The 1938 World Cup victory in France was the zenith of sporting achievement for Fascist Italy. As Lando Ferretti, Mussolini’s press officer and one of Fascism’s most prominent theorists of sport, suggested, such successes were uniting the Italian diaspora behind the regime and symbolized the rise of the Fascist Italian nation. Until this point, ‘Italy’ was a more accurate term for the geographical area united by the 1861 Risorgimento (Unification) than the ‘Italian nation’, which remained a disparate, disconnected entity, in need of physical and psychological integration. Post-unification governments lacked a critical sense of legitimacy among Italian citizens, who were alienated by geographic, economic and linguistic barriers. Their legitimacy was.
