renaissance Italy also reveals his departure from the prevailing anti-Byzantinism that was deeply entrenched within Italian scholarship, bolstered even more by Fascist discourses.The essay Umanesimo originated in a series of lectures Festa delivered in September 1932 at the Regia Università per Stranieri in Perugia.Festa's discussion consists of ten short chapters on various aspects of Italian humanism, including chapters on its precursors, its early Florentine phase, the role of the Medici court, and the main humanist circles in Florence, Naples, and Rome.The final chapter, which was specifically added for the printed version, dealt with humanism and modern (classical) philology.The book was reprinted, slightly revised, in 1940. 28nlike many other scholars writing about Italian humanism and the Renaissance at the time, Festa did not come to the subject as a philosopher or a historian.While his name can be listed among major classicists of his generation, as a historian of humanism he is not the peer of contemporary luminaries of Renaissance history such as Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Giuseppe Saitta, and Francesco Olgiati.This also explains why his name does not appear in scholarly accounts of Renaissance humanism in modern historical thought.Festa came to the subject as a classical philologist.While contemporary historians tended to concentrate on the philosophical aspects of the humanist movement, Festa discussed it in its literary and, chiefly, its philological aspects. 29Consequently, he looked at Renaissance humanism as a precursor of his own academic profession of classical philology and, unlike some of his contemporaries, did not approach it as an encompassing and systematic philosophy of life.
This does not mean that Festa boiled humanism down to a purely technical approach to editing and interpreting ancient Latin and Greek texts.He claimed that Renaissance humanism was motivated by an 'appassionato ritorno alle origini' and therefore was a 'movimento patriottico soprattutto'. 30It was an inspired 'pratica di vita, compenetrazione artistica, anzi che rigida disciplina scientifica'. 31In his discussion of humanism, Festa was specifically interested in understanding 'la passione, l'amore romantico per l'antichità' and claimed no interest whatsoever in 'singoli fatti e tentativi'. 32Festa's characterisation of humanism as a patriotic movement that hearkened back to Italy's origins in ancient Rome aligns well with the Fascist cult of Rome, or romanità, with its 'palingenetic ultranationalism', as historians of Fascism call it: the aspiration to achieve a rebirth of the nation through a profound transformation informed by an imagined return to ancient and idealised origins. 33For Festa, it seems, understanding Italian humanism was part of the cultural transformation of Italy under Mussolini.'Conoscere l'eredità spirituale degl'italiani', Festa wrote on the first page of his preface, 'è il primo passo a crearsi un ideale di vita e di azione, tale da meritare di esser considerati come degni discendenti dei grandi avi'. 34hile Festa regarded humanism as a primarily national movement with relevance for the Italians of his own time, he also emphasised its wide European impact and resonance, arguing that Italian humanism was the original, Italian phase of modern European classicism. 35For him, this phase started with Petrarch.He observes that Petrarch had used his study of antiquity to become a classic himself; he was, in Festa's words, 'poeta originale e moderno, senza abbandonare la magnifica lingua dei padri, il latino'. 36For him, Petrarch and Boccaccio exemplified two prototypes of Italian humanism and, by extension, international classicism.While Petrarch had studied the classics to become a classic himself, Boccaccio had aspired to grasp the spirito dell'antico to create something new, making Italian a worthy alternative to Latin.While, in Festa's analysis, the Quattrocento largely followed Petrarch's ambition, later humanism (and hence European classicism) followed in Boccaccio's footsteps in terms of the value and purpose it attached to classical studies. 37esta's insistence on Italian humanism as a quintessentially Italian movement with lasting implications for European culture directly responded to approaches to Renaissance humanism that downplayed or even denied the Italian specificity and originality of the phenomenon.His essay predates the pro-Italian turn in the study of the Renaissance, which occurred in the 1940s with the work of Hans Baron, Eugenio Garin, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, and which has dominated modern scholarship ever since. 