Totalitarian Welfare and Pedagogy: Children’s Holiday Camps during the Fascist Era

The totalitarian project of the fascist regime called for the whole of society to be controlled and subsumed under the state, becoming an integral part of the community created by the regime in which individuals were divested of their autonomy. This policy was pursued through a general process of indoctrination and fascistisation of the masses, which included the provision of services directed at the most vulnerable groups in society and the promotion of fascist cultural and educational models among the Italian population. Younger generations, and children first and foremost, represented particularly fertile terrain for building consensus and laying the foundations of the new fascist religion. It was against this backdrop that, during the fascist era, an extensive network of residential structures was created to provide Italian children with care, holiday facilities and indoctrination. Children were hosted in holiday camps known as colonie (singular colonia), purpose-built in coastal, mountain, lakeside or riverside locations, in order to exploit such healthy environments for the treatment of the most widespread conditions of the day, including tuberculosis, typhoid, and bone and skin diseases, and to mould the youngest members of society in body and spirit, to make them dyed-in-the-wool devotees of Fascism.