A friend and colleague sent me a private message after reading one of my recent LinkedIn posts.
For those who missed it, the post was about a book by Marco Avancini on hotel marketing, published in 1932 under Fascism and titled La Pubblicità Alberghiera. I received a copy as a gift and decided to republish it in four installments.
My colleague raised an issue I’ve been wrestling with for the past two years, ever since that book first came into my possession.
His point was a simple one: even a purely technical or professional discussion of material produced under Fascism risks, however unintentionally, contributing to its normalization.
I appreciated his honesty and, even more, the fact that he chose to reach out privately rather than raise the issue in public. The truth is, I’ve spent a long time questioning whether republishing the book was the right thing to do.
Anyone who knows me is well aware that my political views are hardly a secret. If anything, they make engaging with this material even more uncomfortable. And yet, that very discomfort is ultimately what convinced me to publish it.
Studying something does not mean endorsing or celebrating it. We study propaganda without promoting it. We study authoritarian regimes because understanding how they communicated, persuaded people, and normalized their own existence remains historically important.
But there’s another reason, too.
This book is, in every sense of the term, a case of lost media. As far as I’ve been able to establish, it has virtually disappeared from circulation. Despite extensive research, I’ve found almost no trace of its existence. Preserving forgotten historical documents has value in its own right, even when they come from deeply troubling contexts. Perhaps especially then.
The best way I can explain my thinking goes back to a conversation I once had with an archaeologist friend.
I once asked him, jokingly: “When does digging up a grave stop being desecration and become archaeology?”
He laughed and replied: “Somewhere around the fifty-year mark.”
Of course, archaeology and political history are not the same thing. But his answer captures something I instinctively believe: once enough time has passed, even the darkest chapters of history become legitimate subjects of historical research. That doesn’t make their horrors any less horrific. If anything, it places an even greater responsibility on us to study them with intellectual rigor. That’s why we can now discuss the assassination of Julius Caesar, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Spanish Inquisition.
And like many Italians of my generation, Fascism is not some distant abstraction to me. One of my grandfathers was a Blackshirt; the other was a partisan. Had they crossed paths during the war, they would have killed each other (and, in a curious real-life twist on the famous time-travel “grandfather paradox,” I would never have been born).
Even now, I’m not sure whether publishing that book was the right decision.
But I know the question was worth asking.
And I’m grateful to those who remind me that some questions should never become too easy.
Until next week. Best regards from Simone.
SIMONE PUORTO
