Fascism, Italian

At the end of that summer of 1927 the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini convened an International Physical Congress at Como on the southwestern end of Qord-like Lake Como in the lake district of northern Italy. The congress commemorated the centennial of the death in 1827 of Alessandro Volta, the Como-bom Italian physicist who invented the electric battery and after whom the standard unit of electrical potential, the volt, is named. Everyone went to Como except Einstein, who refused to lend his prestige to Fascism. Everyone went because quantum theory was beleaguered and Niels Bohr was scheduled to speak in its defense. 

For a survey of the interpretations of Fascism, and its roots in Italian hist y, see the papers collected in Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani, Mario G. Rossi (eds.), II Regime Fascista Storia e Storiografia (Rome and Bari Laterza, 1995). 

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