The
Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle,
and Tourism in Fascist Italy
by D. Medina Lasansky
Preface
This book examines the way in which the late Middle Ages and Renaissance were
manipulated and deployed in service of politics during Italy’s Fascist
regime between 1922 and 1945.
In contemporary Italy, medieval and Renaissance culture remains a central component of cultural, economic, and political identity. It is the key feature of an ever-expanding business of heritage tourism. It has provided the basis for countless programs of historic preservation, public entertainment, as well as political rhetoric (the use of medieval symbolism by Umberto Bossi’s Northern League being a prime example). To a certain extent, the medieval and Renaissance past has been democratized, made available in various forms and venues to an increasingly diverse, more demanding, and savvy audience. These many versions now preclude any single or exclusive understanding of history and place.
The Fascist regime was by no means the first, or the last, government to deploy the medieval/Renaissance past in its political rhetoric. Celebrating the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was central to the discourse of identity politics throughout the history of modern Italy. The period, with its connotations of rebirth and renewal, was of tremendous symbolic value, as was quite evident during the period of unification, when Italian history was mined to help define the image and culture of the new country. Nonetheless, the regime’s use of the past was distinct. Through a variety of social reforms and cultural initiatives the regime modernized and adapted traditions of the previous century to a new set of political circumstances. The regime—and by this I mean the scholars, artists, architects, journalists, local leaders, and government ministers who worked on projects that were supported by the central government—redefined the Middle Ages and Renaissance in a manner all its own.
In this book I award particular attention to the way in which the physical form, image, and understanding of the Italian city-state were redefined through urban editing: a combination of urban renewal, architectural reconstruction, and civic spectacle. The built past provided great raw material for Fascist rhetoric.
As the following chapters show, during the Fascist period the city served as a text whose urban spaces and monuments were carefully edited for public consumption. The city’s physical space, image, and history were repackaged to serve political ends. Sites were suppressed or amplified according to a set of inherently nonurbanistic goals. In the process fiction was conflated with fact as a new subjectivity was established. Ultimately, by using urban space as a stage for defining and developing identity politics, expectations of the city were permanently altered. By the end of the regime, civic identity had become inextricably linked to its historical past, and that past was in turn firmly rooted in physical sites that were easily identifiable and made accessible to the general public. The public actively and unquestioningly participated in historic tourism as a part of a newly defined patriotic self-consciousness (fig. 2). This deliberate restaging of architecture is something that we will encounter again and again over the course of the next few chapters. It emerges as characteristic of Fascist urban intervention, in which the redefinition of site was integrally linked to that of sight. The experience of the city was reframed in conjunction with the reconceptualization of history.
My examples are drawn heavily from Tuscany, where the interest in this aspect of Italy’s heritage was particularly pronounced. I use the term “medieval/Renaissance” to signify the peculiar Fascist conflation of visual, literary, rhetorical, and political elements drawn from both periods. In no way do I intend to provide an exhaustive discussion of the numerous ways in which the past was deployed during the 1920s and 1930s. On the contrary, I hope to underscore the need for further study of many of these initiatives. Although seemingly separate and distinct, these initiatives, I argue, whether aimed at the redesign of a piazza or the introduction of a festival, shared a common agenda, audience, and, in many cases, set of individuals involved in their design. The close interrelationship between propaganda and scholarship, history and entertainment, local and national culture, underscores the complexity and completeness of the Fascist redesign of this past.
To understand this use of the past is to understand how the past was linked to contemporary culture during the 1920s and 1930s. How was the exploitation of this past tied to practices in the evolving disciplines of architecture and urbanism? To what extent was the interest in the Middle Ages and Renaissance related to the rhetoric of rationalist architecture or to the growing interest in vernacular traditions? How did it intersect with regime-sponsored activities and institutions such as the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (or OND, the National Organization for Leisure-Time Activities), the burgeoning tourism industry, organized sporting events, folkloric celebrations, film production, and the popular press? Was it in dialogue with contemporary scholarly research, and if so, how? How was the celebration of this past politicized to support regime rhetoric of racial and cultural superiority, imperialism, surveillance, and physical maintenance? The bulk of the book is devoted to answering these questions. The last portion assesses the lasting implications of the regime’s interest in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. How has this interest shaped what we consider today to be the cultural landscape of medieval and Renaissance Tuscany? So as to more completely understand the extent to which the Fascist-period recuperation of this past has influenced contemporary stereotypes and canons, I discuss urban-heritage initiatives undertaken after the fall of the regime at a site outside Tuscany.
