Destination: Rome

My crew and I are in Europe, filming a new TV special about fascism which will air across the USA next September. Our first stop is Rome, to see the stony remnants of Mussolini’s bombastic years.

Every time Mussolini signed the equivalent of an executive order, he’d have a marble stone engraved with the new law. Even minor actions were memorialized with bombast and braggadocio by these marble monuments to the big guy who got it done.

Local guides Alfio Di Mauro and Francesca Caruso have been helping me at each stop in Rome. (Their families both lived through Mussolini’s fascist nightmare.) Here, they are teaching me the tough guy pose that Il Duce used as he strutted around in public and gave rambling speeches at rallies designed to energize his angry base.

Mussolini planned a futuristic city called “EUR.” We needed fascistic-looking places to shoot “on cameras” (when I am speaking on camera), and there were plenty here. This colonnade is text-book fascist — inspired by ancient Rome, but even bolder.

I packed uncharacteristically heavy for this trip. Along with a cruise-ship wardrobe, I flew to Europe with a copy of “Mein Kampf” and a homemade fasces (the bundle of sticks with an ax in it that Mussolini used as his symbol of a fascist state) in my luggage. These were props for our new “Fascism in Europe” TV special, which will air across the USA next September.

Ever since the Patriot Act was hastily passed in the days after 9/11, I’ve wanted to make a one-hour TV special helping Americans understand how and why fascism rose after World War I in Italy and Germany — and how, by the outbreak of World War II, only a handful of democracies survived in Europe (primarily in Britain, France, and Scandinavia). Those were wild times. And today, Western democracies from the USA to Poland, Hungary, and Turkey are navigating choppy waters.

Things change incrementally, and the societies that suffered through periods of fascism between the world wars had some surprises in common: that it could happen to them, that losses of freedom snowball, and that it can all happen so quickly.

The more you study this history, the more you see that autocrats and wannabe dictators all follow the same playbook. I’m a big proponent of the notion that you can learn from history and you can learn from travel. For this important topic, we’ll learn from both. Over the next week or so, I’ll be sharing insights gleaned from filming in Rome, Berlin, Nürnberg, and Munich. Here’s a little clip from Rome.