38In the 1920s and 1930s, by contrast, some European historians (usually with strong nationalist agendas) had argued that the achievements of Italian humanism should be traced to a general European Renaissance that had already flourished north of the Alps, and especially in France, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.This had, for example, been argued, with different emphases, by Edmond Faral (1882-1958) in France and Johan Nordström (1891-1967) in Sweden (the latter's Medeltid och renässans, originally published in 1929, also appeared in French in 1933, and was known in Italy).Paul Grendler reminds us that during the 1920s and 1930s, the study of the Italian Renaissance was generally discouraged in favour of the culture of the Northern Reformation. 39nsurprisingly, the European disregard for the Italian Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s prompted defensive responses from Italian scholars.Around the time Festa published his essay, European interpretations of the Italian Renaissance were being rebutted by Italian scholars such as Italo Siciliano (1895-1980) and the Russia-born Eugenio Anagnine (1888-1965).Some of these counter-discourses were outspokenly Fascist.A striking example is a little-known lecture, entitled 'Il Rinascimento come rifioritura imperiale della gente italica', by Emilio Bodrero (1874-1949), famous for having named Julius Caesar 'la prima Camicia Nera nella Storia della Nazione'. 40In this lecture, delivered at the Institute for Roman Studies in March 1939, Bodrero specifically attacked Johan Nordström's book as a 'denigrazione, anzi demolizione di ogni valore della civiltà italiana'; insisted on the originally Italian and 'native' character of the Renaissance; and described the Renaissance, Risorgimento, and Fascism as three distinct phases of a similar cultural renewal of the nation in which classical learning played a guiding role. 41eyond academia, too, the Fascist regime sought to capitalise on the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance for ideological propagandistic purposes, just as it capitalised on ancient and Christian Rome. 42As Medina Lasansky has argued, the period was celebrated 'as a shared cultural heritage for all Italians, Tuscans, Venetians, and Romans alike.Like the celebration of romanità, this communal-era past enabled Italy to project the image of a strong unified nation abroad'. 43 was reflected in the celebration of condottieri; the use of heraldry of the period; exhibitions of artists such as Giotto, Botticelli, and Masaccio; and the revival of architectural styles reminiscent of the period (as in the Case del Fascio with their distinctive medioevo-style belltowers).In order to distinguish the celebration of the period from the cult of ancient Rome, it has sometimes been labelled italianità. 44The notions of romanità and italianità, so defined, are not always easy to disentangle, and Roman antiquity and the medioevo/Renaissance were sometimes celebrated together and in conjunction.At the Mostra Agustea della Romanità, for example, the Renaissance was framed as a crucial link between the ancient world and Mussolini's New Italy.Lasansky's investigation of Fascist urban planning, architecture, and archaeology has moreover shown that romanità and italianità -to the extent they can be neatly separated -could well involve the same people. 45s we have seen, Festa's essay exemplifies these trends well.It constitutes an early contribution to a European campaign to rehabilitate Italian humanism while simultaneously valorising Italian humanism within an explicitly Fascist framework.Renaissance humanism is moreover regarded as a model to look at, and connect with, Italy's Roman past, and as such connects italianità with romanità.The fact that Festa delivered his lectures at the Regia Università per Stranieri is significant in this respect.Established in 1925 to promote Italian culture internationally, Fascism instrumentalized the university as a platform to disseminate the supposed superiority of Italian culture under the Virgilian motto Antiquam exquirite matrem ('Seek out your ancient mother'). 46The original context of Festa's essay at the University for Foreigners gives its nationalist emphasis, tainted by Fascist overtones, an even more forcefully polemical and antagonistic tone.
