In his 1877 Storia della letteratura (History of Literature), Luigi Settembrini wrote that Petrarch’s fourteenth-century poem, the Africa, ‘is forgotten …; very few have read it, and it was judged—I don’t know when and by whom—a paltry thing’. Yet, just four decades later, the early Renaissance poet’s epic of the Second Punic War, written in Latin hexameters, was being promoted as the national poem of Italy by eminent classical scholar, Nicola Festa, who published the only critical edition of the epic in 1926. This article uncovers the hitherto untold story of the revival of Petrarch’s poetic retelling of Scipio’s defeat of Hannibal in Fascist Italy, and its role in promoting ideas of nation and empire during the Fascist period in Italy. After briefly outlining the Africa’s increasing popularity in the nineteenth century, I consider some key publications that contributed to the revival of the poem under Fascism. I proceed chronologically to show how the Africa was shaped into a poem of the Italian nation, and later, after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, of Italy’s new Roman Empire. I suggest that the contestations over the significance of the Africa during the Fascist period, over whether it was a national poem of Roman revival or a poem of the universal ideal of empire, demonstrate more profound tensions in how Italian Fascism saw itself.

路易吉·塞特姆布里尼（Luigi Settembrini）在其1877年的《文学史》（Storia della letteratura）中写道，彼得拉克（Petrarch）的十四世纪诗歌《非洲》已被遗忘…… 很少有人读过它，而且它被判断为-微不足道的事情-我不知道何时何人。然而，仅仅四十年后，文艺复兴时期早期诗人第二次布匿战争的史诗，用拉丁文的六边形写成，被著名的古典学者尼古拉·费斯塔（Nicola Festa）推广为意大利的国诗，他出版了史诗的唯一批判版1926年。这篇文章揭示了迄今不为人知的故事，它再现了Petrarch在诗意上重述Scipio击败法西斯意大利的汉尼拔的诗意重述，以及其在意大利法西斯主义时期促进民族和帝国思想的作用。在简要概述非洲之后在19世纪日益流行的时候，我认为一些重要的出版物为法西斯主义复兴了这首诗做出了贡献。我按时间顺序展示了如何将非洲塑造成意大利民族的一首诗，以及后来在意大利入侵埃塞俄比亚后，意大利新的罗马帝国。我建议，关于法西斯时期非洲的意义的争论，无论是罗马复兴的民族诗还是帝国普遍理想的诗，都表现出了意大利法西斯主义如何看待自己的更为深刻的张力。