ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
section Section 1|63 pages
Global capital
chapter 7|19 pages
F is for … fluctuating symbolism
chapter 9|10 pages
The spaces between intention and reception
section Section 2|54 pages
Conditional colonies
chapter 11|12 pages
The Aeronautical Base Gianni Rossetti of the Italian regime in Leros
chapter 12|12 pages
Kallithea, Rhodes
section Section 3|65 pages
Contested territories
chapter 16|14 pages
Beyond Italianization
chapter 19|15 pages
The legacy of the official borgate
section Section 4|71 pages
Figures and frameworks
chapter 21|14 pages
From fascism to the postwar era
chapter 22|13 pages
The silence of modernity
chapter 23|14 pages
The University of Trieste during the period of the Allied Military Government
chapter 24|11 pages
The afterlife of typology and the resilience of fascist architecture
section Section 5|71 pages
Fabricating fascism
chapter 27|10 pages
The Casa della Madre e del Bambino in Trieste
section Section 6|65 pages
Remnants of place: Reception and polemics at the extremities of empire
section Section 7|63 pages
Continuity or crisis
chapter 39|16 pages
Problems of abstraction
section |15 pages
Epilogue