Balbo Monument

The weathered stone column near the lakefront ahead is roughly two thousand years old, pulled from the ruins of the ancient Roman port town of Ostia, and it did not come to Chicago by accident of history. It was a personal gift from the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, shipped over and dedicated in nineteen thirty three to honor Italo Balbo, a general in Mussolini's own fascist government who had just led a squadron of seaplanes across the Atlantic to the Century of Progress World's Fair here in Chicago. The inscription at its base still credits fascist Italy by name for the gift, and the city renamed a nearby street Balbo Drive in the general's honor at the same time.

The monument stood largely unremarked for most of its life on the lakefront, just another old stone column near the joggers and cyclists on the trail. That changed after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen pushed American cities everywhere to take a harder look at monuments honoring fascist and Confederate figures standing quietly in their own parks. Activists have pushed since then for the column's removal, pointing to Balbo's record as governor of Italian-occupied Libya and his public support for the invasion of Ethiopia under Mussolini's regime. A city commission even recommended taking it down. The city has so far chosen a middle path instead of actually removing it, renaming a different nearby street for the civil rights journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells rather than touching the column itself, which still stands exactly where Mussolini's government put it, inscription and all.