Furnishing Fascism

Furnishing Fascism

Modernist Design and Politics in Italy

Ignacio G. Galán

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

This publication is made possible in part by the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Cover design by Jena Sher Graphic Design

Cover photograph © Triennale

Milano Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher.

Abridged versions of chapters 3 and 4 were previously published as “Building Simultaneity in Fascist Italy: Film, Furniture, and the Reframing of the Nation,” Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians 80, no. 2 (June 2021): 182–201; and “Furnishing Italian Colonialism: ‘Nomad’ Interiors and the Habitations of the Empire,” Modernism/modernity 30, no. 4 (December 2023): 681–717; copyright 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of the book were previously published in “Furnishing Fascist Italy,” in Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture, ed. Denise Costanzo and Andrew Leach (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 197–210.

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Contents

Introduction: From the Chair to the Nation

1. The National Market of Furnishing: Toward the “New Italian House”

2. Interiors in Print Media: “The Question of Taste”

3. National Film Sets: The Synthesizing of Modernist Fictions

4. Furnishing the Empire: “Nomad” Interiors and Carceral Habitations

5. The Mobile Objects of Tourism: Mediterranean Occupations

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Author Biography

Color Plates

Figure I.1. Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, collage featuring a lighting fixture, included in “Five Ideas for Five Lumen Fixtures,” Lo Stile 10 (October 1941). Copyright Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

Introduction

From the Chair to the Nation

A decade into the twentieth century, as the Kingdom of Italy’s belated modernization challenged established traditions and various artistic movements sought to align the culture of the country with international modernist trends, art critic Ugo Ojetti underscored the urgent political need to develop a specifically Italian national architecture and decoration.1 In his view, this project would be manifest even at the level of household furnishing and interiors. His call to arms, entitled “La patria e la sedia” (The homeland and the chair), published in 1911 in the Corriere della Sera—Italy’s most widely circulated newspaper, and the mouthpiece of the country’s northern bourgeoisie—coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. To think that a simple object, a chair, would be called upon to carry such weight for a major political project in a noted national commemoration might sound odd today. But not at all at the time.

Ojetti’s call anticipated how the field of furnishing would be mobilized as an integral dimension of the nation-building project under Italian fascism. In many aspects, this mobilization aligned with how architecture played a key role for the regime, as an instrument of social and technological modernization and as a medium in the nationalist cultural politics of fascism, with its diverse and often contradictory strategies. While Ojetti had in mind the ready-made store of classicist forms and ornamentation that he understood had granted Italy its historical preeminence in the realm of the arts, the entanglements of architecture and politics during the fascist period did nothing but strengthen as its conception was increasingly transformed by modernist principles. As a matter of fact, the alliance of architecture and politics was not limited to specific connections between individual architects and Benito Mussolini’s politics or the alignment of certain styles with the preferences of the regime, but rather entailed a statewide involvement of the architecture profession with the ideals and programs of fascism.2 For the modernist critic Pietro Maria Bardi, architecture was called upon to be the arte di stato (art of the state). Its task was to give form to the values of fascism—a task that also required the state’s direct involvement in managing architectural culture and practice.3 Framed within the general alliance between architecture and fascism, the field of furnishing effectively executed Ojetti’s call to link the design of the chair with the unfolding politics and developing identity of the Italian nation.

However, while furniture design was connected to the field of architecture and its politics were similarly transformed with the adoption of modernist principles, it was contemporaneously constituted as a circumscribed area of discourse and practice.4 Moreover, while it was deeply entangled with politics, it also established relations with power that were different from those of architecture. In fact, while fascist architecture frequently resulted from state-sponsored projects and often gave form to the regime’s programs and institutions, this was not true for practices of furnishing, which were primarily targeted toward domestic interiors. And while the regime had a number of programs addressing the household, interiors throughout Italy were rarely furnished by programs directly enacted by the fascist government as a unified center of power but rather resulted from distributed enterprises more conspicuously related to the exercise of power. Beyond these historical contingencies, furniture is characterized by its potential to be moved—a difference with architecture that was essential to its politics. Bringing to the fore new relations between design and power and between modernism and fascism, Furnishing Fascism explores how seemingly neutral everyday furniture items and the allegedly minor arts played a major role in shaping Italy’s identity at the scale of the household and enacting the regime’s politics during the Mussolini era.5

A lively culture of furnishing (arredamento) flourished in Italy throughout the fascist period.6 Like its English equivalent, the term arredamento refers both to a single piece of furniture and to the ensemble of elements that furnish a unified space, an interior. It conveys a sense of tension between decoration, objects, and interiors, as well as between diverse fields of work ranging from the decorative or applied arts to architecture.7 Architectural historian Leonardo Benevolo saw this tension as marking a moment when “the ‘history of art’ came to an end, and the history of human environment began.”8 Primarily addressed to the house (arredamento della casa), the term also denotes both the act of spatial arrangement and the elements involved in it. While architects were concerned with the design of individual pieces of furniture, they were also decisively committed to defining sets of principles for the organization of domestic space and disseminating images of arranged ensembles. Even if the terms decorazione (decoration), mobile (furniture), and interni (interiors) were also used during the interwar period, the popularization of practices of arredamento signaled a distinct impetus toward the “arrangement” and “ordering” of spaces.9

This impetus might be considered a response to what theorist Giulio Carlo Argan described, retrospectively, as “the new relationship between the object and space, the thing and the environment”—a relationship, he argued, that was manifested both in the work of futurism, where the object becomes part of space, and in the metaphysical art (arte metafisica) of Giorgio de Chirico, where the object does not communicate with space.10 At the same time, furnishing became an idiosyncratic space-making technology and the site of a new understanding for the articulation of objects that was key to mediate the anxieties generated by the increasingly unstable relationships between subjects, communities, and locations characteristic of the modern period. In fact, while chairs, sideboards, and light fixtures were the subject of stylistic controversies, this book is not just concerned with how modernist principles were embodied in the design of furnishing at the time. It focuses instead on how, in mediating the anxieties of modernity, furnishing became a privileged technology of modernism.

Other accounts have emphasized the relevance of interiors as one of the “mechanisms” of modernity.11 Building on this understanding, this book emphasizes how furnishing challenges the association between interior and interiority that has been privileged by the German philosophical tradition.12 Both the Italian interni and the English term “interior” connect, in their genealogy, with a delineated territory, leading to the equation of the interior with the domestic (as opposed to the foreign) and with the inner life of the subject (connected to interiority as the new realm of individual subjectivity).13 Furnishing, meanwhile, emphasizes material transformations that, contemporaneously to the interior’s construction as the realm of the private subject from the nineteenth century on, challenged the boundaries of the house and the nation. Furniture pieces were sold in the market and shipped within and across territories, the mass migration of workers from rural areas brought furnishings from different regions into urban households, images of ensembles reached diverse audiences through international films and periodicals, and the new technologies of the radio and the telephone began to connect domestic interiors across the Italian peninsula. Domestic interiors were broadly destabilized by transformations in production, market exchanges, media campaigns, and the diverse processes of population transience that led to the kinds of disaggregation distinctive of modernity. The act of furnishing, meanwhile, became a privileged form of intervention for architects and designers trying to address this fragmentation.

Exploring this form of intervention, I analyze how, in Italy, furnishing coordinated the emphases of modernist design with the project of fascism.14 With both new objects and their arrangement, architects sought to help the Italian population cope with the chaos of the modern world, particularly as this chaos was reinforced by the disruption of regional traditions and ways of living that followed Italian unification and the country’s modernization. In this context, furnishing became a means to pursue new forms of identity-building that characteristically linked the family house and the nation as homeland. Moreover, in a time that critics characterized it by its promiscuity and cosmopolitanism, it became an agent for the consolidation of kinship. In fact, it was in working to collectively modernize Italian households that architects participated in the construction of the “imagined community” of the nation—to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known phrase.15 And, at the same time, they often helped to define the exclusionary nature of this community as nationalism became more entrenched during the interwar period and gave way to the unfolding of fascism. The tendency toward spatial ordering and stylistic consolidation that broadly characterized modernist designs provided architects and designers with a privileged referent to discuss and a medium to intervene in the management, articulation, and synchronization of Italian society, while countering the perceived dissolution of the nation’s values in line with the fascist project of social rebirth and cultural regeneration.

