Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University, where he also directs the Transnational Law Institute. Many thanks to Ana Laura Coria for research assistance, and Inge Gruenwald, Barbora Holá, Mark Kersten, and Alex Klein for comments. All photographs – except for one, as indicated — are taken by the author.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini gifted a fascist monument to the city of Chicago in 1934. It still stands, today, in public. I went to see it in early March 2025. I did so when I was in Chicago for the International Studies Association Annual Meeting. 

The monument was easy to find. It’s a twenty-minute stroll from the downtown Chicago Hilton Hotel, where the conference was held.

The story of this monument traces to 1933. In that year, twenty-four seaplanes left Mussolini’s Italy and flew, via several transatlantic stops, to the United States, notably, to the shores of Lake Michigan. These planes were commanded by Italian aviator Marshal Italo Balbo. Balbo was a member of the Blackshirts (fascist paramilitary). He was appointed Air Minister in 1929 and built the Aeronautica (the Italian Air Force). An avowed fascist, Balbo was central to Mussolini’s ascent to power. Mussolini also envied Balbo and saw him as a rival.  So, Mussolini conveniently sent him to Libya, where in 1934 he was named Governor-General of the then colony. Balbo was a key part of Mussolini’s colonial wars in Ethiopia, Libya, and Somalia. Balbo extensively bombed Ethiopia. Although Balbo opposed Mussolini’s alliance with the Nazis, Hitler celebrated his tactics. Balbo died in 1940 at the age of 44. He was reportedly downed by friendly fire over Libya. His remains, initially interred outside of the Libyan capital of Tripoli, were returned to Italy in 1970 after Libya’s then leader, Muammar Gaddafi, threatened to destroy all Italian cemeteries in the country.

All of these threads weave together. The monument takes the form of a Corinthian column dedicated to the honor of Italo Balbo and his aviation accomplishments. Mussolini offered it to Chicago for the Century of Progress Fair. It arrived by boat. It is unsurprisingly called the Italo Balbo Monument. The Balbo Monument was warmly welcomed by Chicago officials, including the mayor, and dedicated on Chicago’s Italian Day in 1934. Erected for the Fair, and placed in front of the plane-shaped Italian Pavilion, the monument remained after the Fair shut down and the Pavilion packed up. The Balbo Monument, ironically, is the only fixed remnant of the 1934 Fair.

The monument sits today in the very same place it initially sat. It has sat there, uninterrupted, for 91 years. The sit-site-sight is in a park (Burnham Park) abutting Lake Michigan, across from Soldier Field, and not far, at all, from the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium, major tourist attractions adjacent to the Loop.

The Balbo Monument features an ancient Roman column (spolia) set on a modern stone plinth. Mussolini harvested the column from Ostia, ancient Rome’s port, for the express purpose of giving it to Chicago. The Romans had constructed the column from breccia, a variant of stone created from gravel and boulder fragments. The column dates from between 117 and 38 BC. This is when the story of the Balbo Monument actually begins. 

Mussolini loved all things Roman. He pursued a goal of Romanità, namely, to ensconce his Italian Empire – together with its colonial aspirations – within the glory of ancient Rome.  

Kirsten Fisher joined me on my visit to the Balbo Monument. She came along because we are together editing a book called Transitional Justice Innovations, Boundaries, and Refractions which is forthcoming from Routledge. I am contributing a chapter to this book on Italy’s approach to fascist cultural property, with examples from Rome, Naples, and Bolzano. Italy takes a divergent and more ambivalent approach than many other countries to cultural property derivative from and indicative of times of oppression, exploitation, and human rights abuses. The Italian approach is one I call nonchalant integration. Mussolini-era buildings, obelisks, and friezes remain, in public spaces, throughout Italy, notably in Rome. I write about what this all might mean for the intersection of transitional justice and cultural property. This is how I first learned of the Balbo Monument.  

We visited the Balbo Monument on a rainy, blustery day. It is surrounded by greenery, pedestrian and bike paths, and lovely spruce trees with thick bursting cones. Nearby are memorials to police officers and firefighters, and also to American POWs.

