Abstract
Examines the role of Italian historian of Roman law Pietro De Francisci (1883-1971) in the cult of 'romanità' (Roman civilization) which provided historico-cultural legitimacy for Fascism in the late 1930's. A prominent academic and ideologist of the Fascist regime, De Francisci publicly proclaimed the spiritual identity of the leadership of Mussolini with that of Augustus, whose new order, the principate, he portrayed as a form of protofascism. The cult of 'romanità' originated as a clerico-nationalist view of history that De Francisci subsequently adapted and expanded into a Fascist doctrine and metaphor for the regime's imperialist ideology. Though described as an intellectual catharsis for his Fascist past, De Francisci's postwar 'Arcana Imperii' (1947-48) shows remarkable continuity with the view of history he formulated in the period 1939-40.