Uniquely among other cultural forms, the very medium chosen to advance the fascist agenda—furnishing—was part of the message: one concerned with principles of formalization, structuring, hierarchy, and cohesion.16 And while furnishings themselves can be considered as media for these principles and were essential to the politics of the period, their effects were critically advanced by their broadcasting, exchange, and display in other platforms and media.17 In fact, while architects and designers were concerned with the techniques of conception and technologies of production of new pieces and ensembles, the means for their circulation also became a priority for them as a way of advancing their politics.18 This study, then, considers the articulation of the principles shaping the design of furnishing (through an attentive reading of modernist designers’ discourse and programmatic enunciations) and the platforms and media through which both these principles as well as furnishings themselves were disseminated.19

Critical actors who I examine were concerned both with design of new furnishings and their circulation. Particularly significant was Gio Ponti (1891–1979), who collaborated with the department store La Rinascente and was editor of the magazine Domus (and later Lo Stile) as well as a regular contributor to Corriere della Sera. These collaborations helped him develop and broadcast his ideas for what he called la casa all’italiana (the Italian house). Also important was Carlo Enrico Rava (1903–1986), who combined interior design with the decoration of film sets and furniture design for the colonial campaigns, working with bourgeois clients, diverse film studios, and exhibition platforms. Both men were born in Lombardy. Ponti, from Milan, was linked to the entrepreneurial class of the region, while Rava, born close to Como, was the son of an influential politician; thus both had access to forge alliances with different statewide platforms and national media.

While Ponti’s and Rava’s contributions to shaping the field of furnishing thread through the different chapters of the book, I do not provide a hagiographic account of their careers as designers but rather situate their significance within diverse networks, conversations, and collaborations.20 They both developed their activities in conversation with a larger group of architects, designers, and critics including Giuseppe Pagano (1896–1945), Edoardo Persico (1900–1936), Franco Albini (1905–1977), Carlo Mollino (1905–1973), Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988), Carlo Pagani (1913–1999), and Lina Bo, later Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992). This cadre of figures, most of them architects by training and simultaneously engaged in the design of buildings, suggests that the Italian field of furnishing was, with the notable exception of Bo, primarily a masculine undertaking (different from other discourses and practices occupied with domestic interiors).21 Their work still engaged a number of women with diverse areas of expertise, including educator and promoter of modernism Lidia Morelli (1871–1946) and garden designer Maria Teresa Parpagliolo (1903–1974), among others. And they all worked together in platforms that mediated the interests of other actors differently related to the regime, such as Guido Marangoni (1872–1941), organizer of the first Monza Biennale exhibitions, the forerunner of the Milan Triennale; Senatore Borletti (1880–1939) and Umberto Brustio (1878–1972), founders of La Rinascente; and Luigi Freddi (1895–1977), promoter of the Cinecittà film studios. Within these networks, architects negotiated diverse interests and expanded the impact of their work by broadening the markets and audiences they reached, with the goal of furnishing the houses of the nation.

Nationalism, Fascism, Modernism

Ojetti’s 1911 call to connect the homeland and the chair chimed with the nationalist sentiments that grew out of the period of Italian consolidation broadly known as the Risorgimento and gathered force in the years following Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922. Fascism did not perform as a parenthesis in Italian politics (as is sometimes hypothesized) but rather was embedded in a longer history of nationalism in the country.22 Speaking to the Chamber of Deputies in 1861, the year of the creation of the Kingdom of Italy, Piedmontese statesman Camillo Benso di Cavour spoke of the country as “a noble nation” that had been “trampled on and flagellated for three centuries by foreign and domestic tyrants” but now was “rousing itself, invoking its rights [. . .] united under one regime and authority, united as it already was by race, language, religion, the memories of the suffering borne and hopes for complete deliverance.”23 And yet, at the time, the assertion of a united Italy was more a statement of intent than an accurate description of the prevailing mood in the country. The understanding of Italy as a homeland and the myth of the nation that supported the rise of fascism need to be historicized rather than taken as self-evident.

At the time of unification, political franchise was limited to around 6 percent of the population, and an even smaller number—some 2 percent—voted in the plebiscites that led to the creation of the Italian nation-state.24 The new state brought together unwilling bedfellows, so that strong local allegiances—and, equally, negative stereotypes—undermined the national project.25 Moreover, the new state gathered extremely diverse territories and population, with the North and the South as two economically and culturally disparate regions with a long history of confrontation. Prior to unification, an envoy of Cavour had not been shy about articulating with violence some of the prejudices against the South in the following terms: “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin are the flower of civilized virtues compared to these peasants.”26 In this analogy, Africa stood as a “space of Otherness,” borrowing from Sylvia Wynter, which the logics of the nation should displace and make alien to it, as an “order-legitimating place” characteristic of modernity.27 In turn, many in the South rejected the paternalism of the North that was embedded in the project of unification. “Leave us in the South to govern ourselves. [. . .] We have no need of the north’s concerned protection,” said Sicilian priest and political activist Luigi Sturzo, embracing self-determination as an alternative to the colonial logics of the state’s redemptive project.28 The process of unification exacerbated uneven economic development, triggering mass migration from the impoverished rural areas in the South. Large numbers moved to the industrial cities of the North, increasing conflicts and challenging the self-perceptions of Italians.29 Many more left the country altogether, including more than thirteen million migrants in the four decades leading up to fascism—an unprecedented diaspora that weakened Italian national pride.30

Rather than being founded on a collective sense of identity and the shared pursuit of progress, the new Italy coalesced out of a series of conflicting (and sometimes violent) political, economic, and cultural negotiations. In fact, rather than being the natural context for the creation of a national design culture, Italy itself might be seen as the result of complex design operations—a condition that was evident in a popular dictum of the Risorgimento: “We have made Italy; now we have to make the Italians.”31 These words capture an understanding of the Italian state as an empty framework without a unified population or, indeed, a specific content. From its inception up to and during the fascist period, the Italian nation remained an exercise in representation materialized through diverse mediated expressions.32 In this context, cultural productions, including chairs, interiors, and architecture, participated in staging the possibility of an Italian identity and in negotiating its inclusions and exclusions.

In these negotiations, leading constituencies (particularly the Piedmontese aristocracy and the northern industrial elites who drove the process of national unification) used culture to supplant entrenched, usually localized forms of identity with loyalty to a nation shaped according to their model. To a large extent, diverse cultural forms operated in alliance with a project that the political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) formulated as the colonization of the South by the North of the country.33 This project was also aligned with the Italian colonial agenda beyond the peninsula, since the process of national formation was critically entangled with the country’s violent land grab in Africa, in emulation of other European powers. The “making” of Italians was framed by these two processes of subjugation.

The colonial expansion in Africa, along with Italy’s involvement in World War I, reinforced nationalist sentiments, as the confrontation with other nations brought the country together. These sentiments were often rooted in a sense of exceptionalism which found its historical justification in the hegemony of imperial Rome and the cultural legacy of classicism. But they also developed in accordance with an impetus toward modernization fueled by international competition. What historian Emilio Gentile has called “modernist nationalism” resulted from the marrying of a national myth with a commitment to progress and cultural regeneration—the former in alliance with modernization, the latter a manifestation of modernism.34 This movement would become increasingly exclusionary and authoritarian, giving rise to fascism.35

Exploring the critical relation of modernism, nationalism, and fascism unfolding in this context, this study contributes to ongoing efforts to challenge the assumption that modernist cultural forms generally aligned with left-wing politics or internationalism while also questioning their reductive identification with a form of technocratic power under the control of the state.36 Relevant for unpacking this relation is the understanding that the aesthetic explorations of modernism embodied a conflictual relation to contemporaneous technical, social, and political transformations, simultaneously capturing the alienation of modern life and attempting to mitigate its effects.37 Building on this understanding, scholar of fascism Roger Griffin has defined modernism as “a reaction (but a non-reactionary, revolutionary reaction) to western ‘modernity’ [. . .] posited on a reading of modernization as a process of disaggregation, fragmentation, and loss of transcendence with respect to premodern societies.”38 While embracing the modernization of the country, fascism similarly sought to counter these effects of Western modernity, which it presented as a form of decadence, with a revolutionary and totalizing project of redemption that took the nation as its grounding framework—a project that was modernist in its essence.39 Consequently, while it is still hard to find consistency in the cultural politics of this period—not all fascists had a modernist foundation; equally, not all contemporaneous modernists in Italy supported fascism40—the ideological alignment of modernism and fascism helps counter the idea that Mussolini’s regime merely tolerated modernist cultural manifestations: instead, it found in them an essential ideological support.

