In June 1930, Luigia Barbarovich Paulovich, born on an Adriatic island off Dalmatia, transferred in her youth to Zara (Zadar) but resident of Trieste since 1905, was affronted by the Fascist state. Signora Paulovich, a respectable seventy-year-old widow with two sons and a daughter, was instructed that she must hereafter call herself Luigia Barbarovich Paoli. However, eight months later, she petitioned Rome for the annulment of this change as it applied to her and to her daughter, Ines. Paulovich had been her patriotic husband's name, and, should she become a Paoli, she would posthumously betray him, she lamented. Paulovich, she added, was not a signal of menacing Slavdom but rather possessed of a respectable history in Venice's Adriatic empire.
To be sure, in 1928, one of her sons, Enrico, had agreed to a name change, in his case to the more ‘Italian-sounding’ Paolucci. The other son, Ernesto, a rising civil servant, worked in Sondrio and so was not subject to legislation that did not cover the whole nation but rather those border areas that Italy had acquired from its victory in the First World War where ethnic definition had been and remained a crucial everyday issue. Hametz thinks that Ernesto Paulovich by the Second World War had become a Fascist administrator in annexed Dalmatia; he was unsuccessfully pursued by the Yugoslav authorities after the conflict for his possibly criminal wartime activities.
In the second half of 1930, then, the four members of the family possessed three different surnames, although the authorities did nothing to query Luigia's inherited name of Barbarovich, which might have been thought to provoke concern that she carried in her blood the ‘barbarism’ frequently ascribed by Italians to their ‘Slav’ neighbours. Anyway, on 6 April 1931, widow Luigia appealed that the name-change for her and her daughter be rescinded. The case travelled with surprising rapidity to Rome. There, only a month later, Paulovich's lawyer, Giulio Morpurgo, and an advocate for the prefect of Trieste laid their cases before the Administrative Court of the Council of State where they engaged in predictable sparring on the detail of the etymology of the name, Paulovich, and on the widow's record either as an exemplary Fascist dowager or as a devoted nationalist one. The result came in January 1932, when the Court found in Luigia's favour and, on the 26th, the Prefect agreed to void the decree, accepting as well that the state should pick up Paulovich's costs.
It is a nice story and it is good to have it again put on the record, although, as Hametz herself notes, much of the matter had already been related by Lavo Čermelj in his anti-Fascist work, Life-and-death struggle of a national minority (the Jugoslavs in Italy) (1936). To justify the revival of the matter, Hametz, in her introduction, suggests that she will engage in a micro-historical study, drawing ‘inspiration’ from The cheese and the worms and The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. In practice, however, the meagre nature of the sources left on the widow (she disappeared from the historical record entirely after she got her name back, and Hametz, despite major effort, has not turned up a surviving relative) means that the central story, if it were ever brought together, would occupy only a few paragraphs.
Failing a description of the protagonist's appearance and indeed anything except the basic record of her birth, marriage, child-bearing and of the case in 1931–1932, In the name of Italy thus makes its major claim to scholarly significance through the extensive background material with which Hametz fills her pages. She provides wide-ranging commentary on the theory and practice of law in Fascist Italy and its borderlands, as well as under liberalism in Italy. She examines the efforts by the Fascist state, in Trieste and the rest of the country, and by its predecessors to define ethnic identity, with the process regularly at cross-purposes with the everyday efforts of citizens to make their own histories in that regard. She probes the fate of womanhood under the dictatorship, arguing that, in this totalitarian society, female agency was enhanced despite the patriarchal vision and habits of most Fascist males. Even if sometimes her method is to build a digression on a digression on a digression in a way that may leave a reader gasping for breath and chronology, there is much of value in her analysis of these important topics.
The major lesson of the book is that Mussolini was not altogether wrong when he complained as his regime collapsed that it was not possible to govern Italians. Every issue that Hametz discusses is so complicated. Implementing a straightforward Fascist intention to eliminate ‘alien’, ‘Slavic’ sounds in Italian households was a massively complex matter in practice, although 100 000 name changes happened and few were amended after 1945. Such a tally might look like success but totality was never achieved; nor was satisfaction. The inevitable divisions between what seemed crucial in Trieste, in Rome (and in Sondrio) were not resolved. Fascist demands that the law should believe, obey and serve the dictatorship, when the precedents and knowledge of legal process weighed so mightily from the past, when it was certain that one Fascist lawyer could always find grounds to disagree with another about almost anything, and when the devil of the detail could never fully be exorcised, mocked propaganda boasts about machine-like totalitarian control. As Luigia Paulovich found when she turned stubborn on one little matter, a dictatorship that liked to call itself ‘granitic’ in fact left plenty of nooks and crannies of difference available for those lucky, determined or obstinate enough to hit on them. Italians (somehow defined) ruled Fascism, as much as Fascism ruled Italians.