Inherent to the premise of this book is the belief that there exists a relationship between political ideology, urban space, and history. I am interested in how the urban landscape is reworked to define a “collective” memory, or shared understanding of the past, intended to serve political legitimization and economic development. Buildings, monuments, and spaces are, in the words of Brian Ladd, the “selective aids to memory,” encouraging us “to remember some things and forget others.” The way in which structures are seen, treated, and remembered sheds light on collective identity. Correspondingly, ideas, institutions, and cultural practices help make it possible to regard such structures as historical.
Western culture has long defined itself through monuments that are, to borrow the terminology of Alöis Riegl, both “intentional” and “unintentional.” In Italy, such monuments have taken the form of memorial markers, commemorative sculpture erected in the piazza, or myths associated with particular sites. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the identification, invention, and occupation of historical sites became increasingly important to emerging nation-states for the production of distinctive national identities. As Jacques Le Goff has pointed out, a range of new memory sites and memory activities were invented (or at least redefined) to institutionalize specific renditions of history. It is clear that historical narratives can provide powerful political legitimization. Not surprisingly, as he has noted, the commemoration of the past reached an extreme in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Understanding the use of medieval and Renaissance buildings and spaces in the early twentieth century is crucial to full comprehension of today’s reception and historiography of the period. It is clear that medieval and Renaissance buildings have had, and continue to have, lives that are integral and meaningful to contemporary urban activity and civic identity. Architectural historians working in the area of medieval and Renaissance studies tend not to overlap with those working on modern topics. I hope that this book will demonstrate the benefits of a diachronic discourse. The architect Aldo Rossi has argued that cities are repositories of memory, defined by the interrelationship between the past and present. In the mind of Rossi, monuments provide “propelling permanences” that thrust the past into the present. They are catalysts for memory as long as they are integrally connected to a larger cultural context.
Michel Foucault once claimed that history provides a way to control and domesticate the past. It can be, and has been, repeatedly rewritten according to demands of the present. As the three-dimensional parallel to written history, buildings and cityscapes are subject to the same forms of revisionist interpretations. It is clear that in order to understand the built past, it is necessary to understand the extent to which it has been subjected to continual reinvention and reinterpretation. As many have noted, the history of architecture lies as much in the history of buildings as it does in architectural historiography itself. Yet oddly, architecture is most often studied within the confines of the cultural context in which it was originally created, as if it were static and unchanging. Juergen Schulz noted in a study of the restoration of the Fondaco dei Turchi in Venice that contemporary scholarship often assumes that buildings are either actual remains or faithful reproductions. The extent to which they can simultaneously be remnant and reproduction, as well as a site for creative architectural exploration, does not typically enter into consideration. Buildings have multiple and transient pasts dependent upon the changing cultural context. They can mean different things to different people at different times, or even at the same time. Arguably they can also mean different things to the same person at different times. Marvin Trachtenberg has demonstrated this beautifully in his study of the Florentine Piazza della Signoria—a site that changed over time due to shifts in intellectual thought and sociopolitical attitudes toward the design and use of public space.
The building, as Aldo Rossi might argue, is simultaneously a site, an event, and a sign. It is both the structure, in the traditional sense of the word, and the process by which that structure is deployed. Inherent to this definition is the process of mediation. In this book buildings and spaces are understood as a set of activities, products, and attitudes that complement and complete both the design and meaning of specific sites. As such, architecture is considered as a process of reception, representation, use, spectacularization, and commodification as meaning is mediated by ideologies and strategic rhetoric disseminated through divers media, including photography, film, tourist propaganda, advertising, and exhibitions, as well as scholarly conferences and academic publications. At times this book seems all but an intellectual history of the various government organizations, institutions, and individuals that were instrumental in the design process. It is this confluence of activity that emphasizes the peculiar nature of architecture as both multidimensional and multimedia. As I have indicated, such a concept of architecture allows political ideology, urban space, and historical narrative to meld into one.
