Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how the political ecology of Italian fascism that drove dam building in the Alps can be understood as an expression of high modernity. It further reflects on how the regime's hydroelectric schemes socio-ecologically transformed the affected watersheds and valley communities.

Paper long abstract:

During the interwar period, Italy's fascist regime focused on modernising the country by expanding its hydropower infrastructure. Especially in the water-rich southern Alps, energy corporations with close ties to Rome built hydropower plants to supply industrial metropolises with energy. The regime's propaganda created a narrative that favoured the exploitation of the "white coal" in the Alps in newspapers, newsreels, and other media, announcing Italy's supposedly unstoppable progress to becoming an imperial power. The propaganda glorified engineers and construction workers as heroic protagonists of development, while their high-altitude construction sites appeared as epic battlefields against the forces of nature. Although historians have examined the regime's media culture as an expression of fascist modernity (Ben-Ghiat 2009), they have hardly explored the regime's hydroelectric expansion. Nonetheless, recent studies have pointed to the political ecology of fascism as seen through its environmental policies and infrastructure projects (Armiero / Biasillo / Hardenberg 2022). In this paper, I first aim to bridge studies on fascist high modernism with those on the political ecology of the Mussolini regime. Secondly, using newspaper articles and sources from municipal archives, I outline the local impact of dam construction. As a case study, I focus on the hydro-technical industrialization of the Formazza Valley in northern Piedmont between 1926 and 1940. I aim to show how the development of hydro-energy under the political ecology of fascism can be understood as a radical expression of European high modernism (or hydro modernism) and discuss how the affected communities reacted to this extractive invasion.