ROCCO D'ALFONSO

Summary — The Neapolitan Francesco Coppola is one of the most representative (and also one of the less studied) figures in the history of Italian nationalism. Polemicist and aggressive publicist, he reported first for the "Giornale d’Italia", and then for the "Tribuna". From his election to parliament in March 1909, he repeatedly took sides against the socialist party and trade unions; in December 1910, he was admitted to the nationalist movement (on the eve of the Florence congress, when the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana was constitued). As a distinguished leader of the ANI and an important writer for the weekly newspaper "L’Idea Nazionale", Coppola was conclusive in the process of ideological settlement of Italian nationalism, moving it toward an antidemocratic and antireformist orientation, in a bitter quarrell with the supporters of the democratic approach (like, among the others Scipio Sighele, an irredentist from Trento). This paper is intended to establish the very first of Coppola's ideological steps, from the world of newspapers and his juvenile liking for the Buddist religion, to the antipacifist, antisemitic and antidemocratic struggles that he fought in the period between the world against Turkey (the Italian conquest of Lybia) and the second nationalist congress in Rome, December 1912. Coppola was an effective inventor and propagator of a number of political slogans and myths which were very successful in the post-war period and during the Fascist Ventennio. An example is his condemnation of socialism and pacifism, which he conceived as ideological progenu of the liberal and democratic principles of the French Revolution: this polemic at Leitmotiv was introduced by Coppola after 1910, and was to be one of the most effective and widespread slogans of the Fascist propaganda of the Twenties and Thirties.