Festa's book was welcomed with mixed criticism, both in Italy and abroad.Some saw it as a useful synthesis rather than a piece of original scholarship. 47Most reviewers were more positive in their judgment.For example, the American Hispanist Joseph Fucilla praised Festa for the fact he 'continually cuts across the purely compilatory evidence which he presents with his own personal interpretations, his own philological conceptions, his own vision of the historical development of Italian civilization acquitted through many years of profound and penetrating thinking and his colossal erudition'.He even placed Festa's Umanesimo alongside the works of Voigt, Burkhardt, Monnier, 'and other great scholars'. 48hile Fucilla perhaps overstated his appreciation, Festa's account of Italian humanism was quite original in at least one regard: the emphasis it placed on the role of the Byzantine Greeks in the emergence and development of the humanist movement was rather exceptional at the time.The 'return of Greek' in Renaissance culture was an important episode in the history of Greek culture in Italy.It sat at the crossroads of classical philology, Byzantine studies, and Latin humanism, all areas to which Festa had contributed.He seems to have had a special interest in the reception of the Greek heritage in Italian culture more generally.In 1907, for instance, he published a brief study on the Greek models in Gabriele D'Annunzio's prose tragedy Più che l'amore (1906). 49Perhaps this special interest is not surprising for a classical scholar from Matera in Basilicata, a city with an ancient Greek past itself. 50

Responses to Italy's Greek Heritage(s) in Fascist Italy
Before delving into Festa's discussion of the Byzantine Greek presence in Italy within the framework of his fascisticized account of Renaissance humanism, it is important to briefly consider the larger question of Italy's multiple Greek heritages.As Festa's work traversed the realms of classical philology, Byzantine studies, and Renaissance humanism, his analysis of Greek learning cannot be viewed in isolation and adopts some of the strategies we also find in other scholarship dealing with Italy's Greek heritage.
Italy's Greek heritage is multifaceted.Two aspects stood out to Festa and scholars of his day, and Festa's essay added a third.The first (in terms of chronology) was the Greek presence in southern Italy and Sicily from the eighth century BCE onwards and its cultural and linguistic impact on the area.The region was already known in antiquity as 'Magna Graecia' (Greater Greece), which testifies to the clear Greek presence in the area.A second important aspect of Italy's Greek past was the Romans' extensive engagement with Greek culture, its language and literature, its art and architecture, especially during its classical period under the emperor Augustus and his immediate successors. 51Thirdly, the Byzantine Empire and the Italian peninsula shared an enduring interaction.While it garnered less scholarly attention than its ancient counterparts, it shaped various aspects of Italian culture, art, and architecture.The long-standing contact between Byzantium and Italy extended into the fifteenth century, during which the Byzantine Greek diaspora played a significant role in the revival of ancient Greek language and literature within humanism.
The various Greek legacies of Italy were obviously problematic in an ultranationalist political climate that usually exhibited anxiety over the nation's debt to cultures perceived as foreign, that is, un-Roman and un-Italian, both in the past and present.The idea that national culture -via Magna Graecia, ancient Rome, and Renaissance humanism -relied on Greek models and examples, as well as Greek teachers, philosophers, rhetoricians, and doctors who settled in Rome and elsewhere, was difficult to harmonise with the ideals of Roman originality and cultural self-sufficiency. 52Where the primacy, originality, and historical persistence of Italian culture were felt to be in danger of being compromised, they were emphatically reasserted.This could entail minimising or even negating the impact of foreign languages and cultures, occasionally accompanied by assertions of the inferiority of the cultures perceived as threats.Italian anxiety over foreign influence was of course not limited to the Fascist period and can be traced back to the Risorgimento period and nineteenth-century nationalism.Nonetheless, under the ultranationalism of Fascism, such concerns were articulated more prominently and reformulated more antagonistically. 53hese responses can be succinctly exemplified through two notable cases from the study of Magna Graecia and classical Latin literature.Between 1924 and 1932, Emanuele Ciaceri (1869-1944), an academic acquaintance of Festa, published a monumental study of Greek culture in southern Italy in three volumes.Ciaceri hypothesised that the cultural flourishing of Magna Graecia was primarily due to the contribution of the 'natives' and criticised previous scholarship for writing them out of history in favour of the Greeks.He downplayed the difference between the natives and the Greeks, arguing that the indigenous element remained the culturally dominant factor in the area. 54In a lecture presented at the Istituto fascista di cultura in Salerno in 1933, Ciaceri went so far as to present Pythagoreanism as a form of 'fascismo antico' that could develop in southern Italy (and not in the decadent Greek East) thanks to the 'fresche energie' of its native population, with Pythagoras as a kind of proto-Duce. 55udi letterari e bibliografici (Rome: Pontificio istituto orientale, 1925), Orientalia Christiana, 13.On these items, see Bianchi, p.On this, see Vittorio Amoretti, 'Pitagora in orbace', Rassegna storica salernitana, 6.1 (1989), 199-229 and, more recently, Marco Giuman, '"Fascismo antico".Alcune note a margine di una conferenza salernitana di Emanuele Ciaceri', Medea, 6.1 (2020), 1-29.
