Archinect - News

What to do about Italy’s fascist monuments? Contextualize them.

2023-02-27T18:01:00-05:00

After World War II, prompted by the Allies, Germany underwent an intense de-Nazification program. Not so Italy — there was no equivalent de-fascistization. The country is still filled with buildings and street names that evoke its 20-year dictatorship. By not challenging the history of these monuments, the memory of fascism has been smoothly integrated into the Italian present.

There are at least 1,400 monuments to the Fascist Mussolini regime spread throughout the country. The era's architectural legacy will, in lieu of full-blown removal, be placed in context according to the hopes of local historians and preservationists who say they want to fight back against the notion that fascism also ushered modern architecture into Italy.

This comes at a time when far-right politics are on the rise nationally. Many see parallels to the struggle of U.S. activists to remove Confederate Civil War monuments, which, unlike in Italy, were mostly the product of a bitter 30-year memory war between North and South.

Previously on Archinect: This small Italian town could be the answer to the debate surrounding monuments removal

A 2017 New Yorker essay from historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat outlined the contemporary causes succinctly:

“[W]hen Berlusconi brought the right-wing Italian Social Movement Party to power, his rehabilitation of Fascism was aided by an existing network of pilgr...

This small Italian town could be the answer to the debate surrounding monuments removal

2022-01-20T15:37:00-05:00

Yet today these two pieces of fascist architectural propaganda are the centrepiece of a bold artistic experiment in addressing the debate around contested monuments, one which offers a template for other communities divided over whether to tear down or keep up monuments with racist, imperialist or fascist connotations.

Bolzano, the capital city of the province of South Tyrol in northern Italy, has become an important case study over its demonstrated ability to thoughtfully frame several of its local fascist monuments in a contemporary light that presents the public with a challenge to improve its own attitudes and look at societal wrongs related to the subject matter of each.

Much of the border community’s original Tyrolean culture was wiped out during the reign of dictator Benito Mussolini, who installed and erected a host of fascist buildings and monuments as part of the establishment of a new ethnic enclave there before the war. The Victory Monument thus became especially potent talismans of Italian identity when set against the prevailing culture of the predominantly German-speaking region, and so they remained untouched until the local administration began its campaign or “recontextualizing” in the last decade following years of dispute and violent episodes which have now gone the way of Il ...

Casa del Fascio eyed by Italian far right to become major art & architecture museum

2018-04-03T19:06:00-04:00

Italy’s far-right Lega party, which won almost 18% of the vote in the general election on 4 March and could form part of the next coalition government, wants to turn a former Fascist party headquarters in Como, in the Lombardy region, into northern Italy’s biggest museum of Modern art, architecture and design.

As reported by The Art Newspaper, the leader of Italy's newly empowered far-right Lega party, Matteo Salvini, has called in his manifesto, besides the expected anti-immigration, anti-European Union views, to create a grand museum of architecture, design, and modern art in the northern Italian city of Como — inside the Mussolini-commissioned 1936 former Casa del Fascio.

The New Yorker asks, "Why are so many fascist monuments still standing in Italy?"

2017-10-16T12:57:00-04:00

So why is it that, as the United States has engaged in a contentious process of dismantling monuments to its Confederate past, and France has rid itself of all streets named after the Nazi collaborationist leader Marshall Pétain, Italy has allowed its Fascist monuments to survive unquestioned?

Many monuments and buildings constructed in the late nineteen-thirties, as Benito Mussolini was preparing to host the 1942 World's fair, are still standing in Rome.

"In Germany, a law enacted in 1949 against Nazi apologism, which banned Hitler salutes and other public rituals, facilitated the suppression of Third Reich symbols. Italy underwent no comparable program of reëducation."

The architectural eclecticism of Mussolini's Italy

2016-06-01T13:18:00-04:00

...Mussolini, at least for his first decade in power, wasn’t quite as interested in architecture as his fellow dictators. While enthusiastically censoring film-makers, writers, academics and journalists, he let architects do as they please [...] The resulting architectural output, between Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 and the late 1930s, when he began to exert more control, embodies an accidentally healthy pluralism.

"While Hitler rejoiced in the traditional völkisch kitsch of his imaginary master race, and Stalin revelled in over-iced baroque confections, Mussolini sat back and let historicist revivalism compete with the crisp forms of forward-looking modernism."

For more on the architecture of fascism, check out these links: