After coming to power in 1922, Benito Mussolini launched an ambitious project to build agricultural colonies in Italy.<\/p>\n
These colonies were intended to reduce the number of large estates, increase wheat production, prevent the exodus from the countryside to the cities<\/strong> and, in doing so, generate a class of small agricultural landowners loyal to the fascist regime. Some 150,000 people settled in the new agricultural colonies of Mussolini's dictatorship<\/strong>, a project that Francisco Franco's regime attempted to imitate in Spain from 1939 onwards, with much more modest results. In addition to their importance for the economy, Mussolini's agricultural colonies contributed to the spread of fascist ideology<\/strong> even from an architectural point of view, promoting a rationalist style inspired by the Bauhaus School in Germany.<\/p>\n A good example of such a settlement was Sicily's Borgo Schir\u00f2,<\/strong> named after Giacomo Schir\u00f2, an Italian soldier stabbed to death by communist militants in Piana degli Albanesi on July 23, 1920. Located about 9 km northwest of Corleone and 25 km southwest of Palermo, this village was built in 1939 and officially opened on December 18, 1940. The village included a school, a grocery store, a medical center, a church, and a restaurant.<\/strong> It once had about 100 inhabitants and survived, with some damage, the Second World War. However, by the end of the 1950s it fell into decline<\/strong>, and many of its residents emigrated to the cities. By 1970, only one family remained, the one that ran the grocery store, and the parish priest, who was the last inhabitant to leave the town<\/strong> with the arrival of the new millennium.<\/p>\n
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