A secondary goal of this book is to provide a historiographical critique of architectural history. I hope to challenge traditionally held assumptions regarding the built environment of the Middle Ages and Renaissance while simultaneously encouraging reconsideration of the architectural discourse of the Fascist era and the legacy that discourse has had in the postregime period. Essential to this discussion are issues concerning restoration and authenticity, the construction of sites of “collective” memory, the transformation of elite cultural traditions into mass-culture experiences, the role of the historian in contemporary practice, and canon formation.
The issues are numerous and have of late begun to attract the attention of scholars. For example, a handful of studies have begun, even if only indirectly, to expand our knowledge of the ways in which the medieval and Renaissance past was deployed during the regime. Work on folklore and festivals by the prolific Stefano Cavazza, as well as Diane Ghirardo, has begun to explore the Renaissance-style spectacles that were set against the backdrop of these environments. Cavazza deserves particular praise for his detailed and thorough studies of regional folklore, which have contributed greatly to our understanding of this period. He is the first to recognize the important intersection of politics, tourism, and celebration of Italian history as this played out at venues such as the Sienese palio and the Aretine Joust of the Saracen. Equally important is the work of local scholars such as Luca Berti in Arezzo. A comprehensive study of the Fascist use of the medieval/Renaissance past, however, is lacking. By way of partial remedy, I intend in this book to provide a better understanding of the three principal ways in which this particular past was made manifest with regard to the architectural discourse: (1) through the reuse, restoration, and “liberation” of existing medieval and Renaissance structures and spaces; (2) through the historicist design of new buildings, neighborhoods, and entire towns and their presentation as either medieval or Renaissance; and (3) through the influence that medieval and Renaissance urban theories and urban-planning concepts had on contemporary design and theory.
Building upon the formative work of Philip Cannistraro, Victoria de Grazia, and George Mosse regarding mass culture and cultural consensus, a younger generation of scholars has continued to strengthen our understanding of Fascist-period culture. They have highlighted the complexities of cultural production with studies on rituals, exhibitions, film, and the popular press. Others have brought issues of gender to the foreground. Still others have extended the discussion of politics and performance to encompass tourism, showing how Italians were encouraged to become tourists in their own country in order to cultivate a sense of national identity, while the tourism industry simultaneously defined a unique image of Italy abroad for an international market. Finally, thanks to numerous recent studies on the Italian colonization of North Africa and the Aegean, we have begun more fully to understand the ways in which the regime confronted (and often assimilated) indigenous cultures and architectural forms. Current scholarship confirms that the nature of what can be termed “Fascist” architecture is not only pluralistic but at times contradictory. As has been noted, Fascist culture had more to do with institutional reforms than with the promotion of any single aesthetic agenda.
Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship, the study of Fascist-period culture is still a relatively young discipline. Giorgio Ciucci lamented that well into the 1960s Giuseppe Terragni was presented as the sole protagonist of modern Italian architecture. It was not until the 1970s, as Marla Stone has recently reminded us, that a wider circle of architects and artists associated with the regime began to receive recognition in scholarly studies and exhibitions. Even so, there are many individuals and aspects of architectural practice about which we know relatively little. For example, while Marcello Piacentini, Gio Ponti, Adalberto Libera, and Giuseppe Pagano are familiar names, Angiolo Mazzoni, Giuseppe Castellucci, and Ferdinando Forlati are not. Scholars have yet to fully explore the theories and projects of the latter. Similarly, while the various triennali have been studied, the 1938 Mostra del restauro has been overlooked.
