(Rome, 1895 – there, 1959), politician, is among the founders of fascism. In fact, in 1919, already active in the Futurist movement, Bottai met Mussolini and collaborated in the founding of the Fasci di Combattimento; he took part in the March on Rome and from 1929 to 1932, as Minister of Corporations, he drafted the “Labor Charter,” the basis of the corporative order. He then became Minister of National Education, from 1936 to 1943, and in 1940 founded the magazine “Primacy.” On July 25, 1943, he joined with other hierarchs on theGrandi agenda, a motion that outvoted Mussolini. He fled to Algeria in 1944, was amnestied in 1947 and was thus able to return to Italy where he founded the magazine “ABC,” of which he would be editor until his death.
The Giuseppe Bottai Fund, donated to the Foundation in 1992, consists of the Correspondence and Manuscripts sections. The first, houses Bottai’s numerous letters sent from 1914 to 1919 to his fiancée Nelia (Cornelia) Ciocca, whom he married in 1920, and some letters by e a Marinetti, a letter from Boccioni and some missives addressed to Gerardo Dottori and Ottorino Coppa; the second, preserves the Youth Diary 1919-1920, largely unpublished. The correspondence is entirely in photocopy, while the Diary is the result of a typewritten transcription by his daughter Viviana Bottai, donor of the Fund.
