The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture

Reception and Legacy

Kay Bea Jones, Stephanie Pilat, Kay Bea Jones, Stephanie Pilat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000061444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architekturgeschichte

Today, nearly a century after the National Fascist Party came to power in Italy, questions about the built legacy of the regime provoke polemics among architects and scholars. Mussolini's government constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula and islands and in colonial territories. From hospitals, post offices and stadia to housing, summer camps, Fascist Party Headquarters, ceremonial spaces, roads, railways and bridges, the physical traces of the regime have a presence in nearly every Italian town.

The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture investigates what has become of the architectural and urban projects of Italian fascism, how sites have been transformed or adapted and what constitutes the meaning of these buildings and cities today. The essays include a rich array of new arguments by both senior and early career scholars from Italy and beyond. They examine the reception of fascist architecture through studies of destruction and adaptation, debates over reuse, artistic interventions and even routine daily practices, which may slowly alter collective understandings of such places. Paolo Portoghesi sheds light on the subject from his internal perspective, while Harald Bodenschatz situates Italy among period totalitarian authorities and their symbols across Europe. Section editors frame, synthesize and moderate essays that explore fascism's afterlife; how the physical legacy of the regime has been altered and preserved and what it means now. This critical history of interpretations of fascist-era architecture and urban projects broadens our understanding of the relationships among politics, identity, memory and place.

This companion will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including Italian history, architectural history, cultural studies, visual sociology, political science and art history.

1
Introduction

The afterlives of fascism

Kay Bea Jones and Stephanie Pilat

Nearly a century after the fascist March on Rome and more than 75 years after the end of Mussolini’s regime, questions about the built legacy of Italian fascism continue to be debated. The fascist regime constructed thousands of new buildings across the Italian Peninsula, Italian islands, and the colonial territories. From hospitals, government ministries, and post offices to stadia, housing, summer camps, and party headquarters, the physical legacy of the regime maintains a presence in nearly every Italian city and postcolonial territory today. Infrastructure projects such as roads, railways, and bridges bear the imprint of fascism: maintenance hole covers of sewer systems across Italy are still marked by the regime’s insignia. In some areas, such as the Pontine Marshes; the Dodecanese islands; and Asmara, Eritrea, the regime built entirely new quarters or towns as part of colonies or land-reclamation projects to serve its expansive objectives. In many such sites, large sections of urban fabric or natural landscapes were erased by Fascists. In Rome, for example, the Fascists demolished entire neighborhoods to liberate ancient ruins such as the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Imperial Fora. The fascist legacy includes these absences and erasures as well.

The Fascists were hardly the only power in Italy to leave their mark on the physical landscape. The visible reminders of fascist rule spread throughout the built landscape of Italy are in dialogue with many preceding and succeeding political powers, which held dominion and constructed remembrances. Everywhere you look in Italy, there is a Medici or Borgia Coat of Arms, a fascio, a street or piazza named after a Savoy Monarch, or some other symbol of those who have ruled the Italian territories from the ancient emperors and the many family dynasties to political parties, cardinals, and popes. Thus, while the monuments of fascism stand out as the more recent symbolic political constructs, they are set in a context rich with physical markers of historical powers. Here is another road named after Umberto, there is another fountain with a papal crest of arms. Political power has been manifesting in physical form in Italy for millennia; total erasure is not an option, nor is it desired. How centuries of history are layered into the Italian urban landscape is widely understood as something to be studied and preserved, not erased, as new political constructs arise. As Harald Bodenschatz observes in the pages that follow that “In Italy, the work of art is often above, even outside, any historical context: culture trumps politics and the artist or patron.”¹

Yet as Bodenschatz points out, the violent history of fascism in 20th-century Italy as well as that of dictatorships across Europe, necessitates reconsideration different from the ancient or Renaissance manifestations of power still visible in the landscape. How scholars, artists, architects, and ordinary citizens approach, adapt, and transform the physical legacy of fascism today reflects far more than historic preservation trends or policies. What we do with the physical legacy of fascism reflects which parts of fascist history we valorize, which we neglect and which histories get hidden from public view, diminished, overshadowed, revised, and forgotten.

In this book, we collect and share some of the many stories of how the legacy of fascism is being reconsidered and rewritten by artists, architects, historians, individuals, and communities. Together, the essays presented here examine the afterlives of fascist architecture and urbanism in Italy and its former colonies. Authors consider how selected sites have been transformed, narrated, or adapted and by whom and to what ends. Connections between meaning and architectural or urban form are subject to renegotiation and reinterpretation through these interventions and representations. In the case of fascism’s vast constructed legacy, there are thousands of sites and ways to engage and reconsider this history. There is no singular shared response to the legacy of fascism in Italy or its former colonies. Moreover, the project of negotiating fascism is very much an ongoing one.

