Thousands of people were on the streets since the first light of dawn, despite the pouring rain, among flags, banners and songs praising the homeland and to that empire which had just “reappeared on the fatal hills of Rome”. An impressive human tide crowds «a Lungomare Trieste decked with festoons and flowers and crossed incessantly by militias and black shirts, and behind them, in religious devotion, an immense crowd that can no longer contain its joy, its enthusiasm, its fever of passion and love”. It is the chronicle of a particular event through the “original voices”, full of rhetoric but fundamental to fully grasp the nuances of an era. In the’XIII year of the Fascist Revolutionin the phase of maximum consensus of the regime, a delirious Salerno is preparing to welcome Benito Mussolini.
The seaplane carrying the Duce suddenly materializes at the height of Capo d’Orso, welcomed by the roar of the crowd, while – reads the weekly “Il Popolo Fascista” – «a ray of sunshine impetuously pierces the black clouds, blazing and illuminating the hopes of the Salerno people.” After the ditching – “carried out with a rapid and perfect maneuver” – Mussolini, accompanied by the omnipresent secretary of the PNF Achille Staracemeets the local authorities, the Podestà, the prefect Soprano and the honorable Jannelli (then undersecretary of Communications and a leading figure of the local fascist party), then at the head of a very long procession that barely manages to make its way between two wings of the crowd: «A magnificent spectacle, that offered by the people of Salerno, who for several kilometers up to the Torrione run after the Duce’s car, as if mad, with an immense cry of love and faith».
The visit to the capital is only the prologue of a short but intense tour de force through the Salerno area. In fact, on the same morning, Mussolini reaches Eboli, to greet the troops leaving for East Africa. There too, enthusiasm sky-high, scenes of jubilation and a crowd bath, with the spectacular entrance of the Duce, positioned on the turret of a tank, in a stadium packed to the rafters. After Eboli, the presidential procession enters the Sele plain, “redeemed for fertile crops and forever freed from the scourge of malaria” thanks to the reclamation work begun a few years earlier. Water canalization works, windbreak dunes, and the imposing dam on the Sele river: “A Roman-Fascist marvel, the pride of Italian engineering” as Mussolini himself observes with satisfaction. Final stop Paestum, hit in the five-year period 1930-35 by a shower of state funding aimed at encouraging the definitive tourist take-off of the archaeological complex. In this perspective, the first environmental protection intervention, with the ministerial decree of March ’33 which applies the non-buildability constraint for a strip of 300 meters along the ancient city walls.