While Ciaceri's approach might seem radical, similar strategies can be observed in other areas of discussion regarding the Greek legacy.In classical philology, the originality of Latin literature, particularly the works of the poet Vergil, constituted a recurring topic of debate. 56This debate was not solely about determining the superiority of Vergil or Homer but occurred within the broader cultural antagonism between Italian and foreign scholars during the nationalist fervour of the Risorgimento period.For some German scholars, Vergil's reliance on Homer and other Greek poets as models was seen as a sign of Roman genius's lack of originality and the inferiority of Latin literature.In contrast, Italian scholars argued that Vergil's use of Homer demonstrated his mastery of the epic genre and his ability to surpass his predecessors.This quarrel was revived under Fascism, and Festa himself contributed to the discussion in a 1930 essay on Vergil's originality.He criticised German scholar Eduard Norden and others for failing to appreciate Vergil's poetic genius in favour of Homer.He boldly claimed, 'Virgilio rappresenta la perfezione', and added 'dopo di lui non ci sarà più bisogno di ricorrere ad Omero; basterà conoscere l'Eneide'. 57s we shall see, in Festa's discussion of the Byzantine Greek presence in Renaissance Italy and its contribution to the accomplishments of humanism, we can observe similar strategies aimed at devaluing foreign influence on what is regarded as the national culture of the Italians.Just as classical scholars and ancient historians worked hard to harmonise the idea of Roman superiority with the omnipresence of Greece, so Festa addressed the question of the dotti greci who had settled in Renaissance Italy and had helped spread the knowledge of Greek language and literature after its decline in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.He shows himself susceptible to ideological frictions between Greekness and romanità/italianità similar to those evident in classical scholarship, as well as to the friction between Italian and foreign scholars.In order to see his discussion in perspective, the next section will first look at the way in which the dotti greci had previously been treated in scholarship before analysing Festa's approach to the topic.It will finally also address the issue of anti-Byzantinism that Festa's account appears to counterbalance.His divergent perspective on Byzantine culture within the context of Fascism contrasts with then-prevailing responses to Byzantium.

