Censorship in Italy

In Italy, freedom of press is guaranteed by the Italian Constitution of 1948. Censorship in Italy has been applied especially during the Fascist Regime of Benito Mussolini (1922-1943).

Censorship in Italy was not created with Fascism, nor did it end with it, but it had heavy influence in the life of Italians under the Regime.

The main goals were, concisely:

Censorship fought ideological and defeatist contents, and any other work or content that could enforce disturbing cultural themes.

This branch of the activity was mainly ruled by the Ministero della Cultura Popolare (Ministry of popular culture), commonly abbreviated as Min. Cul.Pop. (with a weird assonance). This administration had competence on all the contents that could appear in newspapers, radio, literature, theatre, cinema, and generally any other form of communication or art.

In literature, editorial industries had their own controlling servants steadily on site, but sometimes it could happen that some texts reached the libraries and in this case an efficient organization was able to capture all the copies in a very short time.

An important note on the issue of censoring foreign language use: with the "Autarchia" (the general maneuver for self-sufficiency) foreign languages had effectively been banned, and any attempt to use a non-Italian word resulted in a formal censoring action. Reminiscences of this ban could be detected in the dubbing of all foreign movies broadcast on RAI (Italian state owned public service broadcaster): captioning is very rarely used.
Censorship did not however impose heavy limits on foreign literature, and many of the foreigner authors were freely readable. Those authors could freely frequent Italy and even write about it, with no reported troubles.

In 1930 it was forbidden to distribute books that contained Marxist, Socialist or Anarchist like ideologies, but these books could be collected in public libraries in special sections not open to the general public. The same happened for the books that were sequestrated. All these texts could be read under authorization for scientific or cultural purposes, but it is said that this permission was quite easy to obtain. In 1938 there were public bonfires of forbidden books, enforced by fascists militias ("camicie nere"): any work containing themes about Jewish culture, freemasonry, communist, socialist ideas, were removed also by libraries (but it has been said that effectively the order was not executed with zeal, being a very unpopular position of the Regime). To avoid police inspections, many librarians preferred to hide or privately sell the texts, which in many cases were found at the end of the war .

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