As Selena Daly, Hannah Malone and Vanda Wilcox note in their February 2024 Contexts and Debates article in this journal, ‘In recent years, the architectural legacy and so-called “difficult heritage” of Fascist Italy has become a flourishing field of research’ (Modern Italy 29 (1): 97–107, here p. 97). Carmen Belmonte's A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlives of Fascist-Era Art and Architecture is the fourth collection of essays on the subject in the past five years, following Carter and Martin (Modern Italy 24 (2), 2019), K. B. Jones and S. Pilat (Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture, 2020), and G. Albanese and L. Ceci (I luoghi del fascismo. Memoria, politica, rimozione, Viella, 2022). The volume stems from the 2019 conference of the same name organised by Belmonte in Rome and retains the event's original international and multidisciplinary flavour: the 15 contributors work in seven different countries and range across anthropology, architectural history, art history, history and literature.
Belmonte provides a useful introduction to the complex and evolving interconnections between history, heritage (and heritage practices), art, architecture, politics and memory, which over time have given rise to what she describes as the ‘various approaches and diverging paradigms of reception [that] currently exist in Italy’ (p. 15). These are explored in different ways and from different perspectives in the following trio of essays, penned by three leading authorities on difficult Fascist heritage: Mia Fuller, Giuliana Pieri and Hannah Malone. For Fuller, the author of several excellent studies of postwar civic identity and memory in the Fascist new towns in the Pontine Marshes, the uncontested presence of so many Fascist-era relics in Italy points to a widespread ‘inertia memoriae’. Most of the time, she notes, Italians will ignore the inherent and often explicit ‘Fascistness’ of such relics; only when faced with external criticism – Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 2017 New Yorker op-ed ‘Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?’ being the most obvious example – will they engage, and then almost always defensively. Why? Because this helps keep the peace in a country lacking a clear, settled and uncontested memory of the Fascist ventennio and the Second World War. While Fuller prefers to explain rather than judge the Italian case, Pieri is more critical of what she sees as the persistent ‘state of crisis of memory’ (p. 35) in Italian art historiography since 1945 over the deep links between the visual arts and Fascism in the interwar era. Pieri argues that by downplaying or denying these links – for example, by focusing exclusively on the artistic and/or modern quality of a ‘Fascist’ artwork, or on the postwar work of artists previously closely associated with the regime – Italian art historians (and exhibition curators) have effectively ‘unmoored’ the art and the artist from their cultural-historical context. While not ‘outright revisionism’, Pieri finds it ‘no less troubling in the way it reshapes public perceptions of the nature of Fascist arts policies and of Fascism itself’ (p. 35). In contrast, Malone offers a more sanguine reading of the meanings and memories attached to ‘Fascist’ architecture and art. Employing the concept of the palimpsest to Fascism's architectural legacy, Malone suggests that we should not be surprised (or necessarily overly concerned) that buildings and monuments originally built to serve Fascist purposes have lost their Fascist charge or ‘code’: as times have changed, so too have the narratives connected to such sites. With the addition of new layers of meaning and memory, the original Fascist layer has been obscured, allowing other, less problematic, associations to come to the fore.
Issues identified by Fuller, Pieri and Malone play out in the book's second section in essays by Adachiara Zevi, Rosalia Vittorini and Joshua Arthurs. Zevi insists on the need to distinguish between the modern, ‘democratic and human’ rationalist architecture of the early 1930s (p. 115) and the ‘aesthetically and ethically repugnant’ (p. 123) monumentalism of late-era Fascism as championed by Marcello Piacentini. Keen to preserve and restore the former, Zevi would happily support the demolition of the latter, decrying the reputational rehabilitation and actual restoration of monumental ‘eyesores’ such as the now iconic Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (PdCI) in the EUR suburb of Rome. Vittorini likewise sees the 1930s as an important period of architectural innovation in Italy and calls for the consolidated protection and preservation of extant examples of Fascist-era modernism – including modern–monumental hybrids such as the PdCI. Arthurs, meanwhile, reprises his ground-breaking 2010 essay, ‘Fascism as “Heritage” in Contemporary Italy’, in which he first warned against the ‘uncritical legitimation’ of Fascism's material remains. With the far right now in power in Italy, Arthurs doubles down on his earlier position. By ‘[c]elebrating the Ventennio as a period of modernization’, he writes, academics have not only (often unwittingly) helped to valorise Fascism, but they have also ‘place[d] it at a pivotal juncture in Italy's development’ – a narrative that the far right has enthusiastically adopted and manipulated for political gain (p. 157).
The capacity of contemporary art to engage with and/or ‘depower’ (Vittorini, p. 146) Fascist heritage is a recurring theme in the volume and the focus of the final section. In ‘Negotiating Memories’, Pippo Ciorra discusses ‘Freedom of Movement’, Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani's remarkable 2017 multiscreen installation at Rome's MAXXI museum, which combined archival footage and original cinematography to contrast the construction of Fascist–imperial Rome in the 1930s with the gold medal marathon victory of Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila at the 1960 Rome Olympics, and the contemporary story of African migration to Italy. Mimmo Paladino's untitled black marble stele in Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia is the subject of the following chapter by Luca Acquarelli. As Acquarelli observes, in a country where philological conservation practices are the norm, the erection of the stele in the recently restored Fascist-era monumental square in 2017 constitutes a rare example of ‘critical aesthetic experimentation in a controversial heritage context’ (p. 206). Not only does the black stele contrast with the dazzling white marble of the surrounding piazza, but it stands in opposition to – and in place of – the square's original statue, Arturo Dazzi's seven-metre-high ‘L'Era Fascista’ (1932), known locally as ‘Il Bigio’. Removed in 1945 because of its strong association with the fallen dictatorship, the white marble colossus had been due to return to the square in 2013. Instead, a change in local government that year, from centre-right to centre-left, saw the decision reversed. The final essay in the section, by Alessandro Gallicchio, discusses the 2020 ‘Rue d'Alger’ exhibition, curated by Gallicchio, in the former Fascist Casa d'Italia in Marseilles (today the home of the Italian Cultural Institute and Consulate General). Featuring installations by several different artists – including Fischer and el Sani's ‘Freedom of Movement’ – the exhibition's primary purpose was to explore how archival research on the Fascist-era history of the building (and Fascism more broadly) could be combined with ‘a more experimental dimension, including space for a discourse nurtured by contemporary art’ (p. 227), to reflect on Italian Fascism and colonialism as well as the material legacies of the regime. While the exhibition was severely curtailed by the second Covid lockdown in France, it nonetheless achieved its objective. As Gallicchio writes, ‘Faced with a space charged with symbols linked to an imperialist discourse, the artists decided to fill in the gaps and to desacralize the rhetoric of Fascism by adding what has never been told and to make visible what has been omitted’ (p. 211).
Elsewhere in the volume, Dell Upton and Liza Candidi and Davide Grasso take the reader beyond Fascist heritage. In ‘Nationalism's Difficult Monuments’, Upton considers the problematic but still deeply infused nationalist myths and values (around race, empire, etc.) common to monuments constructed in both the antebellum South of the United States and post-unification Italy. Candidi and Grasso's chapter explores the different ways in which Berlin has engaged with its Nazi heritage. Essays by Lucy Maulsby (on case del Fascio in Italy) and Franco Baldasso (on the Fascist city and postwar ruins in the works of Carlo Levi, Anna Banti and Alberto Savinio) complete the collection.
Belmonte's book is a fascinating, thought-provoking and very welcome addition to the recent literature on the difficult heritage of Italian Fascism.
