Censorship in Italy
In Italy, freedom of press is guaranteed by the Constitution of 1948. This freedom was specifically established in response to the censorship which occurred during the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini (1922–1945). Censorship continues to be an issue of debate in the modern era. Censorship in Italy under Fascism (1922–1943) Censorship in Italy was not created with Fascism, nor did it end with it, but it had a heavy influence in the life of Italians under the Regime. The main goals of censorship under fascism were, concisely: Control over the public appearance of the regime, also obtained with the deletion of any content that could allow opposition, suspicions, or doubts about fascism. Constant check of the public opinion as a measure of consensus. Creation of national and local archives (schedatura) in which each citizen was filed and classified depending on their ideas, habits, relationship and any shameful acts or situations which had arisen; in this way, censorship was used as an instrument for the creation of a police state. Censorship fought ideological and defeatist contents, and any other work or content that would not enforce nationalist fascism. Censorship in public communications This branch of the activity was mainly ruled by the Ministero della Cultura Popolare (Ministry of popular culture), commonly abbreviated as "Min. Cul. Pop.". This administration had authority over all the contents that could appear in newspapers, radio, literature, theatre, cinema, and generally any other form of communication or art. In literature, editorial industries had their own controlling servants steadily on site, but sometimes it could happen that some texts reached the libraries and in this case an efficient organization was able to capture all the copies in a very short time. An important note on the issue of censoring foreign language use: with the "Autarchia" (the general maneuver for self-sufficiency) foreign languages had effectively been banned, and any attempt to use a non-Italian word resulted in a formal censoring action. Reminiscences of this ban could be detected in the dubbing of all foreign movies broadcast on RAI (Italian state owned public service broadcaster): captioning is very rarely used. Censorship did not however impose heavy limits on foreign literature, and many works by foreign authors were freely readable. Those authors could freely frequent Italy and even write about it, with no reported troubles. In 1930, it was forbidden to distribute books that contained Marxist, Socialist or Anarchist like ideologies, but these books could be collected in public libraries in special sections not open to the general public. The same happened for the books that were sequestrated. All these texts could be read under authorization for scientific or cultural purposes, but it is said that this permission was quite easy to obtain. In 1938 there were public bonfires of forbidden books, enforced by fascist militias ("camicie nere"): any work containing themes about Jewish culture, freemasonry, communist, socialist ideas, were removed also by libraries (but it has been said that effectively the order was not executed with zeal, being a very