-OpEd-
ROME — I believe the time has come for us to come to terms with perhaps the most illustrious Italian citizen of the 20th century: Guglielmo Marconi.
He was born in Bologna 150 years ago today, on April 25. Yet there are no celebrations planned that are appropriate to Marconi’s stature. The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth lasted a whole year around the world, and the same happened for the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri‘s death. For Marconi, it did not: in recent days a bridge was dedicated to him in La Spezia, where he conducted experiments; in Sardinia he was remembered in a museum set up in an old mill; there were conferences in Viareggio, where he spent his summer vacations and where he was awarded honorary citizenship just before he died, at age 63, on July 20, 1937.
On that day, the world literally stopped: all radio stations, from the United States to Australia, observed two minutes of silence — an extraordinary tribute for the man who had invented wireless: not just radio, as it is usually said, but wireless communications themselves. Even those of our smartphones. The man who connected the world, as reads the title of the monumental biography dedicated to him years ago by historian Marc Raboy.
In short, Marconi was a titan: as an inventor and as an entrepreneur. The Marconi Company, founded in London when he was just 23 years old, was like Apple or Tesla at the time. And again: he was the first to connect Europe and the American continent wirelessly; one of the founders of the legendary BBC; the only Nobel laureate in Physics in history who did not have a degree; the man who was universally referred to as the true savior of the Titanic survivors, since he had just invented the wireless telegraph that enabled the SOS to be transmitted after the impact with the iceberg.
And yet in Italy we are almost ashamed of him.
The reason why
The reason is obvious: Marconi was a fascist. He joined the party in June 1923, and continued to have relations with Mussolini until the end (their last scheduled meeting was due to take place on the very day of Marconi’s death). This choice of his made it objectively complicated to celebrate him, all the more so because his birthday — yes, it feels like a joke — coincides with Italy’s Liberation Day. An obvious short-circuit. How can one celebrate a fascist on the day that commemorates liberation from Nazifascism? It is not possible, and in fact no celebrations have ever taken place.
The far-right government of Giorgia Meloni will (quite obviously) try to celebrate him: the Ministry of Culture has planned a series of activities starting today at the Marconi Foundation headquarters at Villa Griffone in Pontecchio, in the northeastern region of Veneto, opening with a mass by Cardinal Zuppi, president of the Episcopal Conference. Italy’s state broadcaster RAI will air a miniseries in May. And this week Adolfo Urso, Minister for Business and Made in Italy, inaugurated an exhibition in RAI’s radio studios on Via Asiago, calling Marconi a “made in Italy genius”. From the left wing, Bologna Mayor Matteo Lepore acknowledges, “There have been worse fascists.”
A true Fascist?
But what exactly did Guglielmo Marconi’s fascism consist of? Professor Gabriele Falciasecca, a leading expert on the subject, has devoted a rich essay to Marconi’s political activity. He can distinguish two different phases.
In the first phase, Marconi decided to leave England, where he had founded his startup, following a scandal (from which he was later acquitted), and returned to Italy. In 1914 he was appointed senator of the Kingdom, took an active part in World War I, which became an opportunity to improve his inventions by experimenting with new ways for soldiers at the front to communicate wirelessly. At the end of the conflict, given his undisputed prestige, he was sent to Versailles to represent Italy at the peace table. A patriot, one might say. But a second scandal, the bankruptcy of the Banca Italiana di Sconto, which he had agreed to chair, soured his relationship with the old political class. Falciasecca writes: “He complained about this to Mussolini, who had in the meantime become head of government, and between December 1922 and 1923 it was decided that he would not be sent to trial because many affaires were pardoned through an amnesty thanks to the intervention of the new government.”
Marconi was a conservative, and his adherence to fascism, according to Falciasecca, was sincere. But journalist Riccardo Chiaberge, who has devoted a fine biography to Marconi, argues that his adherence to fascism was the result of a calculation: “Marconi was a global entrepreneur and sought protection, he was a liberal in England and a fascist in Rome.” In the new edition of his book, due out in May, there is a new chapter devoted to the contents of the file that Ovra, the fascist secret service, opened on Marconi’s account in 1927. Says Chiaberge, “Mussolini trusted no one and had everyone checked, even Marconi. Being spied on, however, does not make him an antifascist. I have not found a single sentence expressing dissent from the regime, either there or in his letters.”
Should the fact that he was a fascist make us forget the contribution he made to human history by inventing radio communications?
Moreover, already in the 1930s, when he presided over the short-lived Royal Academy of Italy, founded during the Fascist period to promote intellectual activity, Marconi put the letter “e” (to indicate “ebrei”, or Jews) next to the names of Jewish scientists. “Mussolini did not want them and Marconi marked them out of conformism,” says Chiaberge. On this point Falciasecca disagrees and invites us to consider the hypothesis that those annotations were just evidence of a problem that needed to be solved: “Marconi did not have the slightest anti-Semitic feeling and even tried to help the daughter of Heinrich Hertz (the father of electromagnetic waves that inspired his invention) who fled to England for racial reasons.”
A victim of cancel culture?
Nevertheless, Marconi has always been a victim of what is now called cancel culture, a practice that aims to reread and judge the past with our present values and which thus saw the popular condemnation of Christopher Columbus for what later happened to Native Americans, or of the painter Gauguin because during his stay in Polynesia he had relations with underage girls who posed for his portraits.
It has been observed that by these criteria Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Gandhi, Steve Jobs himself, and to return to Italy, Luigi Pirandello, Literature Nobel Prize winner, who applied for Fascist Party membership in September 1924, would also end up in the dust.
Should the fact that the great writer was a fascist make us trash his award-winning work? And should the fact that Marconi was one of them make us forget the contribution he made to human history by inventing radio communications?
The best answer was given, immediately after the war, by the mayor of Bologna Giuseppe Dozza, a partisan and communist. He said, “The name of Guglielmo Marconi belongs to all Italians…giving real form to the idea of Maxwell and Hertz, it continues the shining Italic tradition of (inventors such as) Volta, Galvani, Ferraris, and Righi and constitutes a title of merit that the whole world must also recognize to our unfortunate and generous Homeland.”
For this reason I think we should say today: long live anti-fascist Italy, always. But also: thank you to the inventor and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi.