The column is thirteen feet high and three feet in diameter. It is the ‘oldest outdoor artifact in Chicago’. Two of the four sides of the travertine limestone plinth contain identical text: one side in English, the other in Italian. The lettering, now, is faded and terribly hard to read. The text, though, is unabashedly and openly fascist while also being profoundly ambassadorial. In English it provides:

THIS COLUMN

TWENTY CENTURIES OLD

ERECTED ON THE BEACH OF OSTIA

PORT OF IMPERIAL ROME

TO SAFEGUARD THE FORTUNES AND VICTORIES

OF THE ROMAN TRIREMES

FASCIST ITALY, BY COMMAND OF BENITO MUSSOLINI

PRESENTS TO CHICAGO

EXALTATION, SYMBOL, MEMORIAL

OF THE ATLANTIC SQUADRON LED BY BALBO

THAT WITH ROMAN DARING FLEW ACROSS THE OCEAN

IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR

OF THE FASCIST ERA

The text reflects fascist language commonly found throughout Italy at the time: the new calendar of the era, the venerated connection with the ancient Roman past, the boldness and masculinity of accomplishment, daring and imperium, vitality and virility, victory and fortitude.

The Balbo Monument feels lonely. As one Chicago Tribune journalist elegantly put it: ‘an innocuous abstraction – an ancient pillar in search of a temple’. There is a weathered grimness to it. But the Balbo Monument is not forgotten. In July 2020, in the wake of protests related to George Floyd’s murder, a chain link fence was placed around it. What is more, and more visceral: someone had handmade and carefully attached a little fasces to the fence. It seemed recent. It was there when we visited. That was something I had not anticipated. The Balbo Monument may not be so innocuous, after all. Nor may it be so static.

The four axe heads on the four fasces that fill the four corners of the plinth have been intentionally smashed out and deliberately excised. The fasces became the symbol of Mussolini’s Italy. The symbol itself – a bundle of rods tied together with an axe – derives from ancient Rome. The axe head represents power and the many rods symbolize unbreakability. In ancient Rome, the lictors (bodyguards) of magistrates carries the fasces as weapons. The word fascism derives from the Latin fasces. As an aside, two fasces flank the American flag behind the Speaker’s podium in the Chamber of the United States House of Representatives.

The US is ablaze with talk about what to do with cultural property seen as oppressive. Conversations abound about roads, schools, cemeteries, and military bases named after Confederate leaders and soldiers, as well as memorials and statues edified in their honor. So, too, with spaces dedicated to settler colonialism and the explorers. On this latter note, comparable debates roil Canada and Australia and South Africa when it comes to the cultural property of European settlers and percolate throughout Central and Eastern Europe in the wake of Communism. Places are named, renamed, and then even renamed again; public art is dismantled and removed, renovated and repurposed. And so it ping-pongs along. The Trump Administration, just now, officializes the Gulf of America. 

Yet not all monuments with perceived ugly origins have been toppled, broken, scrubbed, removed, or sequestered. Some just sit, quietly, and endure. The Italo Balbo Monument is one such example.

The Balbo Monument lingers, largely in a slumber unmarked by any pedagogic explanations, but it has not been entirely undisturbed. Placing a chain-link fence around it suggests some solicitude – albeit wincingly feeble – of protection. Someone cared. At the same time, the intentional destruction of the four axe-heads on the fasces on the four corners suggests a far more invasive disturbance. Someone cared about that, too, albeit in a different way. That a person fashioned a fasces out of twigs and tied it, with three strings firmly knotted, to the chain link fence suggests the Balbo Monument is more than an obsolete artefact, but something alive – at least to one someone who seems to really care. And the Monument is not hidden. It is easy to find on Google maps. Although physically unmarked, it is marked in virtual cartographies. We had no trouble locating it. The Balbo Monument is moreover discussed online and even in scholarly literature. A professor conducted 6 hours of interviews there with passers-by, asking them whether they knew what it was. Only thirteen percent of the passersby who responded to the survey did. (It should be noted that only 20% of all people who passed by the trail actually responded to the survey).   

The Chicago Hilton Hotel is an old historic building. Its girth straddles a long block. Funnily, its northern edge sits on Balbo Drive. Yes, the same Balbo. A downtown street is indeed named after him. Here is the street sign, on the sunny morning after my rainy visit to the Monument, at the intersection of the grandeur of South Michigan Avenue. 