We do not intend with this collection of stories to provide a definitive or unified understanding of the reception and legacy of modern Italian architecture. Rather than seeking unity, we have sought to represent instead the diversity of afterlives, voices, and understandings that continue to emerge. This volume therefore presents a cacophony of responses rather than summarily defining a collective position on the 21st-century reception of fascism. At the same time, these studies do provide a significant if varied body of evidence of the changing nature of Italian and postcolonial societies. We learn about our current moment – what it values, what it rejects, and how it uses history to make arguments about the past and present – through these stories of fascism’s afterlives. Together, these studies show us how the distance between the original intentions of these constructions and their reception by citizens today might be negotiated. Collectively, these essays help us consider whether iconic structures, resonant and resistant public infrastructure, and their material presence embodies or retains some essence of the defeated political movement or, in contrast, whether they stand as reminders of the fragility of the connection between meaning and architectural form. These stories of intervention and transformation indicate that the architects of fascism do not get the final say on what their buildings mean; instead, subsequent generations will continue to deconstruct their meanings and reoccupy their spaces.

The work of the authors assembled here builds on a body of scholarship about fascist architecture and urbanism published over the past seven decades. The stylistic debates, exhibitions, and projects of the fascist era that sought to appeal to the regime made for a highly contested, polemical, and dynamic creative field during the ventennio. The interpretation and study of fascist Italian architecture was abundant from its inception by way of the critical perspectives of Edoardo Persico, Giuseppe Pagano, Massimo Bontempelli, Pietro Maria Bardi, Ugo Ojetti and many others, in Italy’s journals, exhibitions, and newspapers. Although the embossed name and phrases of the Duce on fascist monuments and public buildings provoked an immediate postwar damnatio memoriae, scholars were undeterred. Critical examinations of fascist-era architecture by Bruno Zevi, Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Giò Ponti, Leonardo Benevolo, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti, Peter Eisenman, Diane Ghirardo, Maristella Casciato, Giorgio Ciucci, Thomas Schumacher, Terry Kirk, Dennis Doordan, and countless others provided a foundation for decades to come. This body of knowledge has allowed more-recent scholarship to develop and deepen inquiries into the complexities of a fertile formal era. Scholars have debated whether these works of architecture remain worthy of study due exclusively to their remarkable designs, because they symbolize a body of ideas, or both. Moreover, scholars have deliberated whether the political intention and physical form can be separated. That is, can a great fascist building be valued as a work of art abstracted from the ideology that produced it? And what do we make of the designers? How do we make sense of the role of the architects who worked for the regime? Was the architect the source or merely the conduit of political and often-poetic architectural expression? Thanks to the decades of scholarship on fascist architecture, we are currently witnessing the timely emergence of a new era of scholarship that is in turn challenging, upending, and in some cases validating the original and current significance of fascist-produced buildings.

While these debates persist and continue to inspire scholarship about modern Italian architecture, this volume considers a different dilemma: how have the meanings of these sites been transformed or preserved through their reuse, abandonment, adaptation, or acceptance? What do the sites of fascist production mean today? Through a critical history of the reception of fascist-era architecture and urbanism, The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture: Reception and Legacy seeks to broaden our understanding of the relationships between politics and place. It aims to build on histories of the reception of politically charged sites in the modern era, which highlight how interventions, practices, and events have altered meaning even as physical forms often remain. In what follows, we have sought to engage geographies from Rome to Italy’s Greek and African colonies, from the northern borders and autonomous regions of the country to the agricultural new towns and islands. Authors examine histories of reception by drawing on sources such as archival documents, first-hand accounts, physical documentation, web data, advertisements, and media representations. Together, these sources help to furnish a rich and complex depiction of fascism’s afterlife; they present facets of the shifting meanings grounded in a diverse constellation of existing and evolving places. In addition to the diversity of sites and scales represented here, bringing together a wide range of scholarly perspectives was a key aim of this project. Not only do the authors included in this volume hail from many different countries, but they also include architects, junior scholars, recent graduates, and some of the most renowned and prolific scholars in the field. Together, these many perspectives indicate that there is neither a single answer nor a single question confronting the afterlife of fascism, and we fully expect that this work will continue, hopefully with the inspiration provided by these case studies and perspectives.

Organization of this volume

The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture: Reception and Legacy is organized into seven sections of essays by 30 contributing authors, followed by an epilogue. The book opens with three essays that provide broad contexts and questions and thus set the stage for the case studies that follow in the body of the volume. These three essays serve to introduce the history of fascist building and situate its reception in an international and political context and an Italian architectural context. Together, these three essays introduce many of the debates and discussions that are taken up in the chapters that follow.

Each section of the book was edited by a scholar of modern Italy. Section editors guided the development of each essay in their section and sought to identify connections between the divergent perspectives from this international collection of scholars. Section introductions draw out the essential themes, debates, or questions that stitch each section together. Like any dialogue between scholars with disparate backgrounds and unique cultural frames of reference, the resulting discourse is dissonant at times and openly challenges any sense of certainty on these topics.

