Ezra Pound's initial experiences in Italy offer no indication of how that nation would change him during the Fascist period. His early visits are largely about missed opportunities and limited vision. When he moved to Europe in 1908, for instance, he was looking for ways to reinvigorate his writing, but he would conclude that Venice had nothing to offer him, that he had to move on to London. And indeed, the English capital enabled him to construct a kind of modernism that the Serenissima withheld. But already at that same time, though unbeknownst to Pound, Italians were in the midst of reimagining their own modernity and their relationship to their cultural heritage. And while Pound did not discover their innovative ideas then, these same ideas would later enable him to build on but also rethink the very modernism he made in London and Paris. This chapter first examines Pound's encounter with Venice in 1908, and the reasons for his inability to engage then with burgeoning Italian Nationalism and modernism. Then, I turn to the ways in which Italians were beginning to employ their cultural heritage to strengthen their nation, even before the Fascist era, and lay out some of the strategies the Fascists borrowed from these early movements. Finally, I will look briefly at Pound's return to Italy after the March on Rome, and set the stage for his adoption of Italian methods of making modernism through a deployment of the cultural heritage of the past.

“But how you onnerstan’ Venice!!”

When Ezra Pound went to Europe in 1908, he wanted to transform English and American poetry. Disillusioned with American academic life, he found himself in Venice and invested in the living arts. Pound believed he could see the vacuousness of the American art world, and his own youthful arrogance let him believe that he had the answers. He was confident that time in Europe, where he could be free from American provincialism, would let him develop an art that would dismantle accepted notions of the aesthetic. Sadly, Venice was probably not the right place for a young American to start such a revolution. For one thing, the city was hardly a blank slate.