Reconstructing Italy

The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era

Stephanie Zeier Pilat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138248434
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317070290
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Reconstructing Italy traces the postwar transformation of the Italian nation through an analysis of the Ina-Casa plan for working class housing, established in 1949 to address the employment and housing crises. Government sponsored housing programs undertaken after WWII have often been criticized as experiments that created more social problems than they solved. The neighborhoods of Ina-Casa stand out in contrast to their contemporaries both in terms of design and outcome. Unlike modernist high-rise housing projects of the period, Ina-Casa neighborhoods are picturesque and human-scaled and incorporate local construction materials and methods resulting in a rich aesthetic diversity. And unlike many other government forays into housing undertaken during this period, the Ina-Casa plan was, on the whole, successful: the neighborhoods are still lively and cohesive communities today. This book examines what made Ina-Casa a success among so many failed housing experiments, focusing on the tenuous balance struck between the legislation governing Ina-Casa, the architects who led the Ina-Casa administration, the theory of design that guided architects working on the plan, and an analysis of the results-the neighborhoods and homes constructed. Drawing on the writings of the architects, government documents, and including brief passages from works of neorealist literature and descriptions of neorealist films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino and others, this book presents a portrait of the postwar struggle to define a post-Fascist Italy.

PART I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INA-CASA PLAN

1

The Development of the Ina-Casa Plan

An Italian newsreel from 1951 documents the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Fuorigrotta Ina-Casa quarter in Naples. Fuorigrotta means “outside of the cave,” and the clip begins with the narrator’s declaration: “Fuorigrotta is not only symbolic in Naples where there exists the problem of providing homes to those who still live in caves.”¹ The Mayor and a government minister are shown proudly walking around the site among crowds of excited workers and families. A priest reads from the Bible and blesses the site with holy water. Later we see men graciously accepting keys to their new homes. Towards the end of the short clip, we watch as a family enters their new home and runs out to their balcony to survey the view. As the family looks out, the narrator explains that it is also the First Communion Day for one of the children. In the final shot, the camera focuses on the church directly across the street from the family’s new apartment.

That politicians, priests, and needy families were all brought together in this 60-second version of events is no surprise. The Ina-Casa program was created in the midst of a political crisis with international implications that positioned Italy in the middle of a tug-of-war between the Soviet Union and the United States. On one side were the conservative Christian Democrats, led by Alcide De Gasperi, and allied with both the Catholic Church and the Americans. On the other side were the Italian Communists (PCI) led by Palmiro Togliatti, and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) led by Pietro Nenni, allied with the Soviet Union and smaller left wing parties. In order to understand the postwar struggle to define and position Italy internationally, it is necessary to briefly recall the nation’s unification, the legacy of Fascism, and the events of the Second World War in Italy.

The peninsula and islands that make up Italy today were unified as a nation in 1861. Preceding unification, the Italian territory was divided into a number of states with different forms of governance. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies controlled Sicily and much of the South; the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont ruled much of the Northwest including Turin and Genoa as well as Sardinia; and the Papacy controlled sections of central and northern Italy, while the rest of the Center and North was broken up into city-states or remained in foreign hands. Austria, France, Russia, the families of the Hapsburgs, Savoy, and Bourbon, as well as the Papacy and local elites, all vied for control of parts of the peninsula and islands throughout the nineteenth century. Only after a series of insurrections and occupations, led by Italian nationalists, and backroom negotiations by power brokers was the peninsula finally united as the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 under the leadership of the Savoy monarchs of Piedmont. It would be another 10 years, however, before Italian troops finally succeeded in taking Rome from Papal control and made it the capital. Two regions of the North, Istria and the Tyrol, only became part of the Italian territory after the First World War. The territorial boundaries of Italy remained largely intact after the Second World War with one major exception—the Italian colonies. The relative continuity of the nation’s physical boundaries was one characteristic that eased the difficulties of the postwar rebuilding project.²

By the time the Second World War ended, it had been 23 years since Mussolini first became Prime Minister in 1922; yet “Italian” culture, foreign policy, and symbols were now identified as “Fascist” culture, policy and symbols. It seemed that Fascism had invaded every aspect of culture and daily life—from literature to art, food, and even sport and leisure activities; only the private realm of domestic family life was somewhat sheltered from complete politicization. In order to redefine Italy in the postwar era, Italians first had to extract and reject what they perceived as the Fascist aspects of the nation. This task of extraction would prove challenging since most Italians had some passive or active connection to the regime. Instead of rejecting the policies, bureaucracies, and leaders associated with Fascism, postwar politicians and designers often sought a symbolic means to express the nature of the post-fascist nation.

The experiences of the war not only worsened pre-existing social and cultural divisions, they also created new tensions and divisions. Italy began the war in 1940 on the side of Germany and ended it five years later on the side of the Allies. After Mussolini was deposed and imprisoned in 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed a new Prime Minister, Marshal Badoglio. Seeing that Italian support for the war was waning, the new Prime Minister and the King turned against the Germans and signed an armistice with the Allies. The Germans invaded Italy from the North, while the Allies invaded through the South. The Germans rescued Mussolini from prison and re-installed him in a puppet regime, the Republic of Salò in northern Italy. When the Germans took Rome, the King and Prime Minister fled to Brindisi in the South, abandoning the capital. Throughout central and northern Italy, there was widespread resistance against the Germans and remaining Fascists. Armed groups of partisans organized resistance acts and successfully liberated and governed parts of the North. Towards the end of the war, partisans caught Mussolini trying to escape and executed him.