Italian Humanism and Greek Learning in Festa's Umanesimo
The role of the Byzantine Greek scholars in the return of Greek learning to Latin-dominated Western Europe, occurring from the early fifteenth century onward, is widely acknowledged in today's scholarship.Manuel Chrysoloras, Bessarion, George of Trebizond, and Theodore Gaza are household names in the study of Italian humanism and the early Renaissance. 58Interest in their scholarly, cultural, and intellectual contributions to humanism mainly emerged after Festa's death in 1940.Between 1941 and 1954, the otherwise little-known classical scholar Giuseppe Cammelli (1890-1977) published a series of important biographies of the main Greek protagonists of the humanist movement, which triggered interest in the subject. 59Reviewing Cammelli's biography of  Chrysoloras in 1942, Alessandro Perosa (1910-1998) observed that issues related to the Greek presence in Italy were too often overlooked by humanistic historiography. 60Two decades before he published his first biography, Cammelli himself had already raised the issue of the 'noncuranza' of Byzantinist scholars concerning the subject and 'quasi il disprezzo' with which historians of the period had treated the people who (in Cammelli's own words) 'ci conservarono religiosamente tutti questi tesori e furono gli autori primi e gli ispiratori del nuovo e splendido rifiorire della nostra letteratura'. 61His detailed biographies of several Byzantine Greek scholars apparently sprang from the desire to set things straight and to understand the contribution of the dotti bizantini in Italy in a better light.Thanks to Cammelli's pioneering studies, the role and place of the Byzantine scholars and Greek in the humanist movement would come into ever-sharper focus for international academia, mainly during the second half of the twentieth century. 62hen Festa was writing, however, historians of the Renaissance and humanism generally showed little interest in scrutinising the role played by the Byzantine Greek intelligentsia in the humanist movement.Discussions of the Byzantine background of the Italian Renaissance usually remained restricted to dispersed case studies on individual scholars and scattered remarks in general treatments of Renaissance humanism.The discussion focused on Italian and Latin humanism.The Greek presence in Renaissance Italy was, however, discussed by Vittorio Rossi (1865-1938) in his Il Quattrocento, an influential literary history of the fifteenth century, first printed in 1898 and republished in 1933 and 1938.The book was known to Festa, who cited from the second edition, as was its author: Rossi presided over the national edition of Petrarch's work, to which Festa contributed with his famous edition of Petrarch's Africa.While Rossi did not display particular interest in the Greeks' role in Italian humanism, he did spend a few pages of his massive work on their presence, bringing together the most relevant (mainly Italian) scholarship in extensive and learned footnotes. 63Festa, on the other hand, dedicated two subsequent chapters to the dotti greci and their ancient culture in Italy.These chapters are titled: 'Dotti greci in Italia' (pp.55-74) and 'La cultura greca in Italia' (pp.75-94) and make up about twenty percent of his essay.Unlike Rossi, Festa also engaged vividly with previous (especially German) scholarship on this point, including the work of Georg Voigt and Jacob Burckhardt.
The dotti greci of the Renaissance featured in the history of classical scholarship in addition to histories of Italian humanism.In this field of studies, there had been a certain interest in their presence from at least the early eighteenth century, when Humphrey Hody (1659-1707), Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, delivered a series of lectures on the 'illustrious Greeks' ('Graeci illustres') who brought Greek learning to the Latin-dominated West (posthumously published by Samuel Jebb in 1742). 64While mostly forgotten today, Hody's astonishingly well-informed monograph was mined for information by later historians of classical philology, including John Edward Sandys (1844-1922).In his seminal History of Classical Scholarship, published in three volumes between 1903 and 1908, Sandys discussed the Byzantine Greek contribution to humanist philology in detail.He emphasised the manuscripts they brought with them and the editions they prepared, not so much the philosophical debates they engaged in or the scholarly works they produced themselves. 65Festa seems to have taken the basic facts for his own account in Umanesimo from Sandys' treatment (in combination with Rossi's), but not without reframing them to harmonise with his own version of umanesimo as an essentially national Italian phenomenon.
Let us now turn to the ideological issues at stake in Festa's discussion of Greek learning in the Renaissance.How did Festa fit the Greeks and their heritage into the national project he believed Italian humanism to be?
