Luigi Pirandello member of Compagnia del teatro d'arte di Roma
Italy under the Fascists
Pirandello was an Italian nationalist and supported Fascism in a moderate way. In 1924 he wrote a letter to Benito Mussolini asking him to be accepted as a member of the National Fascist Party.
In 1925 Pirandello, with the help of Mussolini, assumed the artistic direction and ownership of the Teatro d'Arte di Roma, founded by the Gruppo degli Undici. He described himself as "a Fascist because I am Italian." For his devotion to Mussolini, the satirical magazine Il Becco Giallo used to call him P. Randello (randello in Italian means cudgel).He expressed publicly apolitical belief, saying "I'm apolitical, I'm only a man in the world." He had continuous conflicts with fascist leaders. In 1927 he tore his fascist membership card to pieces in front of the startled secretary-general of the Fascist Party. For the remainder of his life, Pirandello was always under close surveillance by the secret fascist police OVRA.His play, The Giants of the Mountain, has been interpreted as evidence of his realization that the fascists were hostile to culture; yet, during a later appearance in New York, Pirandello distributed a statement announcing his support of Italy's annexation of Abyssinia. He then gave his Nobel Prize medal to the Fascist government to be melted down as part of the 1935 Oro alla Patria ("Gold to the Fatherland") campaign during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.Pirandello's conception of the theatre underwent a significant change at this point. The idea of the actor as an inevitable betrayer of the text, as in the Sei personaggi, gave way to the identification of the actor with the character that they play. The company took their act throughout the major cities of Europe, and the Pirandellian repertoire became increasingly well known. Between 1925 and 1926 Pirandello's last and perhaps greatest novel, Uno, Nessuno e Centomila (One, No one and One Hundred Thousand), was published serially in the magazine La Fiera Letteraria. He was one of the contributors of the nationalist women's magazine, Lidel, and the Fascist daily Il Tevere.
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