At the same time, the study of this era is truly interdisciplinary. Anthropologists, art historians, historians, literary scholars, sociologists, and political scientists contribute as much to the discussion of architecture and urbanism as architectural historians. This disciplinary slippage is similar to that pertaining during the regime itself when architects doubled as town planners, painters, exhibition organizers, art critics, and journal editors (a multidimensionality architect Gustavo Giovannoni attributed to the “integral architect”). The material presented in the following chapters confirms the permeability of boundaries between concepts, as festivals become architecture, architecture becomes spectacle, high culture becomes mass entertainment, restoration commingles with new construction, new-town plans become historical research, and so forth. One can easily imagine how regime designers would have drawn a parallel with the multidisciplinary careers of Renaissance architects such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Raphael, who at any given point were typically employed in various realms of artistic production: designing stage props, ephemeral architecture for festivals, fireworks, and painting cycles, as well as buildings. As Walter Benjamin noted in 1936, Fascism was a form of “aestheticized politics” that “permeated all aspects of society.” Therefore “the political, economic, and cultural realms should not be considered separately.”
That said, this book is not a study of Fascism per se. It is not occupied directly with the official dictates of Mussolini and his ministers. Instead, it explores how traditions are shaped as much by local organizations as by those at the top, how scholarship is guided as much by popular interests as by academic ones, and how public architecture is designed as much by the public as by the architect. Ultimately it explores how a sense of “Fascism” was constructed from the bottom up, how local leaders, such as podestàs, superintendents, regional architects, and professors, situated their civic projects within state rhetoric.
I arrived at this project, not as a scholar of Fascist Italy, but through an interest in the civic architecture and public space of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I have been fascinated by how the city could serve as a stage for civic exploration and demonstration, and intrigued by the symbiotic relationship that existed between the design of public spaces and the activities that took place within them. This project comes to completion at a time when the very field of Renaissance art and architectural history has begun to question the paradigms upon which it was founded. Believing that historical study is a practice rooted in, and influenced by, contemporary culture, I quickly became interested in the historiography, reception, and use of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Why had certain sites been studied, while others had been ignored? Forgetfulness, Jacques Le Goff reminds us, is as revealing about the mechanisms for creating collective memory as anything else.
I began to question to what extent our present-day assumptions about the Renaissance have been conditioned by previous cultures’ attitudes toward the Renaissance, to what extent our understanding of the past has been mediated by the political and economic interests of the institutions that sponsor scholarship. “History is,” if we are to believe Le Goff, “the politics of the past.” How then have the very sites of study been transformed to reflect the interests of intervening cultures? As many have pointed out, the work of the historian is, to varying degrees, subjective. According to Le Goff, “the past is reconstructed in relation to the present just as the present is explained by the past.” As David Lowenthal has aptly noted, the past is a perfect foreign country. Keeping this in mind, I became increasingly interested in what shapes the popular public perception of the past, and to what extent this popular perception intersects with scholarly pursuits. What ideas, institutions, and practices have helped shape this popular conception, and do these overlap with scholarly agendas? More simply, do contemporary Renaissance scholars and the twenty-first-century tourist share an understanding (or at least certain preconceptions) about the past?
This project has been made possible thanks to new directions within the field of urban, architectural, and art history. Over the past decades the field has become increasingly self-reflective. The canon has been deconstructed and rethought as the discipline has borrowed increasingly from the theoretical foundations of others, including linguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies. As a result, historians have broken new ground. They have asked new questions of old and familiar material while simultaneously pursuing topics that would not have been welcome thirty, or even twenty, years ago. In many ways these pioneers served as my role models in exploring the conditions of architectural production, the role of vernacular traditions and mass-produced popular culture, and the relationship between politics and architecture. The work of scholars outside the discipline, from anthropology, cultural history, sociology, cultural geography, history, and political science, has been equally important in guiding the questions posed in this book.
This study emerges from an interest in the dialogue between popular visual culture and traditionally studied fine art, the ephemeral and the permanent, and the past and the present. The dialectic between past and present is particularly resonant as I face a growing pressure (from my students, most of whom are future architects, landscape architects, and urban planners) to make the past relevant to present practice. Above all, the book provides a framework in which the relationship between politics, economics, popular culture, and the built environment can be explored. As such, this book differs from more traditional architectural and art history in that it does not construct a Vasarian narrative around any one individual artist or any single building or site. Nor is it a study that deals directly with issues of aesthetics. Rather, it is about the process of architectural production, about the fluid and complex way in which forms of the built and visual culture interact and intersect across what I consider to be the artificial boundaries of time, hierarchical typology, style, genre, and medium. That is, it is concerned with buildings, not as isolated entities, but as integrated within a larger urban context in which political, economic, and social forces bear as much upon design as aesthetic concerns. Above all else, it considers architecture to be the unity of the structure and its mediated image. I consider how new technologies, the popular press, and modern notions of spectatorship were not only integral to design but used to heighten architectural experience.