Festa framed his whole discussion of the dotti greci in Renaissance Italy, starting in his essay's fourth chapter, in an antagonistic way.At the beginning of his chapter on learned Greeks in Italy, he criticised Jacob Burckhardt for a remark in his epoch-making The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; 2nd revised edition in 1869), published in Italian in 1876 with additions and corrections communicated by the author to the translator Diego Valbusa.Burckhardt had limited his discussion of the Greeks to less than one page, but Festa apparently did not like what he read there.Burckhardt had claimed that 'the study of Greek literature died out about the year 1520, with the last of the colony of learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of fortune that northerners like Erasmus, the Stephani [Robert and Henri Estienne], and Budaeus [Guillaume Budé] had meanwhile made themselves masters of the language'. 66For Festa, Burckhardt's statement -however brief -sufficed to make him suspect that the Swiss scholar intended to belittle the importance of Italian humanism by overvaluing the contribution of non-Italians, both Byzantine Greeks and northern Europeans.The polemical and tendentious way in which Festa framed his discussion reveals that he saw Burckhardt's treatment of the matter as an offence to Italian culture.Additionally, his response already shows something of the cultural unease with accepting the impact of cultural agents perceived as 'un-Italian' on Italian culture.In response Festa, in his ensuing discussion of the matter, inverted Burckhardt's picture: the Byzantine Greeks emerge from his discussion in the passive role of 'facilitating outsiders', while the Italian humanists are presented as the true pioneers of European classicism, including Greek learning.In other words, they do not participate at all in the active kinds of humanism that Festa outlined as an ideal.
According to Festa, the pioneers of Greek studies in Italy had been the first Byzantine teacher of Greek in Florence, Manuel Chrysoloras (d.1415), and his Italian students.When a new generation of Greeks arrived after Chrysoloras, they encountered Italian humanists who already were accomplished Hellenists.These Italians were, in other words, more or less self-made men who had only needed a few years of Chrysoloras' teaching (1397-1400) to familiarise themselves with Greek and establish a tradition of their own in the language.Discussing the years surrounding the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438/39) in his chapter on Greeks in Italy, Festa claimed that humanism had by that time already climaxed in Italy, 'sicché la presenza di quei greci non poté produrre gli effetti che circa mezzo secolo prima vi aveva prodotto l'insegnamento del Crisolora'. 67He repeated (and made even more explicit) this point at the end of his subsequent chapter on Greek culture in Italy.Concluding his discussion of the work of Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405-1464), Festa rounded off the chapter with the bold assertion that, by that time, 'l'Italia non aveva più bisogno di maestri greci; aveva bisogno di raccoglimento per trarre frutto dalle opera classiche ricercate e ricopiate da ogni parte e rese accessibili agli studiosi'. 68odern historians of Renaissance humanism agree that after Chrysoloras' departure from Florence, his former students and successors advanced Greek studies significantly.However, more generally, for their mastery of the language, the humanists still largely relied on Byzantine teachers.Before Greeks started teaching at Italian schools and universities more regularly in the late 1450s and 1460s, Italian humanists such as Guarino of Verona, Giovanni Aurispa, and Francesco Filelfo visited Greek teachers in Constantinople or elsewhere in the Greek-speaking world.Additionally, some highprofile Greeks had already been active as teachers in Italy before the council, most notably George of Trebizond, who arrived in 1416 at the latest. 69Overall, however, a thorough knowledge of Greek remained limited to a relatively small group of exceptional individuals.If the new generation after Chrysoloras met accomplished Hellenists in Italy, they had usually been taught by Byzantine Greeks, and their knowledge of Greek was not representative of the majority of humanists.Festa edited out, for instance, the testimony of the Greek scholar Michael Apostoles, which had previously been cited by Rossi in his Il Quattrocento.As late as c. 1472 (that is, more than seven decades after Chrysoloras' Florentine lessons), Apostoles complained that, notwithstanding their continuous efforts, the Italians were unable to learn Greek well due to a lack of good teachers. 70Festa's representation of the situation can therefore be regarded as rather one-sided.It is strikingly consistent with the way in which some humanists themselves liked to see their own 'self-achieved' competence in Greek.
