Territories of Imagination: “The Republic of Maschito” (2024-2027)

This research project departs from the brief twenty-day existence of the Republic of Maschito, a rural anti-fascist uprising that took place in Basilicata in southern Italy in September 1943. Following the collapse of Mussolini’s regime and the fragmentation of state authority after the armistice, villagers in Maschito removed local fascist powerholders, occupied the municipal building, and established a provisional form of self-government through public assembly. Though short-lived, this episode opens a wider inquiry into rural anti-fascism, agrarian social relations, land, migration, language, and collective forms of survival.

The project approaches Maschito not as an isolated local anomaly, but as a microhistory through which larger political questions become visible. It examines how fascism in the Italian South was embedded not only in state institutions, but also in landlordism, class hierarchy, regional unevenness, and the long subordination of rural life to external centres of power. In this sense, the revolt in Maschito is understood as both part of the history of Italian anti-fascism and as an attempt to reorganise life from below.

A central concern of the project is the relation between political rupture and material reproduction. Maschito is studied in the context of the latifundia system, forms of peasant labour, the marginalisation of the Mezzogiorno, and the reproductive infrastructures that sustained village life. Particular attention is given to women’s labour, minority language, oral transmission, and everyday practices of cooperation that formed the social basis of survival beyond formal political institutions. The project asks what kinds of political possibility become thinkable when these infrastructures of care, subsistence, and local knowledge are understood as constitutive of anti-fascist struggle.

The research also situates Maschito within a broader transnational and contemporary horizon. It connects the history of rural revolt in southern Italy to current questions of land concentration, extractive capitalism, food insecurity, internal colonialism, and the erosion of rural commons. In doing so, it brings the Maschito uprising into dialogue with wider traditions of peasant resistance, communal self-organisation, and struggles over land and autonomy across different historical and geopolitical contexts.

Methodologically, the project combines archival research, political theory, microhistory, and visual-textual montage. It works across fragments, documents, songs, gestures, local memories, and speculative connections in order to trace how collective life is organised and how it resists capture. Rather than reconstructing a closed historical narrative, the project treats Maschito as a site from which to think the unfinished relation between anti-fascism, social transformation, and the political imagination of territory.

At stake is not only the recovery of a neglected episode in the history of resistance, but a larger question: what becomes visible when anti-fascism is approached not simply as opposition to a regime, but as a struggle over land, reproduction, and the collective organisation of life?