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In the context of the high-conservative thought of modern Europe, Giovanni Papini represents one of the most significant precursors to lay out the fundamentals of the fascist apparatus. Current Italian critics downplay this side of his intellectual personality, and yet Papini should be considered a fertile case study and a key referent for that part of fascism that produced an intense refection on origin and, more specifically, for those circles of intellectuals and militants that endorsed the primitivism of the Strapaese movement. Born in Florence in 1881, he was highly influential in the Tuscan and national cultural scene of the first part of the twentieth century. He contributed to the formation of a distinctive cultural climate that from the 1920s on took up strong identitarian claims coupled with an antimodernist ideology. Deeply rooted in the Catholic Tuscan tradition, this kind of Florentine fascism grew by playing a pivotal part also at a national level. And yet, although he filled important posts during the dictatorship, Papini did not have any practical role in the early stage of the fascist putsch. He was not a man of action. In a tactical move, he joined fascism once it had seized power.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137476869_2

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