As knowledge of Greek was spreading in the second half of the fifteenth century, at least some Italian humanists worried they would lose the cultural primacy they had claimed for themselves.They refused to be seen as dependent on Byzantine Greek teachers anymore.One strategy they used to reassert their superiority was to downplay the role of Byzantine scholars in the emergence of Greek learning and humanism more generally. 71Interestingly, in response to Burckhardt's claims, Festa resumed this strategy of the humanists by quoting one of the luminaries of Italian Quattrocento humanism, Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494).Poliziano was an admirer of ancient Greek literature, and wrote Greek verses himself, yet he had a troubled relationship with the Greeks of his own time.Teaching Greek in Florence, he claimed in an opening lecture that the Florentines knew the Greek language so well that it would seem Athens transplanted itself to Florence sua sponte: 'spontaneously' -an implicit denial of even the slightest role for the Byzantines in the process.He wrote as follows: And you are the people, Florentines, in whose city all Greek learning -long since extinct in Greece itself -has come to be revived, and it flourishes so greatly that your men now already teach Greek literature in public, and (something that has not happened in Italy for a thousand years) boys of high nobility speak the Attic language so soundly and so easily and fluently that it would seem that Athens had not already been destroyed and occupied by barbarians but spontaneously separated itself from its very soil and moved to Florence with its entire household, so to speak, and poured itself out over the entire city. 72ther than taking Poliziano's statement with a grain of salt (as modern historians would agree he should have done), Festa took it at face value and used it to counter Burckhardt's claim.
Using this representational strategy throughout, Festa's account dissociated Hellenism from Byzantium and the Greeks and firmly placed the Greek literary heritage in the hands of the Italian humanists.The Greeks were imagined to have 'handed over' the Greek heritage to the Italians.Festa  also 'filtered' it, as it were, and through their philological activity removed its 'Byzantine' and 'Oriental' accretions.In this way, Festa's narrative implies, they prepared the Greek heritage for the rest of Europe and designed the blueprint for European classicism.Festa's account thus also suggested that the humanists' engagement with the heritage of ancient Greece was a very 'Roman' phenomenon.Like the Romans before them, the Italian humanists of the Quattrocento made Greek learning part of a Latin-dominated culture and disseminated the humanist culture they created in the process to other parts of Europe in the form of European classicism, whose real roots were in Rome rather than Athens -or Constantinople, for that matter.The implicit narrative that runs through Festa's account thus aligns with the way cultural institutions tied to the regime, including the Institute of Roman Studies, reasserted the cultural primacy of both Italy and Rome. 82hile Festa's treatment of the Byzantine Greeks falls short of fully recognising their contributions, it nevertheless counterbalances a prevailing anti-Byzantinism in contemporary classical scholarship.This negative bias is clearly evident in a 1941 essay by Festa's most renowned student, Giorgio Pasquali, entitled Medioevo bizantino. 83Pasquali consistently portrays Byzantium as a sterile, unoriginal, and rigid culture, juxtaposing it with his vision of Roman Catholic culture. 84'Bizanzio, dove mette le mani, soffoca', he writes. 85His disdain for Byzantium obviously leaves no room to acknowledge the contributions of Byzantine scholars to the Renaissance.Pasquali challenges what he perceives as the absurd idea that the Renaissance was incited by the arrival of Byzantine Greeks in Italy, a viewpoint proposed by Giuseppe Cammelli, as mentioned earlier.'Sarebbe molto singolare', he writes, 'che i Greci avessero dato agl'Italiani quello che essi stessi non avevano mai avuto'. 86He goes on to argue that the Byzantines failed to emancipate themselves from the past, had little appreciation for classical beauty, lacked the motivation to find joy in creativity and understanding, and were devoid of the Renaissance man's sense of freedom.
