Did Fascism Ban Genoese?

The received story is familiar: the regime against the dialects, driven out of schools and newspapers. The national campaign was real, but in Liguria – prof. Fiorenzo Toso observes – the picture is more ambiguous. Recasting the Republic’s Mediterranean glories and the myths of Columbus and Balilla in nationalist terms, Fascism found propaganda value in an "aligned" dialect literature, and used the Ligurian-speaking communities of Corsica and the Nice area to legitimise its irredentism; Gilberto Govi toured South America as an ambassador of regime-approved Italian identity.

As for the decline of Genoese, prohibition mattered less than modernisation – and a new, discriminatory idea: Genoese as a mark of marginality.