The street renaming (of 7th Street) had been undertaken in conjunction with Balbo’s arrival with his squadron in 1933. At the time, he was greeted with the fascist salute and lunched with President Roosevelt. When Balbo’s squadron landed in Chicago, they were met by a crowd of 60,000 people. Italian Americans connected their still unsettled, but increasingly settling, place in the United States with the vaunted accomplishments – historical and contemporary – of motherland Italy. It is difficult to untangle the then Italian American desire for acceptance from the derision and discrimination and stereotype Italian Americans faced as immigrants to the United States.

Conversations have ebbed and flowed about removing the Balbo Monument entirely (and to rename the street), notably in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, but also before, for instance in 2017 (after the Unite the Right Rally). I guess this was because of the heightened attention then, heated by social media, to oppressive cultural property in the United States.  There was some hemming and hawing at Chicago City Council. That said, the municipal alder-people whose wards house the monument and the street decided to keep them. Why? 

Is it because of a transatlantic extension of the nonchalance of the domestic Italian approach to fascist cultural property? Likely not. Is it because of the advocacy of the Italian American community, who wished to protect these as identity markers, including in concert with monuments and festivals dedicated to Columbus? Perhaps. That is more plausible, and there certainly was such advocacy and such sentiment. Yet, if so, is Columbus comparable to Mussolini? Or is the catalyst American exceptionalism, to wit, this idea on the American left and American right that foreign fascisms are largely disinteresting, superfluous, or of marginal importance, including in light of the plentiful remnants of in-house historical markers located throughout the USA? Can social activism only deal with so much?

Chicago alderwoman Sophia King offers a new angle: ‘I was initially in support of the removal of the Balbo Monument, due to its link to fascism. However, there is much to learn from displays like this, and removing it entirely would hinder a valuable historical lesson.’ That said, and with respect, there is nothing of any pedagogic, contextual, or explanatory value located near the Monument. Nothing whatsoever. Not even a QR code. That I had not expected, actually. I had not anticipated this blank void. It is as if its history has been disappeared, and the Balbo Monument is indistinguishable, mysterious almost, unlike lingering fascist monuments in Italy, whose provenance is very evident. 

Yes, the column visually evokes ‘classical’ times to onlookers, albeit in a benign manner. The words on the Balbo Monument are so worn out – so shabbily threadbare – that, whatever their discursive value, they are unreadable. The monument could be anything, really, from antiquity – ancient Rome, Greece, Crete, something classic like that, from AP World History, or some school trip, a test of art history: ‘Remember what we learned about the Greek columns in Middle School: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian?, all that stuff about volutes (or rams’ horns) and flowery leaves?’. Balbo could be anyone, actually; so much so that the Monument, visually, renders him a no-one: he’s virtually indiscernible to the eye as it grazes by and gazes upon.

The Balbo Monument is not only about Mussolini and Italy. It is also about the US. Indeed, the Monument extolled the friendship between fascist Italy and the US. Relations between the two countries were largely positive for most of the 21 years in which Mussolini was in power. Mussolini along with Balbo were favorably presented in American media. As late as May 1940, Mussolini graced the cover of Newsweek. Balbo himself was a popular figure. His aviation accomplishments were legion. He became associated with progress, the very theme of Chicago’s World’s Fair. Right after World War II, Italy did request that the tribute to Balbo be removed. Chicago mayor Edward Kelly reportedly retorted: ‘Why? Didn’t Balbo cross the Atlantic?’ Italy has not since called for the repatriation of the ancient Roman column. In 1973, on the 40^th anniversary of the seaplane flight, surviving airmen returned to Chicago. In the company of Balbo’s son, they participated in Chicago’s Columbus Day celebrations. Alongside Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the Governor of Illinois, the airmen paraded through the streets of Chicago.

The past assuredly roams in the present. But as societies look to the future, can there be excessive focus on the flotsam and jetsam of the past – and the barrage of transitional justice interventions to topple, move, erase, scrub, and rename, in other words, to scour sour history? Perhaps just leaving things where they are  letting them slumber, dither, putter about, dawdle, and straggle   in the case of the Balbo Monument, moldering and idling and anonymizing, also is a path.