Over the course of this project I have studied material ranging from symbolic kitsch and calendar art to advertising and product design, feature films and professional photography, mass-produced postcards and glossy magazines, architectural drawings, fine-art paintings, and amateur watercolors. In the process I have tried not to privilege the realities of any one form of representation. In an attempt to better visualize this documentation for the reader, I have scoured public archives, public and private collections, obscure libraries, and flea markets. The Wolfsonian collection, with locations in Miami and Genoa, deserves special recognition as a place where one can gain a fuller appreciation of Fascist-period visual culture, ranging from advertising to decorative arts. To complement the variety of visual material, I have consulted archival sources, including government documents (meeting minutes, correspondence between the ministers and superintendents, committee reports) and period tourist ephemera, and have conducted oral interviews with festival organizers and designers.
The first chapter explores various ways in which the Middle Ages and Renaissance were studied, preserved, and exploited during the nineteenth century. The conceptions of culture and history developed during this period informed the regime’s own interest in this past. The chapter begins with a discussion of the terminology used to describe the period. There was significant disagreement regarding the definition of what today’s scholars would comfortably term “Renaissance.” Perhaps surprisingly, disagreement had very little to do with style. Instead, it was focused on the connotations of the terms. That is to say, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Medioevo, or Middle Ages, was imbued with the rhetoric of nationalism, while the Rinascimento, or Renaissance, more typically signified the idea of rebirth.
The celebration of the Italian Renaissance was centered in Tuscany, above all in Florence. It was there that the local and national government, along with interested citizens, invested money, time, and expertise in its preservation and celebration. Museums were founded. New structures were built in neo-Renaissance style. Period buildings were restored. Entire neighborhoods were preserved. And villas located in the Tuscan hills were transformed into neofeudal refuges designed to house private collections of period furniture and art. This chapter shows how the interests of the government, private business, and individual patrons converged to establish Tuscany as the capital of the Renaissance. Just as the regime inherited the idea of Rome as the caput mundi, or capital of the world, it inherited this notion of Tuscany as the political, intellectual, and artistic center of the Renaissance. It was the center of both the Italian city-state and Italian culture—a capital that gave birth to political and artistic geniuses such as Brunelleschi, Dante, Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo.
Not only did nineteenth-century attitudes toward this past lay the foundation for the regime’s own interest, but many of the individuals involved in preserving and celebrating the Middle Ages and Renaissance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—such as the prolific and enigmatic architect Giuseppe Castellucci or the photographers who worked for the Alinari studio—remained active and influential during the regime. As a result, the discussion of such nineteenth-century organizations, individuals, and institutions, and the cultural paradigms they patronized, is crucial to an understanding of the Fascist-period projects that were to follow.
Like antiquity, the Medioevo (as the regime called it) proved to be a vital thematic resource in political thought, economic organization, and the arts throughout the country, as well as in the colonies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, and the Italian Aegean. If the rhetoric of antiquity served to legitimize the regime’s agenda of empire building, the medieval/Renaissance past provided regime leaders with distinct material and a set of myths that allowed them to reinforce the idea of “native” Italic traditions and a shared concept of the Italian self that emphasized independence, self-reliance, and cultural rebirth.
Regime leaders were opportunistic in using local resources and traditions. While the celebration of romanità made sense in Rome, a city filled with ancient monuments, it did not serve their purposes in Tuscany, where monuments from antiquity were virtually nonexistent (the remains of the amphitheater in Lucca constituting a notable exception). Instead, the regime went to great lengths to sponsor projects, building programs, and celebrations that maximized the existing medieval/Renaissance resources of the region. This strong dependence upon local culture and traditions explains why one past was privileged in Rome, while another was privileged in Tuscany. In cities such as Florence, Siena, Pisa, Arezzo, San Gimignano, Volterra, and Lucca, the celebration of the Medioevo was as significant as the celebration of romanità.
