A Pagan Landscape: Pope Pius XI, Fascism, and the Struggle over the Roman Cityscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the two visions of Rome put forward by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI and the tensions they caused. The rivalry between the two men over the meaning of the Roman landscape became sharper in the 1930s when the Fascist regime transformed the Eternal City through extensive demolition and increasing archaeological activity in the city. Pius XI increasingly viewed these activities as an attempt to “paganize” Rome. The Pope’s fears over paganism came to a head in the days of Adolf Hitler’s famous visit to Italy in May 1938. The development of closer relations between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany made Pius XI increasingly concerned about what he called the “neo-pagan” nature of these ideologies. Ultimately, the cityscape of Rome was transformed into a kulturkampf between Fascism and the Vatican which not only gives us a fuller picture of the seemingly cordial relations between Pius and Mussolini in the 1930s, but also reveals Fascism as a political religion inevitably in conflict with the other religion, Catholicism, which saw Rome as its own.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".