Broadly framed by the role of culture in the “making” of Italy, modernist furnishing played a key role in the coordination of modernization, nationalism, and fascism, as one among diverse manifestations of modernism in different contexts and in response to diverse modernities.41 In conversation with Hannah Arendt’s description of totalitarian regimes as providing a “fictitious home” for “the masses to escape from disintegration and disorientation,” we could argue that modernist design provided the perfect furnishing for this home’s interior—its instrumental aestheticization.42 And while, in this way, furnishing might be conceived to have performed within the “aestheticizing of political life” that Walter Benjamin famously proposed as characteristic of fascism, fascism also operated through the politicization of furnishing and the decorative arts in a revolutionary process of national regeneration and social renewal.43 In both of these directions, furnishing was decisively mobilized in the eradication of the boundaries between the personal and the political as the ultimate manifestation of totalitarian politics, fundamentally linking the house and the homeland.

Fascist Politics, Diverse Agendas, Cohering Interiors

More than a representation for the ideology of the regime, modernist furnishing was one of the media through which multiple dimensions of its program were enacted and the contradictory forces of the period were negotiated. Working at the scale of furnishing, Italian architects and designers were deeply involved in the regime’s drive to modernize the country in ways that aligned with transnational trends. They participated in the development of industrial production and the creation of a nationwide market for the applied arts. Responding to international social transformations, they embraced shifting patterns of consumption, changing relations between private and public, new lifestyles, and new gender roles, and created specific products for the developing needs of tourism.44 They diversified cultural references by engaging with mass media, from radio to cinema, and took advantage of the spread of new technologies, from highways to telecommunications, in the dissemination of their work.45

At the same time, however, they often aligned themselves with politics that sought to counter those tendencies and connections. The products they designed were supported by protectionist measures, including the control of foreign trade. They worked to homogenize a national culture in alliance with the cultural program of fascism, which suppressed regional identities, including dialects.46 Interiors were a receptacle for objects circulating within different forms of exchange, broadcasting, and territorial displacement, but they also facilitated processes of territorialization. What Ruth Ben-Ghiat has described as the “seemingly contradictory agendas” of the regime and the tensions of the period manifested in furnishing and interiors more than in other areas of culture, including the design of buildings or urban plans.47

What distinguished Italian furnishing from other modernist pursuits, however, was its expert management of heterogeneity. Interiors made up of many diverse elements were defined as “environments” (ambienti) or “atmospheres” (atmosfere)—terms that captured the desired coherence of the overall effect. Moreover, just as interiors were characteristically diverse, both Ponti and Rava were criticized at the time for their lack of rigorous principles, in their style and their argumentation alike. Pagano took aim at Ponti’s “inefficacious attempt at conciliation,” while Ponti himself proudly declared that his magazine, Domus, did “not abandon any point of view.”48 Persico challenged Rava’s shifting positions on the relation between modernism and nationalism, while Rava in turn invoked “the right of the artist to contradict himself.”49 Critic Raffaello Giolli described the field of arredamento as being in a sort of “limbo,” lacking a cohesive framework for analysis and criticism.50 In accounting for these ambiguities and contradictions, as well as the wide diversity of aesthetics embraced by furnishing, this book does not suggest that they destabilized the program of fascism or that they resulted from the regime’s tolerance of dissent. Rather, I explore them as a key manifestation of the diverse aspects of the fascist program: they made it clear that, during this period, “everything was instrumentalized, and each tendency reflected a different facet of what Fascism was,” as Romy Golan has argued.51

Even if individuals developed their agendas with different emphases, most protagonists of the field of furnishing—along with most architects—were broadly aligned with the regime. Most were card-carrying members of the National Fascist Party (PNF) and many participated in state-controlled organizations, including, notably, the National Fascist Syndicate of Architects, which oversaw most public architecture commissions.52 In spite of the broad alliance of architects with the regime, there were still different understandings of how to enact its programs. There were also political suspicions and accusations, with many of them concerning the anti-Semitic politics adopted by the regime in the late 1930s.53 Within this complex context, both Ponti and Rava took advantage of their personal connections to develop a program that might not always have been perfectly aligned with the regime, but never manifested any form of dissent. The position of other figures was more complex: Persico often expressed his disagreement with official positions but also worked for the regime, and his political affiliation is still subject to debate, while Mollino’s and Bo’s positions remained characteristically ambiguous. Others who had been fervent fascists grew increasingly disenchanted with the regime: Pagano, for example, would join the armed resistance in 1943 and die in the Mauthausen concentration camp. And even those who expressed their alliance to fascism more forcefully often collaborated with unwavering antifascists all throughout the period.54 In accounting for all these complexities, then, Furnishing Fascism is sensitive to the multiple agendas within fascist politics and the diversity in the architects’ positions while at the same time exploring how the pursuit of furniture’s modernization and stylization was often able to integrate them in support of the regime, even if projects were not always conceived with this purpose.

The Politics of Culture and Italian Civiltà

Overall, my goal in this book is to simultaneously strengthen and loosen the connection between design and politics—exploring the privileged realm that furnishing and architectural interiors offered to connect modernism and fascism while accepting the contradictions within the fascist program and the regime’s dependence on (and friction with) other commercial platforms, cultural institutions, and media.55 On the one hand, Mussolini and several branches of his broad governmental apparatus did play a role in the field of furnishing, from Il Duce’s direct participation in the stylistic debates to the initiatives sponsored by the leisure organization Dopolavoro. More significant, Mussolini was the model Italian that all citizens had to identify with—and furnishing in turn sought to shape citizens in his image. On the other hand, the culture of furnishing was supported by institutions and platforms that were in part para-governmental, in part independent from the regime—even if rarely free from oversight. From the department store La Rinascente to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, these institutions operated within what Marla Stone calls “pluralist state patronage.” According to her, the regime simultaneously rejected both liberalism and complete centralization and operated, instead, through different degrees of “incentive, flexibility, and coercion” in pursuit of integrating multiple platforms and styles to deliver diverse messages.56

In analyzing these complexities, my goal is to explore how, in the connection between furnishing and politics, the regime did not operate alone, but was supported by other institutions that gained increasing relevance as mass media and new forms of consumption challenged the efficacy of the state for the control of the Italians’ values and ideals. The notion of “consent” has been mobilized in various ways to explore the regime’s shaping of society through the management of public opinion.57 And yet, the articulation of social life throughout the fascist period was not resolved in a unified public sphere but was distributed through dispersed and contested “stages,” many of them located within architectural interiors.58 And as the pursuit of “consent” extended into interiors, other agents were more effective than the state through operations that are better understood as “soft power.”59 If, as Victoria de Grazia powerfully argues, “to stay at home [in fascist Italy] was a form of social engagement,” this was due not only to the regime’s social and cultural programs but also to the designs that architects and designers developed in collaboration with diverse commercial platforms and media operations.60 In these collaborations, architectural interiors remained open to political scrutiny and acted as a medium for debated messages in motion: they performed as an “arena” in which different and conflicting goals and influences were at stake, as David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle have argued for culture more broadly.61

Significant to this arena was the way in which the program of fascism was negotiated with the interests and worldviews of the urban bourgeoisie, who were often in control of diverse commercial institutions and media in which pieces of furniture and arguments on design were disseminated.62 Paradigmatic among the regime’s contradictions was the one between an anti-bourgeois sentiment (grounded on its rejection of its cosmopolitanism) and an unfulfilled anti-capitalist rhetoric on the one hand, and the buttressing of bourgeois interests on the other—a contradiction that was not resolved by the pursuit of control of corporativist politics.63 A parallel conflict was characteristic of the work of modernist architects and designers, which just as in other modernizing nations allegedly rejected bourgeois values—which they often saw as curtailing aesthetic innovation and their pursuit for social redemption—while broadly aligning with the cultural hegemony of this group.64 The concept of “hegemony” takes on specific meaning in this precise historical moment, central as it was to Gramsci’s contribution to the analysis of culture and power. Gramsci broadly mobilized the term to refer to ideas, attitudes, and behaviors that are taken for granted as “common sense,” often shaped and deployed by ruling classes to achieve social consent, and the domestic space was key to its shaping.65

The hegemony of the bourgeoisie—most significantly an entrepreneurial and industrial urban elite from the North of the country—unfolded in the midst of diverse references, many of them pointing in different directions. Architectural historians have carefully recounted the relevance of vernacular models of architecture in the shaping of a national identity in the first half of the century, and have considered the fascist regime’s attention to the countryside with the development of new towns as an alternative to urban hegemony—deemed a breeding ground of promiscuity and degradation.66 Art historians have in turn analyzed fascism’s alliance with the Strapaese movement, which promoted the culture of the peasantry, as a way of grounding its revolutionary program in the country’s traditions.67 And yet, simultaneous to these moves, the cultural program of fascism broadly rejected folk cultures and parochialism in its push toward modernization and nationalism, and many of the institutions that buttressed its program served to sustain social and territorial hierarchies that had favored the urban bourgeoise during the Risorgimento.68

In strengthening this hegemony, fascism assimilated the role of modern states, which Gramsci described as being concerned with “adapt[ing] the ‘civiltà’ and morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous development of the economic apparatus of production.”69 While the term civiltà might be translated as “civilization,” it also shares some of the semantic field of the term “civility” as well as “culture,” bringing together ethical and political connotations.70 Appeals to the term captured a desire to sustain the values of an idealized Italian civilization allegedly threatened by modernization. And yet, it also manifested the bourgeoisie’s fear of losing its power—as Gramsci himself explained.71 The struggle between the urban bourgeois elites and the disenfranchised rural populations was mediated through the conflict between modernity and tradition, which, following Gramscian thought, postcolonial theorist Iain Chambers has proposed to recast as a conflict between hegemony and subaltern populations.72 In this study, I consider how the modernization of furnishing and its stylization contributed to center the values of the northern bourgeoisie in the shaping of a model inhabitant for the houses of the country—the “Italians” that the national project was asked to “make” from the outset—and bypassed, among others, the role that modernism could have played in shaping an alliance between rural and urban workers as a new hegemony challenging territorial divides within Italy (Gramsci’s goal).73 And this exploration contributes to understanding the regime’s shaping of society, which was particularly relevant with the growth of the middle class and its search for social and cultural references. In studying how hegemony is shaped, I hope this study might establish a productive dialogue with contemporaneous efforts to trace counterhegemonic histories.

The analysis of design’s role in the “making of Italians” additionally adds to other design histories that have discussed how “in producing for itself, society is also producing and reproducing itself, its work habits, institutions, relations between people, and dominant perceptions of reality.”74 This project required architects and designers to make their designs available—at least to the imagination, if not as real products—to an increasingly large audience. With this pursuit, they broadly engaged with the circulation of their designs and programs—an engagement that this book critically centers. Their success in this pursuit remains difficult to evaluate, given the limited development of Italian industry at the time and the stratification of the audiences targeted by many of the media with which they worked.75 However, it critically manifested in discussions that address the capacity of their designs to participate in shaping “popular culture” and a shared “taste.” Discussing how architects engaged in this project, Furnishing Fascism explores how furnishing sought to lead in the transformation of the Italians’ self-perceptions and relations as they complied with the cultural program of fascism as a paradigmatic response to modernity: one seeking to counter the perceived loss of coherence and meaning of premodern societies with new aesthetic forms that privileged hierarchy, order, and cohesion.

International Networks, Circulating Interiors, and National Identity

While framed as a national project, the furnishing practices of Italian architects and designers were deeply enmeshed with developments beyond the country’s borders. Discourses and practices of furnishing in Italy were entangled in international conversations regarding, for example, the effects of industrialization in the decorative arts, including the concern with the shaping of furnishing “types.” The Deutscher Werkbund (1907–1938) offered a model for the forms of institutional support of a national furniture industry that were pursued in Italy, while the Bauhaus furniture designs of Marcel Breuer, Lilly Reich, and Mies van der Rohe were soon popularized and discussed within the country.76 The Wiener Werkstätte (1903–1932) and Austrian Werkbund (1912–1938), as well as the work of designers such as Josef Hoffmann and Josef Frank, were extremely influential for both Ponti and Rava.77 Italian institutions and practices found their parallels in France with the Salon d’Automne (founded 1903), which increasingly featured design pieces, including the famous collaborations between Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier in the late 1920s; the Société des Artistes-Décorateurs (1901) and later the Union des Artistes Modernes (founded in 1929 by Pierre Chareau, Francis Jourdain, and Robert Mallet-Stevens); and the design studios attached to department stores such as Galeries Lafayette or Le Bon Marché.78 These developments were not only known to critics, designers, and connoisseurs, but were available to a large audience through films and magazines. The question of how to reconcile these external influences with the cultural agenda of a newly unified nation was one that caused some anxiety—captured, for example, in the art critic Renato Poggioli’s musing: “Are we Italians that should become more European, or is it Europe that should become more Italian?”79 In exploring how foreign developments and references were at times offered as models to counter and other times seemingly embraced, I contribute to a discussion about how the nationalist cultural program of fascism was entangled with other international powers in ways that have been described as “ambivalent.”80

Italian furnishing practices were additionally enmeshed in networks of exchange that evaded economic, political, and cultural centers both within and outside the country. If German chairs and French art magazines were a transnational reality influencing the furnishing of Italian homes, the materials and imaginations shaping domestic interiors were dispersed through market and media networks and migrations joining the countryside and the city, and ranging from Libya to New York City, through photographs, films, and shipped products that reached not only cosmopolitan families but all corners of the country, resulting in a characteristically modern disjuncture between subjects, objects, architectures, and their locations. Writing of his internal exile in 1935 in a remote village in southern Italy due to his anti-fascist activities, painter and writer Carlo Levi (1902–1975) described how households in that region were not only connected with Africa through the reports of family members fighting in the colonial campaigns, but were also “entirely American in regard to mechanical equipment as well as weights and measures.” From Rome, he said, “came nothing [. . .] but the tax collector and speeches over the radio.”81 While the relevance of taxes and speeches cannot be dismissed, the increasingly decentered context described by Levi forced architects to negotiate diverse elements constitutive of ordinary life, international systems of signs, and circulating imaginaries beyond the structures of the state. In turn, the modernist developments on the peripheries of Rome and other major cities were filled with traditional furniture that had been carried there by the displaced populations of many different Italian regions.82 The arrival of southern and rural migrants in Italy’s urban centers in the first decades of the century was accompanied by a fear of cultural degeneration grounded in long-standing prejudices, many of them focused on different ways of living. Interiors became the site of cultural dissolution resulting from these different influences and, simultaneously, a platform for the consolidation of national identity.83

These processes of deterritorialization, most commonly highlighted in the analysis of post-Fordist regimes of advanced capitalism, electronic mediation, and global migration, trace their foundations to the modern period and are fueled by consumerism, colonialism, and tourism, as Timothy Mitchell has highlighted—all significant to the histories explored in this book.84 Architectural interiors can be understood as a privileged site to understand what social and politics theorists have called the “production of locality” within these increasingly deterritorialized realities.85 Most significantly, they were involved in demarcating the self and “the other” along cultural, geographic, and racial lines as a characteristic project of these productions in the modern-colonial period.86 Here, I use the term “production of locality” to highlight the architects’ efforts to intervene, from within individual interiors, in the provision of a sense of integration and organicity that built toward a project of territorial and social coherence—one which characteristically manifested in the pursuit of shaping an “Italian house”—within a context characterized by fragmentations that were both specific to Italy and increasingly caused by modernity across geographies.

Attentive to these processes, this book considers the entanglement of modernist interiors with diverse processes of circulation as characteristic of the definition of their constitutive “Italianness,” rather than considering those two impulses (circulation and constitution) as contradictory. In this, I am in conversation with contemporary scholars who have regarded the country as “a flashpoint for mobilities as they relate to nationalism, imperialism, globalization, and consumer, leisure and labor practices.”87 Engaging these discussions, Furnishing Fascism is concerned with design’s role in the history of nation-building within the cultural and political transformations of the modern world, rather than assuming that a nation (Italy) is a natural framework for the historical study of design and architecture. As a matter of fact, this study aims to join Étienne Balibar’s challenge that we “delineate how the object ‘nation’ was constructed in the first place” as a precondition to the analysis of nationalist biases in historical studies.88 I do not take Italian design as a preexisting category but see it as a response to transnational forces, in conversation with those that address “the political implications of design’s imbrication in global networks.”89

Design before “Made in Italy”

The book is organized as a series of topical episodes, broadly arranged in a chronological sequence. Rather than providing a comprehensive analysis of the transforming interiors of the nation and an all-encompassing evaluation of their politics, each chapter highlights specific ways in which designers responded to Ojetti’s call to link the chair and the nation. Presented as discrete explorations, they foreground how architects engaged diverse processes of circulation in pursuit of consolidating this link. The first three chapters analyze how architects mobilized different media in order to shape a national culture, exploring the dissemination of furnishings, images, and arguments from the rise of fascism up to the late 1930s. The last two chapters trace their engagement with the territories of nation and empire, following the movement of both furnishings and populations, with the analysis of interiors defined for colonialism and tourism in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Each chapter addresses different aspects of Ponti’s and Rava’s work in relation to shifting conversations, collaborations, and political negotiations, and draws on different archives and media to assemble, as the field of furnishing did, individual activities and institutional agendas.

