Rejuvenating the nation: health resorts, baths, and biopolitics in Fascist Italy

During fascist rule in Italy (1922–1943), health resorts became key sites where urbanism, architecture, tourism, and biopolitics converged. This article examines how provincial spa towns such as Castrocaro Terme and Fratta Terme were transformed into ideological landscapes under the regime, blending public health, leisure, and regional development. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of heterotopia and biopolitics, this study situates fascist spa resorts within broader interwar trends of state-managed leisure and health. It argues that health resorts were not merely sites of therapeutic tourism but instruments of social engineering, an attempt to shape class relations, gender roles, and political identities. Through rationalist architecture, ritualised leisure, and symbolic design, these resorts were conceived to inculcate the fascist vision of national rejuvenation, disciplining bodies and, at the same time, promoting the regime’s vision of italianità.