Collectively, this compilation aims to broaden the number of sites, interventions, actors, and frameworks for understanding the reception of fascist architecture and, at the same time, illuminate the current fraught discourse by giving voice to new debates over the regime’s legacy today.

Historical contexts, voices, and questions

Before we can consider the reception of Italian modern architecture and urbanism, it is first necessary to review what the Fascists built and the key debates of the era. In “The Fascist Legacy in the Built Environment,” Francesco Cianfarani takes us deep into the history of the era in Italy in order to set the stage for the essays that follow. Cianfarani provides a succinct but detailed overview of period interventions in the physical landscape by calling on the legacy of foundational scholarship and authors. He outlines the major projects, building types, stylistic movements, and key figures. This detailed summary of fascist building projects situated in the cultural overview of the ventennio provides the necessary context for understanding the case studies in the chapters that follow.

Harald Bodenschatz’s opening essay, “Urbanism, architecture and dictatorship: Memory in transition,” situates questions about the reception of Italian fascism in comparison to other nations in Europe and the Soviet Union. Bodenshatz argues that “we are currently experiencing a shift in the culture of remembrance in Europe.” Comparative case studies illustrate how this shift is unfolding in the different national and political contexts across Europe and Russia. Through these comparisons, he seeks to understand the reasons for essentially differing responses to the legacies of five early-20th-century dictators. Situating one Italian artifact – the restoration of a Mario Sironi painting at La Sapienza in Rome – in the context of monuments in Portugal, Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union highlights both the commonalities and distinctly Italian approach to navigating its postwar and post-fascist history. The tendency to view art and architectural productions as autonomous objects that stand apart from their political and social contexts surfaces most clearly in the Italian case. Yet as Bodenschatz argues, “In this debate an architectural viewpoint tends to fall short.” He calls instead for recognizing that how we address such a rich and potent physical legacy reflects something of our current politics and agendas. What we choose to remember and forget as we address these works of art and architecture defines a contemporary cultural moment. By contrasting just a few examples, he begins to reveal a wider range of possible responses than we could find in Italy alone. Bodenschatz’s study thus challenges us to question what types of responses are missing from the Italian context.

An interview with Paolo Portoghesi conducted by Luca Arcangeli for the Routledge Companion begins to offer one response to Bodenschatz’s questions about how and why the physical legacy of fascism has evolved in Italy. As one of the most important critical voices and creative forces in architecture today, Portoghesi offers a long view on the cultural responses to fascist architectural culture in Italy. Portoghesi resituates the roles of leading critics, historians, architects, and writers, including Bruno Zevi, Marcello Piacentini, Luigi Moretti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom he calls Italy’s greatest intellectual of the last century. Portoghesi makes a compelling argument for questioning the polarization between good and evil, which fosters a narrow and reductionist approach to history: all cultural productions associated with fascism are labeled as evil and therefore bad. He argues that it is critical to see and value the good created by the fascist dictatorship just as it is critical to see and acknowledge the negative aspects of liberal democracies. Only by acknowledging the complexity of this history might we begin to honestly engage it. Portoghesi also responds to the question posed recently by Ruth Ben-Ghiat: why are the monuments of fascism still standing?² He argues that this question inherently resorts to the polarizing and reductionist dialectic of good and bad, fascist and anti-fascist, and thus reflects an overly simplistic interpretation of fascism as a cultural force. His perspective raises the following question: if we maintain strict divisions between good and bad, do we make ourselves more vulnerable to dictatorships cloaked in social programs and aesthetic beauty once again? What do we risk when we put faith in these simplistic divides? Will we fail to see evil at work in liberal democracies, for example?

Global capital: Fascism, democracy, and power in the Eternal City

The first section of essays centers on some of the most renowned sites of Italian fascism in the capital: the Foro Mussolini, now known as the Foro Italico, and the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, now occupied by global fashion brand Fendi. These two sites remain among the most monumental and highly visible markers of fascism in Italy today and have consequently been the subject of widespread debate and criticism. Edited by Stephanie Pilat, Global capital: Fascism, Democracy and power in the Eternal City (Section 1) considers the divergent histories of these two showcases of fascist design by exploring questions of ownership, daily use, and advertisements and branding campaigns that have exploited these familiar icons. At a most basic level, the uses of these sites provoke questions about reception, reutilization, and branding in public media. The four authors ask, who has the right to determine how these sites are represented, occupied, and accessed? Who bears the responsibility for their maintenance and preservation? As Pilat argues, these sites may foreshadow the decline in the power of the nation-state and the rising power of global corporations. If that is the case, what responsibility do political leaders and citizens alike have to intervene on behalf of the public?

Conditional colonies

C...