Chapter 1 explores the drive to modernize the production of furniture and to shape a national market through a number of exhibitions and commercial venues, including the Monza Biennale (later the Milan Triennale) and the department store La Rinascente—decisively contributing to the transformation of furnishing into a commodity. Central to this chapter is the Domus Nova furniture line, with designs by Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia for La Rinascente and exhibited at the 1927 Monza Biennale. Mobilized by these institutions, this furniture line was among the models Ponti and Lancia developed for Italian homes as a way of advancing the consolidation of the nation. They combined classicist decorative motifs and modernist principles as an enactment of the syncretic nature of fascist politics—in its engagement with past myths and its pursuit of a new culture—while simultaneously participating in different class and territorial negotiations through their circulation.

Chapter 2 discusses the role that print media played in cultivating a new national taste. Ponti’s editorial work for the magazine Domus, which he founded in 1928, his contributions to Corriere della Sera from 1933 on, and the magazine Casabella (under the direction of Pagano and Persico from 1933) mobilized new information on furnishing and simultaneously transformed furnishing into information. This information disrupted existing aesthetics and typologies in favor of new ones, but also challenged existing traditions as they brought the fascist politics of cultural regeneration into the household.

At the same time as architecture and mass media were consolidating their role as official forms of representation, the depiction of architectural interiors in film conjured new fictions for the population of Italy, with furnishing transformed into these fictions’ characters and being definitory for their locations. Chapter 3 explores the discourses developed by architects and critics such as Persico, Rava, and Mollino, who saw cinematographic interiors as a means to shape the interiors of the nation. The film studio Cinecittà, which opened in Rome in 1937 under the direction of the journalist and politician Luigi Freddi, was a key infrastructure supporting this pursuit. There, furnishings arranged in sets established relationships of simultaneity between the imagined spaces of film and physical interiors, and helped architects to bring together the increasingly fragmented experiences of the Italian people. The tension between imagined and physical interiors allowed architects to discuss the relation between national and foreign spaces, which became increasingly critical to the shifting politics of the regime in the late 1930s.

Chapter 4 examines the display and circulation of furniture and decorative arts between Italy and its African colonies, and discusses the relationship between pieces conceived in the occupied territories, those defined for Italian households, and those envisioned to accompany Italians in their colonial endeavors. The circulation of these different pieces was thought to embody the “expansion of life horizons” characteristic of modernity. However, modernist designers worked alongside ethnographers through the delineation of distinct identities for the inhabitants of the Italian nation and those subjected to colonization, increasingly differentiating who was allowed to engage in the characteristically modern “expansion” and who was forced to remain fixed—the defining hierarchy of the modern-colonial period.

Chapter 5 follows other mobile objects as they spread throughout the Italian peninsula and set the stage for summer vacations. Arguments and designs for vacation homes and gardens by Ponti, Rudofsky, Bo, and Pagani, featured by Ponti himself first in Domus and then, from 1941, in his new magazine Lo Stile, brought together a growing interest in diverse regional traditions—using the Mediterranean as a significant unifying referent for rural vernacular architectures—and developing forms of tourism, which resulted in different forms of cultural re-signification and territorial appropriation. Significantly, these vacation homes, with their furnishings, typically hosted urban populations that moved along the reverse path to the rural inhabitants who were leaving the countryside and migrating toward metropolitan centers. Ultimately, the sea helped Italian elites to navigate their pursuit for identity throughout the increasingly convulsive war period.

The culture of furnishing would change during the postwar period in response to ideological shifts and the transformation of industrial production, absorbing developments in the realm of industrial design, new forms of marketing, and new media like television. The relevance of design in this new period has led to many referring to the interwar developments as “protodesign”—even while this book proposes the design of furnishing in particular as a fully formed field of discourse and practice throughout the fascist period.90 While Rava’s career waned, dwindling to a small number of furnishings and film sets, Ponti’s output expanded dramatically as he engaged with the new context. While unquestionably new in many aspects, it is worth noting that the postwar context was peopled by many of the same protagonists and institutions: the Milan Triennale, La Rinascente, and Cinecittà grew in relevance in the postwar period and helped to spread “Made in Italy” design products and their associated imaginaries beyond Italian boundaries, while invoking an idiosyncratic Italian “taste” and a local “way of life.”

Fascism was rarely addressed explicitly by postwar architects and designers, as they committed their work to range “from the spoon to the city”—as Ernesto Nathan Rogers put it in Domus in the immediate postwar period.91 And one might wonder if the ideologies that fed the fascist regime continued to be materialized in the fertile field of postwar Italian furnishing practices as architects and designers remained engaged with the transformation of Italian society.92 More broadly, it is worth considering if this society remained haunted by the “Italian citizens” who had been molded, for more than two decades, by the ideological framework of fascism. While those explorations remain outside the purview of this book, my goal is not only to contribute to the history of “Italian design” with a prehistory of the better-known works of the postwar, but also to uncouple “Italy” from “design” and provocatively argue that both were shaped simultaneously and in relation to each other throughout the fascist period. While “Italian design” has often been invoked as a constitutive element of liberal subjectivity and postwar national identity, it was grounded on the fascist construction of both citizenship and the nation. In fact, “Italian design” is a paradoxical expression, for design was activated in the “making” of Italians and in the construction of the nation. With architects’ work connecting the chair to the nation, Italy was itself designed at the same time that fascism was furnished as an ideology in the interwar period.

One

The National Market of Furnishing

Toward the “New Italian House”

During the late 1920s, advertisements for the Domus Nova furniture line appeared frequently in Italian art and architecture magazines. The ads defined the pieces as “modern furnishing,” even if their language and materialization were far removed from the streamlined aesthetics seen in the contemporaneous products of the Bauhaus workshop, for example, or the furniture presented by Charlotte Perriand at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in 1928. Domus Nova furnishings combined a modernist pursuit of simplicity with elegant classicist ornamentation and the use of diverse materials beyond those privileged by avant-garde practices. These diverse aesthetic impulses mirrored the way that different agendas of fascism were seen to result in an “eclectic ideology” (as the leader of the Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, put it).1 And yet, both furnishings and the regime displayed a drive toward consolidation, aiming at the definition of a unified interior on the one hand, and the crafting of the political body of the nation on the other. This chapter explores the relationship between these two pursuits as they overlapped in the formation of a national market for furnishing.

Rather than “eclectic,” the aesthetic properties of the furniture shown in these ads might better be described as syncretic, as they combined an embrace of classicism with invented elements, in a particular version of the fusion of tradition and modernity that was an essential quality of the politics of Italian fascism.2 Going beyond these aesthetic properties, however, this chapter emphasizes how the stylistic proposition of these pieces (which aligned with a broader artistic and architectural movement known as Novecento) was socialized and shaped as a medium for politics through diverse cultural and economic processes of consolidation in the years immediately after Mussolini’s seizure of power.

The Domus Nova ads reflected a changing conception of furnishing and a new means of marketing it that was essential to its shifting social and political role. Pieces of furniture are grouped together, presented as ensembles, with the ads listing prices for the furnishing of a room rather than the individual items. The cost of equipping a dining room, children’s room, or kitchen was between 450 and 4,500 lire. A double-page ad, published in 1929 in the newly founded magazine Domus, announced an exhibition of these products at the Rinascente department store in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo (Figure 1.1). Shoppers had the opportunity not only to purchase the items on display but to visit the store’s “consultancy service,” where “a specialized architect will offer free advice on how to solve the problems that arise in furnishing one’s own house.”3 The furnishing of the domestic interior was thus not only commodified, but also reframed as a matter that might exceed the competence of its inhabitants, requiring the expertise of a professional: the architect. Rather than extolling the functional benefits or aesthetic qualities of the furniture, the ad focuses on the architect as mediator—a manager of the circulation of these objects between commercial platforms like La Rinascente and a growing nationwide market.

Figure 1.1. Advertisement of the furniture line Domus Nova for the department store La Rinascente. Domus 15 (March 1929). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

The image includes typed text in Italian, which reads: “‘Domus Nova’, Modern Furnishing by La Rinascente, Exhibition at the Piazza del Duomo in Milano.” The text additionally announces, in Italian: “Free consultancy service for the furnishing of the house, where a specialized architect will offer free advice on how to solve the problems that arise in furnishing one’s own house."