The book’s second chapter explores the way in which the regime transformed the celebration of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from a predominantly foreign, private, and elite preoccupation to one that was domestic, public, and democratic. The regime sought to make history visible and tangible through various mechanisms of public display. Exhibitions, festivals, and film were means by which the regime could both define history as public and reclaim it as Italian. The chapter begins with a discussion of the sexcentenary celebrations for Dante held in Florence in 1921, for which a series of fourteenth-century buildings were identified as historic landmarks, restored, and publicized. The sexcentenary established a paradigm for the themes and forms of projects later sponsored by the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF, the National Fascist Party).
A section of the second chapter is devoted to Tuscan Renaissance festivals. Although the palio in Siena and the calcio storico in Florence are familiar events, the fact that they were heavily redesigned during the regime to present a perfected vision of the past is not widely known. Evidence drawn from archive documents allows us to better understand the regime’s interest in these events, and the way in which they were reconfigured. Organized by various local cultural groups associated with the PNF and officially sponsored by the OND, the festivals proved their worth in conveying the regime’s pedagogical and propagandistic mission. They were cultural events designed by scholars and artists to be both educational and entertaining. A similar strategy was deployed for the elaborate reception staged in Florence for Adolf Hitler in 1938. This event marked a high point in the design and presentation of Italian history and cultural superiority, or italianità, a term frequently used to signify the essence of Italianness. Unprecedented in size, this production involved the cooperation of many cultural groups, hundreds of local artisans, as well as virtually every aspect of city government. The surviving correspondence between those involved, sketches for the event’s design, photographs, and rare film clips provide unparalleled insight into an event that until now has escaped the attention of scholars. The Hitler entry, like many of the festivals and exhibitions, was filmed as a part of the regime’s program for reaching a larger public. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role played by documentary and feature film in chronicling the past and establishing a set of historical stereotypes. While recent studies have focused on Italian film, none has dealt with the rare documentary footage in the film archives of the Istituto LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa, the regime’s film institute).
These various venues of public display facilitated access to the medieval/Renaissance past for a wide audience and in the process established the belief that this past was the common denominator of Italian identity. While seductive, the regime’s use of this past was simultaneously selective and subversive. Through the centralized control of ephemeral events, the regime bombarded the public with a carefully constructed vision of the Italian past, one that privileged civic ritual and civic architecture and ultimately supported the government’s ideological rhetoric of cultural superiority.
The third chapter moves from the ephemeral to the permanent to analyze the way in which the physical character of the city was reworked to emphasize the civic aspects of its medieval/Renaissance past. The chapter uses the Tuscan town of Arezzo as its example. This is a town where what I term “urban editing” was particularly pronounced. Local architects and historians were hired to return civic buildings to their “original” and so-called uncorrupted form by stripping them of their post-Renaissance additions and adding components that never existed. Particular attention is given to roles of architect Giuseppe Castellucci, podestà Ludovico Occhini, and the local monument brigade in conceptualizing the redesign of the town’s historic center. It is clear that the city’s built past was reinterpreted and its history fabricated with the knowledge and support of the central government in Rome. In order to understand how these local individuals and institutions could have wielded such influence, the redesign of Arezzo is discussed within the context of the contemporary professionalization of architecture and urban planning.
Once completed, the newly restored civic buildings of Arezzo provided the perfect scenographic backdrop for the reintroduction of a medieval festival, the Joust of the Saracen. The fourth chapter deals with the way in which the city serves as a stage for a civic ritual designed to present history in a tangible and entertaining manner. Like the redesign of the buildings themselves, the costumes, choreography, and narrative of this event were designed by artists, architects, and historians in order to convey a particular vision of the past. With the combined scenery editing and spectacle choreography, the urban stage provided a carefully controlled atmosphere for the presentation of the Aretine city-state. The chapter shows how the event and urban space were presented to the public and in the process were co-opted to support contemporary political rhetoric of racial and cultural superiority, physical strength, and imperial domain. Such rhetoric became particularly pronounced following Italy’s October 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. By May of the following year, with the successful conquest of the country, Mussolini announced the birth of a new Italian empire. Within this cultural milieu, the joust was recast as the virile conquest of the Saracen “other.” It was presented as an autochthonous tradition rooted in native Italic soil. As such it was celebrated as an Aryan tradition at a time when the Italian government was trying to heighten the distinctions between Ethiopian culture and Italian. Transformed during the 1930s to support various meanings, from a celebration of civic pride to a proclamation of military authority and Aryan superiority, the joust provides an example of how cultural meaning could be modified to serve political agendas.
