IN HEROIC MOULD.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 18849, 11 April 1931, Page 7

IN HEROIC MOULD.

A DICTATOR’S ROLE. The first volume of an allegorical poem of colossal proportions in praise of Fascism and its founder, Benito Mussolini, has just been presented to the Duce (says the “Christian Science Monitor”). The poem is the work of a young Florentine poet, Virgilio Fiorentino. Twenty-six more volumes are to be issued monthly: each volume, handsomely bound and illustrated, is to be sold at the price of 500 lires (£5). Each book is in grand folio, and consists of a canto of 720 verses; the entire epic 'will contain 20,000 verses. The historical period covered in the ■work is that between March 23, 191 S, when Signor Mussolini founded the first Fascist Society in Milan, and October 28, 1922, the date of the Fascist march on Rome. Signor Mussolini and the leaders of the Fascist Revolution are cast in the mould of Homeric heroes. The whole epic is a fantastic allegory In which Signor Mussolini is depicted as being invested with divine authority to save and redeem Italy from the forces of evil -which, in the shape of Bolshevism, are shown to be threatening to destroy it. The forces of evil, in the guise of , the allied plenipotentiaries at the Peace Conference in 1918, are set forth as taking the Goddess of Victory from Italy and handing her over in chains to Jugo-Slavia, where she is fettered on the Croatian Rocks on the other side of the Adriatic. Signor Mussolini goes to battle in revenge, stops a Socialist outbreak, and in the conflict the offices of the Socialist newspaper “Avanti” are burned. A similarly high message comes to Gabriele D’Annunzio to march on Fiume, and he is assisted by a flock of divine eagles. Following the eagles along the coast, he comes to the Goddess Victory, releases her, and takes her to Fiume. Meanwhile Signor Mussolini, defeated in the 1919 elections through the machinations of the opposition, organises the Black Shirts The forces of evil, in the guise of the Socialists, having occupied the factories, the Fascists attack them and drive them out. The Goddess Victory is taken to the editorial offices of the “Popolo d’ltalla,” where Signal- Mussolini swears to defend her and take her to Rome, to defend Latin greatness in perpetuity. The doors of the “Pololo d’ltalia” are thrown open, and the Goddess of Victory, in glittering armour, is seen proceeding with the Duce. at the head of the Black Shirts on the march to Rome. The epic ends with the divine commission given to Signor Mussolini and the Pope to reunite Fascist and Roman Catholic Rome and to re-establish the new empire of universal civilisation.