Domus Nova encapsulated many of the shifts in the practices of furniture and interior design in Italy in the late 1920s and brought together many of the individual protagonists and institutional platforms responsible for shaping them. The collection was produced and distributed by La Rinascente, the early pieces were designed by Gio Ponti together with Emilio Lancia, and it was shown for the first time at the III International Exhibition of the Decorative Arts in Monza in 1927. Founded in 1923 by the socialist politician and entrepreneur Guido Marangoni, the Monza exhibition was initially held every two years. Ponti, then thirty-five, was appointed to the administration board for the 1927 exhibition, and was one of the directors of what would become the IV Monza Triennale in 1930. He was also responsible for the exhibition’s transfer from Monza to Milan in 1933, where it became the famous Triennale Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts and Modern Architecture.

In parallel with their work on these exhibitions, Ponti and Marangoni also helped to set in motion a discourse on furnishing, founding Domus and La casa bella, respectively, in Milan in 1928. Both magazines initially took furnishing and interiors as their primary subjects, as their subtitles announced: Architettura e arredamento dell’abitazione moderna in città e in campagna (Architecture and furnishing of the modern dwelling in the city and the countryside) and Arti e industrie de l’arredamento (Arts and industries of furnishing).4 Despite the diverse emphases with which these institutions and media approached the house interior (or more precisely, its furnishing or arredamento), Marangoni presented their common impetus in an editorial near the end of the magazines’ first year: “All our passionate discussions in the circles of art and in magazines culminate in a single effort and tend toward a single goal: to create the new Italian house with its peculiar and typical characteristics.”5 The consolidation of a national market of furniture sought to align each customer’s “own house” (as framed in La Rinascente’s ad) with the construction of the “new Italian house.” The diversity of interiors of the different Italian populations was to be replaced with a single definitive model that sought to combine the “peculiar” and the “typical,” to reproduce the intrinsic qualities of Italian houses at an industrial scale. Marangoni noted, however, that this “new Italian house” did not yet exist, “in spite of all the rhetoric and the illusions of optimism.” Before it was materially realized, it was brought into being by networks of circulating pieces of furniture and arguments in magazines.

Scholars on the decorative arts and architecture have often presented the aesthetic discussions of the initial period of fascism and the preeminence achieved by the Novecento style as resulting either from Mussolini’s personal aesthetic preferences or from the initiative of artists and architects responding to the sensibilities of their bourgeois clients.6 Adding to those, this chapter situates these discussions within the agendas of the different institutions and media that were responsible for the circulation of furnishing beyond individual clients and consequently considers how these furnishings hoped to shape—rather than merely respond to—the preferences of a larger market and helped to construct a national identity, with its exclusions.7 As a matter of fact, just as these institutions and agents were characteristically concerned with the circulation of meanings, objects, and capitals, they simultaneously participated in the definition of diverse forms of socio-territorial confinement. Constituted as a market-exhibitionary complex, they not only turned the “new Italian house” into a subject of public interest for Italians but additionally into a conduit for new forms of power throughout the early years of the fascist period.8

The Homeland and the Chair

Diverse initiatives attempted to link the development of the decorative arts for the architectural interior with the nationalist project of furnishing the nation even before the necessary means of production and distribution had been developed to make such an enterprise possible. At the turn of the century, in 1902, Turin hosted the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts—a foundational event for the development of modern design in Italy and the first of its kind in Europe.9 The event responded to Italy’s ambition to modernize its industry and become a player on the European scene, both politically and economically.10 Turin was home to a number of institutions that were key to such a project, including the Royal Industrial Museum and the Polytechnic School. Modeled on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the museum was intended to educate the public in “the good taste of industrial production”11—an ambition that dovetailed with the polytechnic’s role in training the engineers who were to take the nation into the new era as not only its technical but also its political and economic leaders.12 Design was seen as a necessary complement to the mission of the two institutions, with the goal of having industrial production contribute both to the nation’s wealth and to the culture and well-being of its population.13 To support this aim, there was a wholesale reorganization of design pedagogy under the auspices of the Central Commission of Industrial Arts Education between 1884 and 1908, which additionally sought to contribute to the forging of a national artistic consciousness.14 The 1902 Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts situated design at the core of the political and financial agendas of the new nation while strengthening the hierarchies that had led its formation, with the northern cities remaining as the centers of both culture and economic prosperity.

The exhibition defined “decorative arts” in the broadest terms, as encompassing that which “cannot be included in the realm of pure arts [. . .] from the most modest objects to the sumptuous decorations of a palace.”15 Aligned with the agenda of many contemporaneous initiatives throughout the second half of the nineteenth century that had sought to respond to a perceived decay in the quality of these types of objects, the exhibition’s program informed visitors that they would be able to “appreciate the aesthetic superiority of the new decorative trends in relation to the eclecticism of current styles and the anarchy of current industrial production.”16 Though some of the works on show were exceptional in nature, the focus was on “types of decoration suiting any house and any budget.”17 This linking of aesthetics and affordability put the exhibition in dialogue with contemporary developments elsewhere in Europe, such as the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony (also represented in the show). The exhibition’s political remit was framed in relation to economic concerns, as it required the objects on show to be within the reach of the Italian population.

A particularly forceful presence in the exhibition was the Italian manifestation of Art Nouveau, known as the Liberty style.18 Carlo Bugatti’s interiors, and particularly his Cobra Chair, gained a certain notoriety, while buildings designed by Raimondo d’Aronco and Giuseppe Sommaruga manifested its aesthetics at the scale of architecture (Figure 1.2). The movement’s stylizing and unifying goals were extolled by the critic Vittorio Pica, who described how it sought to “finally provide our era with a new architectural style which meets the new aspirations, new tastes, new needs of today’s societies, and which agrees, at the same time, with the developments, always greater and more eager for originality, of all the applied arts.”19 The characteristically modernist emphasis on newness was also reflected in the show’s inclusion of the international figures with whom Italian trends were in dialogue—among them Hector Guimard, Victor Horta, Joseph Maria Olbrich, and Peter Behrens.

Figure 1.2. Carlo Bugatti, bedroom and living room with the Cobra Chair, featured at the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts, Torino, 1902. L’architettura alla prima Esposizione internazionale d’arte decorativa (1902). Avery Classics, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

And yet, the exhibition’s embrace of the Liberty style did not go unchallenged. While some celebrated its capacity to respond to nineteenth-century eclecticism and the perceived lack of design value of early industrial production, many, including conservative art critic Ugo Ojetti, questioned its consistency. Writing in 1902, he mused: “Is there a new decorative style? The Turin exhibition responds, yes. Is there already a new constructive style, a new solid, logical, and clearly established style like the four classical styles of Vitruvius and Vignola? No.”20 As a matter of fact, it was classicism, rather than modernism, that had been prioritized in the early attempts to develop a new national style in the wake of Italian unification.21 Although the aesthetic leveling triggered by modernization—and widely disseminated by international expositions—was a concern in many countries, the stakes for Italy seemed particularly high, given its own perceived dominance in the realm of the arts and its recent and contested history as a nation.22

Ojetti would return to this theme nine years later, when he launched a more specific attack on the Liberty style as a foreign import that had already passed its expiry date, an offshoot of the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that had infiltrated Italy via France where, as Art Nouveau, it had been further blended with Japanese influences. This transnational circulation of artistic forms made the style, in his view, inherently “foreign everywhere” and “thus, international.”23 While looking back at the 1902 exposition, Ojetti’s argument—culminating in his call to link “the homeland and the chair”—was written in response to a new occasion of national importance: the 1911 International Exhibition of Industry and Work in Turin, held to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of unification.

