Consumption

In the aftermath of the First World War, the high cost of living became one of Italy’s hottest political topics. From the start, Mussolini’s Fascists made the politics of everyday consumption a cornerstone of their “project” to remake Italy. This chapter examines the politics of everyday consumption in Fascist Italy from the perspective of how these were practiced and lived, focusing on a moment of heightened state intrusion into consumer habits and practices—the reaction to the imposition of sanctions by the League of Nations in late 1935 in response to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia—and how these played out in one Italian city, Venice. The Fascist regime used the economic sanctions as a pretext for restrictive and persuasive measures aimed at reinforcing the imperial “home front” and fundamentally reshaping families’ consumer practices. Shopkeepers and consumers responded in multiple, often ambivalent, ways to the regime’s attempts to place them and their consumer practices at the center of efforts to construct a Fascist home front and empire.