Arezzo was only one of the many cities that underwent a face-lift during the regime. Cities throughout the country were restored and reimaged through various architectural initiatives, ephemeral events, and promotional schemes. Sites were sold to the public through articles and advertisements in journals, organized excursions, and discount train fares that facilitated visits. The fifth chapter addresses how the restored sites were transformed through these various means into a common architectural heritage. That is to say, while restored towns such as Arezzo were designed to quote and compete with neighboring towns, they were also seen as contributing to a shared sense of national patrimony that erased provincial difference. This process was accelerated by the regime’s burgeoning tourism industry. By encouraging tourism to towns such as Siena, San Gimignano, and Arezzo, the regime established a canon of sites that became and have remained integral to an understanding of the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance.
The sixth chapter explores the lasting legacy of the regime’s initiatives. It is a case study of the northern Italian town of Marostica and its invented medieval festival, the partita a scacchi, a game of living chess. Marostica provides a wonderful example of how the regime’s celebration of the medieval/Renaissance past thrived during the post–World War II period at a site outside Tuscany. It becomes clear that this past continued to provide raw material for civic revitalization efforts undertaken in a changed sociopolitical climate after the fall of the regime. The case of Marostica provides an opportunity to assess not only how the interest in this past was sustained but how it was transformed into a lucrative commercial enterprise at a time when Italian towns faced the often conflicting pressures of modernization and the vocal pan-European historic-preservation movement. The town invested heavily to enhance its historic character. Local leaders financed the restoration of buildings, invented a historical tradition, and promoted their town as an appealing heritage destination. Stereotypes of courtly love drawn from literature and art were used to create a tradition that, while invented, was so compelling that visitors have never questioned its authenticity.
The concluding chapter summarizes the Fascist strategies of reusing and manipulating the medieval and Renaissance past. While the Fascist-period use of this past was influenced by the paradigms of the nineteenth century, it was inherently distinct. It was controlled by a centralized network of individuals, government officials, and institutions, but was also pluralistic, eclectic, and at times contradictory. And it was disseminated via a campaign of multimedia mass marketing that merged the popular and the scholarly understandings of history.
The relationships between nation building, architecture, memory, and media are at the core of this book. They have most recently been examined in depth by scholars of unified Germany, whose studies have assessed how the country has come to terms with its controversial past through a selective process of preservation, reconstruction, and destruction of its built environment. Rudy Koshar has noted that preservation maintains a complex relationship “to the changing, unstable optic identity of the nation.” In the case of Berlin and Munich, for example, memory of the Nazi past has been increasingly dispelled by reworking (and destroying) the buildings, monuments, and spaces associated with that past. Brian Ladd has concluded that the “Germans’ failure to confront their own past can be measured by the continuing destruction of its traces.” The same can be said for the attempt to rewrite the history of the divided Germany. It has been decided that Berlin is better off without certain monuments: the wall, the statues of Lenin, Marx, and Engels that once dotted East Berlin, and the vacant Potsdammer Platz. Tearing down the wall, dismantling the sculptures, and rebuilding the plaza as a thriving commercial center and corporate headquarters are all means of negating that there were once two separate and ideologically opposed Germanys. Once again the past is defined in relationship to contemporary political, economic, and social needs.
These studies and others have begun to expand Alöis Riegl’s definition of “monuments” as structures that either were “intentionally” built to convey meaning or have “unintentionally” acquired meaning over time. As has been noted in the case of Berlin, ruins, vacant land, empty spaces—all have meaning. Like the statues and memorial piazzas, they too are the “spaces in which memory work is carried out.”
