(Published in Il Popolo d'Italia, July 26, 1938)
By Benito Mussolini
An English woman writer, traveling in Rome, has made an amazing discovery, a discovery which the aforesaid lady has noted in a widely read magazine of her country. Discussing Italian women in general and Roman women in particular, the woman writer testifies that: "the features of the Italian women are of incontestably Aryan origin." Evidently this verification is a surprise to the English woman. It is known that according to the English, the negroes begin just beyond the English channel, namely at Calais.
We are speaking of race, ladies and gentlemen. Italian men and women do not have anything to do with, and have never had anything to do with, the Semitic or other non-European races. Only in a period of total national humiliation was it possible to so insult the old, vigorous Italian people. Those who wish to see the Aryan types in their classical purity and nobility of line are asked to examine the high reliefs of the Ara pacis, which will be reconstructed and exhibited to the world next September. That type is revived through fifty generations in the Italians of today, who for at least one thousand years have bred among themselves, without assimilations and without the integration of foreigners through "naturalizations" which so often occurs in countries where the cradles are significantly lower than the coffins.
To say we are 'Aryans' means we belong to a historically-determined group of races: to the Indo-European group, and specifically to that which has created world civilization. Without a clear, defined, omnipresent consciousness of race, people do not keep their empires. That is why certain problems which were before in a gray area have become a burning issue since October 3, 1935.
