[2] Intended to commemorate the revolutionaries who had taken part in the rise to power of Italian fascism, the Exhibition was supposed to be, in Mussolini's own words, "an offering of faith which the old comrades hand down to the new ones so that, enlightened by our martyrs and heroes, they may continue the heavy task.

Alfieri presented the program of the Exhibition in a meeting of the National Fascist Party directorate on 14 July 1931, in the presence of Mussolini, who enthusiastically approved it.

Alfieri was involved in the project with a group of young, radical artists including, among others, the painters Mario Sironi and Achille Funi and the rationalist architects Adalberto Libera and Giuseppe Terragni.

The artists were called to translate the epic of the Fascist Revolution into plastic form making use of contemporary styles in graphic arts and architecture.

The purpose of the Exhibition was, in Mussolini's words, to “create something ultramodern and audacious, free from melancholy memories of the decorative styles of the past.”[4] Unlike Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, who openly attacked modern architecture and art on both stylistic and racial grounds, denigrating its practitioners as decadent if not actually communists or Jews, Fascism had been since its early inception closely linked to avant-garde artistic movements, such as Futurism.

[6] As Diane Ghirardo has shown "The Modern Movement received substantial state support in Italy as it did from no other major power in the decade before World War II".

[9] As artistical-technical consultant for the exhibition, Oppo was joined by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Futurist leader and a longtime friend of Mussolini, and by a small group of artists, including the architect Enrico Del Debbio and the painter Giovanni Guerrini.

It was never conceived as an objective representation of the facts or as being solely based on the exhibiting of historic documents, but as a work of Fascist propaganda to influence and involve the audience emotionally.

The rooms were filled with mural photomontages (or “photo-mosaics”), sculptures, collages, sound clips, and quotes that surrounded visitors with visions of World War I and achievements of the Fascist movement.

[13] The Palazzo delle Esposizioni was given a temporary façade by Adalberto Libera and Mario de Renzi dominated by four twenty-five-meter tall tin-plate fasces and two six-meter X's, one on either side of the entry.

Clashes between Socialists and Blackshirts were dramatized as battles over the soul of the nation leading up from the decadence of the years immediately following the war to the triumph of Fascism and the beginning of the new era.

Having completed the long detour through the history of Fascism, the visitor finally reached the Sacrario dei Martiri della Rivoluzione Fascista ('Shrine of the Martyrs of the Fascist Revolution'), the most theatrical and cathartic space of the entire exhibition.

[14] The Sacrario commemorated to the thousands of soldiers and scores of Fascist Party members who gave their lives for the cause and soon became the focal point of patriotic pilgrimages.

The exhibition has been praised by many art historians, such as Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno Zevi, who have both written appreciatively of Libera's and Terragni's contributions.

In the Exhibition of 1942, new rooms were added, one dedicated to the Doctrine of Fascism, another to artifacts recovered during the African campaigns, and yet another against Jews and Communists, who were given the blame for starting the war.