Presented in the context of an international exhibition, Italian decorative arts were now displayed among the newest machines as well as diverse cultural manifestations and goods from all over the world, ranging from Hungarian furniture to Argentinian cereals. The fairgrounds were transformed into a “new fantastic city all spiked with domes, minarets, and antennas,” with the international pavilions jostling for visitors’ attention.24 To counterbalance this eclectic mix, the architecture of the themed pavilions sought to create an overall sense of unity. But unlike the 1902 fair, which had a modern unifying aesthetic, it did this through a revival of Turinese baroque, a style that not only possessed the fundamental quality of shaping a “harmonious totality,” but was also thought to be intrinsically linked to Italian identity, given its classicist lineage and its widespread distribution throughout the country.25 Turinese art critic Giuseppe Lavini even suggested that Italy’s leading politician of the period, Giuseppe Giolitti (first minister of the treasury and finance and then prime minister five times between 1892 and 1921), should intervene to provide this style with a political sanction—ultimately linking art and politics.26

The tension between the definition of a characteristic style for the Italian nation and the various demonstrations of international developments in the arts and industry unfolded along displays featuring the process of colonization—a process that was not only concurrent with, but inextricable from, the formation of the Italian nation and its positioning in the new international order. In 1911, its fiftieth anniversary year, Italy would cement its colonial ambitions with the conquest of Tripoli. The Mostre coloniali (Colonial shows) at the Turin exhibition were aimed at shaping a “colonial consciousness” in the country, with documentary evidence of the colonial powers’ campaigns alongside the raw materials extracted from the colonized territories and samples of various products, from domestic utensils to decorative items.27 The Italian centerpiece was the reconstruction of a village in Eritrea—an Italian colony since 1890—complete with the violent inclusion of living people. Together, the colonial shows helped to delimit the boundaries of Italian identity, which was not complete without the alienation of the colonized individuals.28

While the Turin exhibition situated the pursuit of a national identity within the transnational realities of the modern world, a parallel exhibition in Rome sought it internally, in relation to the diverse traditions within the country. Local artistic traditions were displayed in the Mostra regionale (Regional exhibition), while the Mostra etnografica (Ethnographic exhibition) featured reconstructions of houses and villages from the various Italian regions, along with inhabitants presenting their everyday objects and distinct crafts.29 As Michelangelo Sabatino has argued, this diversity sought to display “the continuity and cultural coherence” of Italian cultures and, as such, it might have provided an alternative to the baroque or other classical styles as a genealogy for the nation.30 However, many contemporary critics dismissed the value of peasant arts and interpreted these displays as evidence of Italy’s social and cultural stagnation.31 The diversity of Italian regional traditions (and populations) was considered a threat to, rather than a possible foundation for, a unified nation. In fact, Italian intellectuals had traditionally relied on the country’s artistic leadership and not their regional traditions to drive their quests. The Mostra regionale emphasized this alternative: while acknowledging Italy’s internal diversity, it focused on authored pavilions that primarily mobilized historicist styles, different from the anonymous display of local styles and building practices.

The lack of a unified vision of the nation in these exhibitions did not go unnoticed. One critic complained that visitors would only find an “antiunitarian and antinational show of two Italies that are still completely and pathetically different: two Italies, one of which is rich, healthy, well educated, advanced, and civilized, the other all poor, segregated, malarial, illiterate, backward, and barbaric; two Italies, one of which is the European Italy and the other the African Italy”—regarding the former as a reference for a modern nation and the second as its other.32 Rather than attempting to reconcile these “two Italies,” the project of national unification could be understood as an operation of colonization of the South by the North, as Gramsci suggested and as I discussed in the introduction.33 This equation helps to clarify a leading trend in the subsequent discourse on furnishing and other cultural expressions: the objects that were to furnish Italian domestic interiors and shape the new identity of the nation responded to the eclecticism of the modern world, but they were equally modeled as an alternative to the diversity of rural and southern households and the furnishings of different African populations—both subject to simultaneous processes of colonization.

Ojetti’s call for the politicization of the decorative arts was an early attempt to articulate this project. In relation to the 1911 exhibition, for example, he commended the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony’s efforts to respond to the “cosmopolitanism” of Art Nouveau, but nonetheless deemed it a failure as it sought a “firm base” in the still “imperfect cohesion of a federal empire.”34 For Ojetti, the success of such a project depended on the solidity of its underlying cultural and political forms of organization. In his view, the artistic principles applied at Darmstadt resulted in “naked” forms, all too similar to those of “barbaric constructions raised by populations without any art history.” Anticipating many of the racist critiques leveled at modern architecture and the Bauhaus after the Nazis came to power, he also drew a parallel with what he called the “neoimpressionist, partly-black, partly-childish” style of artists such as Henri Matisse.

The version of a national culture that Ojetti prescribed would respond to the temporal and spatial disruptions of modernization, opposing the “theoreticians of anachronism” as well as “cosmopolitanism” and challenging the return to the “primitive” as well as “the search for newness at any cost,” neither of which was rooted in a specific location. As he put it, “innocents, children, and savages are found everywhere in the world.”35 His project suggested a linear genealogy built around the territory of the nation, engendering a renewal that would follow the “history, instincts, customs, climate, and the material of each country.”36 And while, in Ojetti’s reading, there was little evidence of this project in the eclecticism of contemporary facades, interiors had already produced distinctive expressions of the national culture: “Rebels outside, extremely obedient inside. Prehistory in the street, civiltà [culture, civilization] beyond the threshold.”37 Implicit in this proposed articulation of the nation’s interiors is an identification of the individual with the collective that was cultivated by nationalist ideology and would later become one of the main tenets of fascist politics.

The War of Decorative Arts

While Ojetti saw the domestic arts as a potential vehicle for a major political project, in 1911 the Italian state still lacked the productive structures and commercial platforms to furnish the “new Italian house” on a mass scale. The shaping of a national furniture industry and market for the decorative arts was a key aim of the socialist politician and journalist Guido Marangoni when he launched the Monza Biennale exhibitions. He sought not only to define a unified style for the decorative arts of the nation, but to make this artistic pursuit of a piece with the development of the country.

In a letter written in December 1917 to the socialist mayor of Milan, Emilio Caldara, Marangoni described his intention to “resuscitate and relaunch those decorative arts which were once the pride of every Italian region.”38 Marangoni located this goal in the spirit of national regeneration that Ojetti anticipated and that was intensified by World War I. Rather than sustaining the distinct regional traditions, his aim was to align them with an increasing industrialization of the decorative arts, following the example of other European countries. Marangoni wrote of the advantage that other nations had gained from “their own powerful and sagacious organization” when, in his view, Italy ought to control this field “by definition and by hereditary rights.”39 This appeal to history, which crossed contemporary ideological divides, was grounded in a perception of Italy’s exceptionalism, as the birthplace of the Renaissance and thus, it was believed, of modern civilization.

Grounding his project, Marangoni referred in his letter to the “artistic war” between France and Germany during the last decades of the nineteenth century, which was in fact a battle for the control of the decorative arts trade.40 Marangoni had in mind models such as the Deutscher Werkbund, but his genealogy went back further. He quoted the warlike vocabulary of the inaugural program of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin in 1881: “We have defeated France on the battlefield, and now we want to defeat it once again in the domain of commerce and the artistic industries.”41 And he then built on this analogy, describing how the schools in those countries were training an “industrial-artistic army” while their various museums were displaying an “ammunition of models.”42 Though Marangoni framed this as a European battle, the United States was simultaneously embarking on what Woodrow Wilson called “the struggle for the peaceful conquest of the world” through manufactured goods—a contest in which Marangoni wanted Italians to compete.43

At the time, Italy’s industrial development was less advanced than that of other Western powers. As with Germany, France, and Great Britain, the origins of Italian industry lay in the transformation of textile production. However, unlike those places, it had developed independently from the urban centers and remained dispersed throughout the northern region. The lack of a proper communication network meant that industries remained tied to the source of raw materials, limiting their growth. Only Naples showed an alternative to this model, with a concentrated heavy industry. Industrialization would only gather pace after the country’s unification, with the expansion of the rail network and other transport infrastructures and the imposition of protectionist measures by the state.44 Combined with the low wages that accompanied a lack of labor regulation, this would lead to a period of rapid industrial growth from the turn of the century up to World War I. Production, however, was still mostly limited to smaller-scale endeavors, with just a few major companies adopting the new methods of mass production (among them Fiat in 1899 and Olivetti in 1908).45 The concentration of industries around northern cities further intensified the cultural and economic divide from the South and reinforced the displacement of population toward the North. Combined with the poor labor conditions, it also pushed millions of migrants out of the country altogether.

Rather than being tied to these industrial developments, furniture production, at this stage, remained fundamentally associated with craftsmanship and the arts, originally linked to the academies of fine arts rather than the new polytechnic schools that had begun to appear in the second half of the nineteenth century in Turin, Naples, Rome, and Milan. Though widely dispersed around the country, some centers of furniture manufacture started to coalesce around the cities of Gallarate and Monza close to Milan, and production was later supported by the establishment of new schools of applied art, including two significant ones in Milan, the Scuola Superiore d’Arte Applicata (1884) and a school for arts and trades associated with the Società Umanitaria (1893). While the former followed the British South Kensington model, the latter was a more original institution that combined the development of professional skills with support for the ordinary needs of workers, from banking to the provision of household goods that transformed their living environments.46 The Società Umanitaria also aimed to strengthen links between designers, producers, and consumers, and used both exhibitions and competitions for that purpose.47 With this orientation, it joined other institutions that sought to contribute to a process of technical and social transformation in the country that is broadly known as the Italian aggiornamento (updating).