In Italy of the 1920s and 1930s, a more comprehensive understanding of “monument” was already used to activate memory. Festivals, exhibitions, touristic experiences, OND headquarter buildings, restored town halls, and the landscape served as monuments and were as intelligent and effective as the traditional forms. We see here that the rewriting of a “collective” memory is very much a current event accelerated by the cultural, economic, and political demands, and therefore its form is highly inflected and continually changing. As Benedict Anderson noted, a nation is the carefully crafted image of community, ceremonies, symbols, and sites that establish a sense of nationhood in terms of a shared collective culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in Fascist-era Italy.
Studies of “collective” memory have ballooned in the last two decades as the pioneering work of Maurice Halbwachs has been rediscovered. Many studies have focused on the relationship of memory to the built environment either directly or tangentially. History, it seems, as Raphael Samuel has noted, “is less and less seen as synonymous with the work of professional historians and the realm of books.” That is to say, historical narratives can be constructed in the physical and visual realms as well. I have come back to this notion again and again while thinking about this project.
Almost two decades ago Richard Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger coined the term “invented traditions” to signify those traditions that appeared or claimed to be old, when in fact they were invented. They noted that such traditions were used to define a collective sense of identity by legitimizing institutions, cultural practices, and political agendas. This work has been quite influential in forcing historians to challenge commonly held assumptions regarding traditions and encouraging scholars to see political-symbolic importance in a wide range of cultural products—from songs to clothes to myths. While their volume was not directed toward a study of visual culture or the built environment, the general premise can easily be applied to the reinvention of a “traditional” medieval and Renaissance cultural landscape during the Fascist regime as well as in postwar Marostica. In the latter, the town has taken the Hobsbawm and Ranger recipe one step further, since the partita a scacchi is not based on the remnant of any tradition but was invented ex novo.
Little thought has been given to the extent to which the image of Italy, as associated with the hill-town or castle, was intentionally cultivated as a heritage-tourist product. In the early twenty-first century we have yet to acknowledge the role played by Mussolini, his advisors, and local party members in the construction of our own stereotypes of the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as present-day Italy. In part, this is because the regime was so successful, and in part because Italy itself has yet to come to terms with the full range of Fascist activity. To admit that the regime heavily restored towns such as Arezzo and reworked events such as the Siena palio would be to admit that the popularly held image of Italy is a politicized construct consciously fabricated and promoted during the 1920s and 1930s.
I believe that the reconstructed past designed by the regime still largely defines the discipline of medieval and Renaissance architecture and urbanism. We still consider the San Gimignano Palazzo del Podestà and the Siena campo to be canonical features of Italian design, and yet we never think to attribute our familiarity with them to the regime. The representation of these sites as icons of Italian culture was so well packaged during the 1920s and 1930s that it has remained successful today even in a market that is quite savvy about cultural consumption. The question we need to ask ourselves is to what extent our current understanding of the physical environment of the Italian city-state was designed with a Fascist imprint during the 1920s and 1930s and subsequently assimilated into mainstream medieval and Renaissance architectural historiography. More precisely, to what extent was the image of the medieval and Renaissance city edited by regime sympathizers to support Fascist ideology? To what extent has that image remained in place for today’s observers? And to what extent are today’s critics fully cognizant of its roots and the associated political connotations?
In Italy the PNF gained authority through the design of an elaborate physical and mass-media stage and an appealing narrative drama in which they situated the new leadership. That is to say, the government used deception as a tool to engineer political stability. Through a process of selective destruction, reconstruction, and restoration coupled with education and publicity, they created an image of the Middle Ages and Renaissance that never really existed. More precisely, the regime patronized the construction of an alternative reality. Both the physical character and the experience of the city were reconfigured in a manner that was unprecedented. By choreographing both site and sight, both the physical place and the way it was seen and understood, they made cities appear more medieval and Renaissance than they ever really were. It is this theatrical deception that sets regime-sponsored projects apart from others.
If the reader feels uneasy by the end of this book, then I have succeeded in
what I set out to do: to challenge our assumptions about the past while making
us realize that there is no history that is not designed, no design that is not
historical, and no single form of authenticity.
© 2006 The Penn State University