The history of Italy’s role in the war has bearing on our understanding of the Ina-Casa program, because it reminds us of the range of different experiences Italians had during that period. It was nearly a year after the Allies entered Sicily that Rome was finally freed from the Germans in the summer of 1944. And it was another 10 months before partisans liberated Milan. Thus the war was essentially over in the South two years before it ended in the North. In addition to the national identity crisis provoked by changing sides in the midst of war, after the switch to the side of the Allies there were three different Italian governments ruling simultaneously. The King and the Prime Minister ruled from the South, the Resistance governments controlled large parts of the North, and Mussolini reigned over the Republic of Salò. Adding to this confusion were two invading adversaries: the Germans and the Allies. The war, therefore, did not provide a shared history upon which the Italian people could redefine themselves. In fact, it only added to the pre-existing regional and class differences.

As a consequence of Italy’s relative youth as a nation, decades under Fascism, and messy role in the Second World War, the challenge of redefining Italy in the postwar era was enormously complicated. Who would lead the new nation and how they would work to bring the Italian people together was unclear in 1945. The onset of the Cold War added yet another dimension to the problem of unifying Italy as Catholics, Communists, former Fascists, Resistance fighters, and more vied to lead the postwar nation. The Communists had played a leading role in the Italian Resistance, providing the party with a powerful argument as to why they should lead the new Italy. This was fulfilled when the partisan Ferruccio Parri became Prime Minister in June 1945. Parri’s term, however, was short-lived (June–November 1945). When the Christian Democrats took the helm under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi in December of 1945, it was through an alliance with the Left. Ultimately, however, these moments of unity were brief, as the nation increasingly became divided between Left and Right, conservative and progressive, mirroring the international divisions of the Cold War.³ Finally, in May 1947, De Gasperi excluded the Communists from his government altogether.

The general elections of 1948 tested whether or not the Christian Democrats had the necessary support to govern without the Communists. The Christian Democrats attacked the Italian Communist Party for its connection to the bloody legacy of the Soviet Union during the war. The Communists counterattacked by portraying the Christian Democrats as puppets of President Truman and the United States and as dangerous to the young Republic, because of their ties to Fascism. The campaign was more than representative of international tensions—it became a heated battleground in the developing Cold War. As Paul Ginsborg described it:

Never again, in the whole history of the Republic, was a campaign to be fought so bitterly on both sides, or to be influenced so heavily by international events. American intervention was breath-taking in its size, its ingenuity and its flagrant contempt for any principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country.⁴

In the event of a Communist victory, the US had the audacity to plan how they could motivate and support an uprising against the Left and, if necessary, stage an occupation of Sicily and Sardinia. The Catholic Church also did what it could to intervene in the campaign, calling it a “mortal sin” not to vote or to vote for parties that did not respect the Church.⁵ The strategy worked. The Christian Democrats won with an astounding 48 percent of the vote, compared to the leftist coalition Popular Front’s 31 percent. The Christian Democrats were victorious, but their power rested on shaky ground in a country where inflation, jobs, housing, and simply getting enough to eat were pressing concerns for millions. De Gasperi recognized that, in order to maintain power, the Christian Democrats had to act quickly to address the very real problems faced by the populace. Thus we see in the 1957 newsreel the reigning Christian Democrats attempting to demonstrate their alliance with Catholics and the working-class in the new Fuorigrotta quarter of Naples.

With the Communists out of the government, De Gasperi made more room for the left wing of the Christian Democrats in his new government. Among them was Amintore Fanfani whom De Gasperi appointed to lead the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. Fanfani (1908–99), a professor of economics, eventually became Prime Minister six different times between 1954 and 1987. Born in Tuscany and educated at the Catholic University of Milan, Fanfani was nicknamed “the little professor” and was a member of a political group of professorini along with Giuseppe Dossetti and Giorgio La Pira. Throughout his life, Fanfani worked to reconcile capitalist economic principles with his Catholic faith, first in his role as an academic and then as a political leader. At age 26, his first book was published, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism (1934). Responding to Max Weber’s classic essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Fanfani argued that an individual’s needs or desires should not supersede the common interest. He believed that government must monitor and regulate the economic system and, in certain cases, has an ethical obligation to actively intervene in the market.⁶

Before his postwar political rise, Fanfani was an active member of the Fascist party, writing and organizing in support of the regime and even supporting some of its most controversial policies.⁷ In the Fascists, Fanfani saw a political order that offered something between free-market capitalism and Communism as well as an authority with the necessary power to act decisively and control the excesses of the free market. He searched for a way in which government could mitigate the potentially inhumane consequences of free market capitalism. Fanfani fled to Switzerland after Mussolini was ousted. He returned to Italy after the end of the war and won election to the national assembly in 1946. Thirty-eight years old at the time, Fanfani was a close ally of De Gasperi. He became a central figure in the left wing of the Christian Democratic Party, served as Prime Minister, and built controversial alliances with the non-Communist left in order to maintain power. As Fanfani himself later explained, “We didn’t want to make love with the Socialists. But we had to reinforce the base of support for the government.”⁸ By moving towards the center and by co-opting popular positions of the left, the Christian Democrats were able to win and ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Plates
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction: Reconstructing Italy
• PART I THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INA-CASA PLAN
• PART II THE RESULTS OF THE PLAN
• PART III THE RECEPTION AND LEGACY OF INA-CASA
• Epilogue: An Architectural Legacy of Ina-Casa
• Appendix A Gazetteer of Selected Ina-Casa Neighborhoods
• Appendix B A Timeline of Events in Architecture, Politics, and Social Housing
• Appendix C Excerpts from the Ina-Casa Design Manuals
• Bibliography
• Index