SummaryThis article challenges commonly held preconceptions about the absence of a cohesive cultural policy by arguing that, while many rival aesthetic creeds were accommodated under Mussolini's regime, they can all be seen as permutations of a common vision of the central role to be played by a culture in the regeneration of the national community and the creation of a new Italy. It points to a profound relationship between Fascism's cultural policy and its core mobilizing myth of palingenetic ultra-nationalism, which similarly spawned a wide variety of surface ideologies similarly doomed to failure by the irreducibly pluralistic nature of modern society.