Mare Nostrum

Mare Nostrum is the imperial name given to the Mediterranean as Benito Mussolini’s government presents Italy’s reach beyond its borders. The phrase condenses a political promise: that the country, newly organized as a nation and state, will expand its influence across the sea. In the book, however, the promise does not stand alone. It is tested against the occupation of Corfu, the state’s breach of an international commitment, and a counter-image of the Mediterranean as a route through which the aftermath of war continues to generate profit and political danger.

An imperial claim in a postwar landscape

The expression belongs to a broader rhetoric of national enlargement. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini describes a state that will make Italians out of regional populations and looks beyond Italy’s borders to an imperial myth. National greatness, in this formulation, depends on an expansive idea of empire. Mare Nostrum gives that ambition a geographical focus: the Mediterranean is not simply a body of water but a field on which Italy is to assert itself among the great powers.

That promise takes shape amid the dislocation of the postwar years. The book describes five million returning veterans pressing toward Italy’s borders and a political landscape in which old leaders and familiar parliamentary formulas seem unable to contain the consequences of war. The rhetoric of expansion offers a forceful answer to that crisis: rather than accept a diminished place, Italy should claim a larger one. But the expression also makes the costs of this answer harder to separate from its spectacle. The Mediterranean that promises renewed national importance is already marked by war, military memory, and material interests.

The book places this language alongside Gabriele D’Annunzio’s contrasting celebration of Fiume. In his New Year address to his legionnaires, D’Annunzio casts 1919 as a year of passion rather than peace and sets Fiume’s youth and life against the decrepitude he associates with Versailles. His vision makes a seized Adriatic city the setting for a new beginning. Mare Nostrum belongs to a related vocabulary of renewal and expansion, though its focus is not the singular example of Fiume but the wider reach of Italian power across the Mediterranean.

Corfu and the language of action

The phrase acquires immediate political force in the crisis that follows the killing of an Italian officers’ delegation on the Greek-Albanian border. On August 28, 1923, Mussolini returns to Rome as the news arrives. Salvatore Contarini, the foreign secretary and advocate of caution, is away. Before he can return with recommendations, Mussolini sends a telegraph demanding extensive apologies, a solemn funeral, honors for the Italian flag, an investigation by Italian inspectors, capital punishment for those responsible, and compensation of 50 million lire.

The Greek government denies involvement and appeals to the League of Nations, relying on British protection. Mussolini answers by sending a naval squadron to occupy Corfu. His ultimatum sets August 29 as the deadline for satisfaction and threatens a landing preceded by the bombardment of the Old Venetian Fortress. The book emphasizes the international significance of the action: Italy, a member of the League of Nations, is openly violating its statute. The imperial claim of Mare Nostrum is therefore linked not only to a demand for recognition but to the use of military pressure to secure it.

The operation is presented on a substantial scale. Forty Italian ships and seven thousand armed troops, supplied with ammunition and equipment, gather off the coast of Epirus. As the ultimatum approaches, the country is portrayed as watching and waiting together, while Mussolini remains awake for the navy’s radiograms. The episode turns the sea into a stage for national anticipation: ships, troops, communications, and the deadline make foreign policy into a public drama. The action’s power in the narrative lies both in what the government does and in the unity it appears to produce at home.

Public spectacle and national belonging

After the landing on Corfu, the prime minister’s press office repeatedly celebrates the Mediterranean’s blue glory under the name Mare Nostrum. The phrase gives official language a vivid, possessive form: the sea is presented as a setting for Italian achievement and as evidence that the country has recovered the power to act. In a November 1922 statement to the press, Mussolini had already framed Italy’s demand for international standing in terms of equality: “Italy wants the great nations of the world to treat her as a sister, not as a housemaid.” The Corfu action gives that demand a more confrontational expression.

This spectacle connects with the book’s depiction of fascist political ritual. At a commemorative gathering in Milan, Mussolini returns to the place of an earlier rally and contrasts the handful of faithful from the movement’s beginnings with the legions assembled in the present. He describes the growth as a resurrection of the race and a transformation of people into a nation and then a state, pursuing expansion in the world. The same structure of decline followed by revival underlies the imperial promise attached to Mare Nostrum. Public ceremony turns the claim into a shared experience, while the scale of military action makes the promise appear concrete.

The surrounding narrative also shows the political usefulness of such a display. During a period when the Fascist Party is described as discredited and weighed down by internal opportunism, the Corfu crisis restores enthusiasm around Mussolini’s audacity. The book presents the crisis as an opportunity to play the cards of Italian nationalism and to break, at least symbolically, from dependence on Britain. Mare Nostrum thus serves as more than a description of the sea: it gathers military action, public feeling, and the promise of a larger national role into a single image.

The sea’s counter-image

The book sets the press office’s celebratory Mediterranean against Amerigo Dùmini’s view of the same sea. For him, it is not a gleaming emblem of national destiny but a record of military history: wrecked vessels, past conflicts, and the accumulated consequences of war. This contrast unsettles the official name. What the government represents as a space of glory can also be read as a landscape of damage and unresolved conflict.

Dùmini’s attention to the sea is connected to the business of war surplus. He recognizes the scale of the trade in firearms, ammunition, medical supplies, vessels, vehicles, clothing, and fuel sold cheaply by the state and resold for profit. Although associations of former combatants and unemployed or disabled workers are supposed to receive preference at auctions, the better lots go to companies using dummy organizations and false fronts. The account identifies businessmen profiting from this system, among them Filippo Filippelli and Carlo Bazzi. The imperial image of a sea opening onto national power thus coexists with a material economy in which the residue of war is converted into private gain.

The political pressure surrounding Dùmini gives this contradiction a personal consequence. After his imprisonment, he telegraphs Cesare Rossi, Michele Bianchi, and Arturo Fasciolo that he will not serve as a shield for others. He is released after two days and moved to the Grand Hotel. Arnaldo Mussolini publicly defends him in Il Popolo d’Italia, while the Corfu invasion renews the official celebration of Mediterranean glory. When Francesco Giunta renews his parliamentary inquiry into arms trafficking, Dùmini prepares a report and writes to Rossi that a documentary account could force him to reveal acts by people in the interior ministry. The sea’s imperial symbolism therefore cannot erase the conflicts and concealed interests that travel in its wake.

Meaning and limits of the expression

Mare Nostrum joins national recovery to outward expansion. Its force comes from making the Mediterranean seem at once a geographical space, a measure of Italy’s standing, and a stage on which the government can perform decisive action. The Corfu operation supplies the image with ships and troops; official language supplies it with glory; collective anticipation supplies it with an audience. In this way, the phrase participates in the book’s recurring portrayal of politics as spectacle and national renewal as a promise made through action.

Yet the expression remains in tension with the evidence around it. Italy’s appeal for equal treatment sits beside a unilateral occupation that violates the League of Nations’ statute. The celebration of a national sea sits beside the trafficking of war materials and the political threats generated by that trade. Against the image of a people becoming a state and expanding into the world, the book offers a Mediterranean that preserves the history of conflict and exposes the gap between imperial rhetoric and political practice. Mare Nostrum is therefore both an emblem of projected power and a phrase whose confident possession is repeatedly complicated by what the narrative shows happening on and around the sea.