Pasquali, who curiously omits any mention of Festa, not only denies the contribution of Byzantines to the Renaissance but also undermines the broader significance of Greek for Italian humanism.He contends that Italian humanism was a Latin phenomenon.Emphasising the reluctance of certain humanists to engage with Greek studies, he dismisses its overall impact on Renaissance culture.According to him, Renaissance tragedy drew from Seneca, not Sophocles, while comedy followed the examples of Plautus and Terence, not Aristophanes.Furthermore, he emphasises the ongoing decline of Greek during the Counterreformation and its diminishing prominence under the influence of the Jesuits.He argues that Greek's integration into a shared European culture did not occur before the late nineteenth century.Prior to that, it was Latin, not Greek; Rome, not Athens, that formed the core of the revival of culture. 87nti-Byzantinism such as Pasquali's was a widespread phenomenon influenced by multiple factors such as personal taste, radical classicism, and a general anti-Greek sentiment.While the Fascist glorification of ancient Rome might have influenced certain instances of anti-Byzantinism, aversion towards Byzantine culture is not by definition indicative of Fascist leanings.This is particularly evident in Pasquali's case, as his political views did not align perfectly with any specific ideology. 88Putting aside the question of what motivated Pasquali's attitude, his radical stance in Medioevo bizantino offers a different perspective on Festa's account of the dotti greci in Italy.In comparison, Festa's discussion appears notably more inclusive than it may have initially seemed.

Conclusion
This article has explored how Nicola Festa carved out a place for the Byzantine Greeks and their heritage in his depiction of Renaissance humanism within a nationalist interpretive framework with clear Fascist overtones, emphasising the superiority and originality of Italian national traditions.We have seen something of how he deployed strategies of disownment, dissociation, and mild alienation in his representation of the Byzantine Greeks and set them at a safe distance from the Italian humanists whom he presented as the true protagonists of European classicism.At the same time, his account provided a counterbalance to the prevailing currents of anti-Byzantinism in Italian scholarship which compromised the position of his field of studies in the academic landscape.While Fascism's receptions of ancient Rome have been studied intensively, our understanding of Fascist receptions of Greek culture is still meagre and fragmented.For a better understanding of the phenomenon, we need a more encompassing analysis of how Fascist culture dealt with the Greek heritage of Italy in the various shapes it took, from the archaeological remains of Magna Graecia to the obvious borrowings and imitations of Greek sources in Roman literature, and including the Byzantine influence on the culture of the Italian Middle Ages and the Renaissance.If it is a truism that Roman culture cannot be fully understood without considering its engagements with Greece, one wonders how Rome's reception can be studied without attention to the Greek tradition it necessarily implies.

13
See, on this subject, the pertinent observations in Napolitano, pp.51-56 and pp.67-68, with an interesting analysis of the case of Giorgio Pasquali's discussion of the origins of the Saturnian metre in his Preistoria della poesia romana (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1936).14 Nathalie de Haan, 'The "Società Magna Grecia" in Fascist Italy', Anabases, 9 (2009), 113-25 (p.122).15 Interestingly, Vincenzo Cuoco's historical novel Platone in Italia regained popularity in Fascist schools.On this, see Monica Galfré, 'La fortuna di Cuoco nella scuola fascista', in Vincenzo Cuoco nella cultura di due secoli.Atti del convegno internazionale, Campobasso, 20-22 gennaio 2000, ed. by Luigi Biscardi and Antonino De Francesco (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002), pp.287-301.16 On the temples, see Giovanna Ceserani, Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 253 (and pp.251-76 more generally on the Fascist approach to the Greek past of southern Italy).Delighted by the two shows he himself attended in 1924, Mussolini brought the initiative under the wings of the regime and in 1925 established the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico.See Patricia Gaborik, Mussolini's Theatre: Fascist Experiments in Art and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp.245-46. 18

Festa' s
Umanesimo (1935) and the Study of Italian Humanism

69
This was acknowledged by Festa in another context: Festa, Umanesimo, p. 66. 70 See Rossi, pp.91-92, observing the (in his view, surprisingly) slow dissemination of Greek learning despite the enthusiasm Chrysoloras had generated.71 On these cultural tensions, see Han Lamers, 'Hellenism and Cultural Unease in Italian Humanism: The Case of Francesco Filelfo', in Francesco Filelfo, Man of Letters, ed. by Jeroen De Keyser (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp.22-42, with the references there.