Eja, alalà

Eja, alalà appears as a collective exclamation in the book’s account of a Fascist congress, where it helps carry political enthusiasm from the hall into the streets. Its significance lies in that public use: joined to shouting, singing, applause, and formation, the phrase becomes part of a shared political performance rather than a solitary utterance.

Appearance at the Congress

At the close of Benito Mussolini’s three-hour address, wild enthusiasm breaks out in the Auditorium Augusteo. The audience shouts and sings, cries of eja, alalà mingle with endless applause, and Mussolini is kissed, embraced, and strewn with flowers. The session is adjourned, but the response does not end with the speech: excitement spills into the street as Fascists form up and march toward the Altare della Patria and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Rome).

The placement makes the expression part of a sequence of collective action. It comes after a long speech setting out a sweeping political vision and accompanies the change from listeners gathered in a theater to a disciplined procession in public space. The phrase is presented not as an argument to be interpreted, but as a voice shared by a crowd.

Acclamation and Political Ritual

The congress scene draws together bodily gestures and repeated sounds: standing, embracing, shouting, singing, applauding, and marching. Eja, alalà belongs to this chorus of acclaim. Its force in the passage comes from the way individual voices join the larger response, making the audience’s enthusiasm audible and collective.

That scene follows a ceremony held five days earlier for the Unknown Soldier, whose remains had been chosen by lot to represent the fallen. At that memorial, the founders of the National Fascist Party knelt in prayer; the narration presents the act as evidence that politics was taking on the character of religion. The congress’s exclamation and procession belong to the same surrounding pattern of public ritual, though the account does not identify the phrase as part of the earlier ceremony.

A Phrase in a Divided Postwar Soundscape

The phrase’s setting is a country still shaped by war and mass political mobilization. Elsewhere, the book describes returning veterans as a huge force pressing against the old political order, while competing crowds give public space sharply different sounds and meanings. At a Milan demonstration, socialist women lead a procession singing songs of liberation; the account contrasts their march with the smaller gathering of men formed by years of wartime experience. These scenes establish the broader political soundscape in which collective songs and exclamations mark belonging, without suggesting that Eja, alalà is used in those other episodes.

The congress passage gives the expression its clearest function: it carries acclaim beyond the spoken address and into a public march. In that transition, the crowd’s response becomes both celebration and organized display, connecting the leader’s speech to the movement’s visible presence in the city.