Marangoni would engage with the existing framework provided by the Società Umanitaria when he founded the Consorzio Autonomo Milano-Monza-Umanitaria in 1921.48 The consortium hosted the Università delle Arti Decorative (University of the decorative arts), inaugurated in 1922 by Ugo Ojetti, and, from 1923, the Monza Biennale.49 Rather than directly supporting the technical infrastructure that Italy needed for furniture production, Marangoni was focused on improving the quality of design through education and dissemination platforms. He saw good design as a means to trigger consumption within the country and to make Italian products competitive internationally, fueling the country’s industrial development and its economy.50 Good design could also, he thought, provide a unity that would override the eclecticism resulting from mass production and international trade, and give a coherence to Italy’s diverse crafts traditions. In fact, the geographic dispersal of furniture production and its relation to local crafts had helped sustain regional diversity throughout the first decades of the twentieth century and, as such, kept it as a field in need of interventions to enact the pursuit of national unification.

Marangoni framed the economic and political dimensions of his project within a forward march of “peace and civiltà” that reached back to the Risorgimento.51 The term civiltà, mobilized both here and previously by Ojetti. invoked both the progress of civilization—with the development of the applied arts contributing to Italy’s growth as an economic and commercial power—and an idealized set of values that were thought to be embodied in the nation’s civic life. Marangoni presented World War I as a brief pause in this ongoing project, and yet the war served to redirect the country’s civiltà as it radically disrupted industrial production and at the same time fueled the rise of nationalism, framing it in terms of “power and expansion,” as Emilio Gentile has argued.52 Indeed, the interwar period in which Marangoni conceived his project was defined by the increasingly exclusionary definition of Italian culture and by the fascist ideological takeover of the nation in 1922.

The term civiltà is not simply translatable as “civilization,” as it carries additional connotations similar to the German word Kultur, as defined by Norbert Elias in the late 1930s. For Elias, a German Jew writing at the height of Nazism, Kultur was central to the development of social organization—and in particular the regulation of different populations—that underpinned the construction of the modern centralized nation state.53 Ojetti and Marangoni both used the term despite their different politics—the former as a ready supporter of fascism, the latter as a member of the Socialist Party.54 And yet, traditional political lines were muddled at this time of radical ideological transformations and individual strategic reorientations. In fact, the processes of sociogenesis invoked by the term both men mobilized are writ large in the request, essential to fascism, that Italians identify themselves with the nation. As the National Fascist Party statute of 1921 had it, Italy is not the “simple sum of living individuals, nor the instrument of parties for their own ends, but an organism that includes an indefinite series of generations of which single individuals are transitory elements, it is the supreme synthesis of the material and immaterial values of the race.”55 Both Italians and the decorative arts objects shaping their interiors were thus connected synchronically as well as diachronically via a common past and a shared new future—both conceived around the nation.56

The Monza Biennale engaged with both the battle to recover Italian primacy in the applied arts and the (more violent) fascist project of cultural regeneration. It eventually became, as we shall discuss, a key platform for the modernization of domestic interiors in the country and the dissemination of modernist design as a way of structuring the nation. Ultimately, the exhibitions would turn the nation into a designed community and a community linked through design—a “community-by-design.”57

The Monza Biennale and the “Synthesis of Collective Taste”

The first edition of the Monza Biennale, held in 1923 in the northern city’s Royal Palace, built on earlier decorative arts exhibitions in Italy in that it focused on “applied arts more tightly linked to the furnishing of the house.”58 On show were individual objects and some furnishings arranged in small rooms, either framed as museum-like artifacts or incorporated into ethnographic-style reconstructions of domestic settings.59 The broad audience imagined for the exhibition was conveyed in the reference to the objects as part of “popular and bourgeois environments”—a bridging of the yawning socioeconomic divisions of the Italian population.60 If domestic interiors were the focus of the exhibition’s commercial program, then its larger remit was to define the “new Italian house” as a technical and stylistic model for the houses of the nation.

The exhibition showcased furniture and decorative arts from all over Italy, with pieces consistently linked to the locations in which they were produced. The work of northern architect Ettore Sottsass Sr. (father of the popular postwar designer), for example, was featured in a display of the applied arts of Trento. Overall, the bias was toward regional arts rather than modernist projects. The same was true at times of the international section: the selection of Austrian pieces, for example, ignored the modern works of the Wiener Werkstätte and highlighted traditional pieces instead.61 The introduction to the accompanying catalogue acknowledged the “lack of unity” among the pieces on display, but suggested that this was counterbalanced by an “overflowing richness of forms and attitudes.”62

Despite their diversity, Marangoni discerned in the objects on display “an acute desire—not to say an authentic spiritual need—deeply rooted in the collective consciousness.”63 And yet, if there were any manifestations of shared directions, they were due to transnational influences. Works in the Piedmont section, for example, bear traces from the Jugendstil as much from the designs of Josef Hoffmann in Vienna, none of which were elsewhere on show. The exhibition also featured some decisively modernist projects, including an interior environment by the futurist Fortunato Depero, “Saletta in Stile Futurista.” The futurists’ concern with the organization of “sculptural complexes” (complessi plastici) and “artificial landscapes” (paesaggi artificiali) was one of the ways the modernist transformation of the environment had been conceptualized in the previous years in Italy.64 In line with earlier manifestations of modernism, though discursively more radical, their work emphasized the need for artistic intervention in the articulation of the diverse objects that constructed the otherwise fragmented modern environment.

The second exhibition, held in 1925, strengthened the search for unity and displayed a clearer modernizing impetus. This time the captions for the objects and installations mostly omitted their place of origin, even if their styles and production methods were still largely linked to local crafts and the show was organized in regional sections. The show highlighted the agency of designers, who were increasingly seen as central to the project: a glass wall by Pietro Chiesa, very similar to one featured in 1923 as a work from Milan, was now attributed only to its author, while a number of pieces by Alberto Issel were difficult to link to any particular region. And while many pieces on display remained rather disconnected from each other, Marangoni hoped that the exhibition would help to realize a “synthesis of collective taste”—a pursuit that echoed the language of the Party’s statute, with the nation as the assumed framework for that collectivity.65 Marangoni emphasized that this desired synthesis was something that had to be consciously shaped, as modern societies lacked the harmonious relations that characterized traditional communities, being instead “educated and transformed by the machine, submitted to a hard test by all the dizzying conquests of science, morbidly intensified by the sophistication of life.”66 If fascism took on the role of shaping an organic society in response to those transformations, Marangoni embraced the premises of modernism in the belief that the arts had an essential part to play in providing society with an experience of cohesion.67

While the “machine” was framed in Marangoni’s arguments as a threat to social cohesion, it had also to be taken into account as the means of realizing a new unified style—a characteristic paradox of fascism’s engagement with technology. Marangoni saw the “shoddy mass production of [Italian] peasant furniture factories” as the main obstacle not only to that unified style but to Italy’s ability to compete internationally.68 In fact, he suggested that the 1925 Monza Biennale would need to measure its success in relation to the International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts held in Paris the same year, even while acknowledging that the Paris exhibition had a “more openly industrial character.” However, in the imagined “battle” that he set up with this other show—an unlikely one, given the vastly different scale and scope of the exhibitions—this did not constitute a defeat. Rather, he proposed that this focus “allow[ed] Monza to remain loyal to its strictly artistic program, and to develop it toward an always higher end goal.”69 The “artistic” focus of the Monza exhibitions was an essential dimension of their synthetic pursuit.

But Marangoni’s project required more than the participation of artists. He also called for political and financial support, for “the disciplined and inexorable efforts of all.”70 Marangoni sought diverse forms of financial support, warning that without it the show could turn into an “abyss” swallowing not only “millions” but collective “illusions” as well.71 A wide range of sponsors responded to this call, including municipalities, national ministries, state agencies, institutions such as Milan’s chamber of commerce, businesses such as the Rinascente department store, and a large number of individual contributors. The success of the exhibitions led to what Marangoni called the “circulation of millions and millions”—a measure not only of the level of economic transactions but of the growing flow of shared imaginations.72

As part of this collective pursuit, Marangoni understood that it was not enough to transform the design and production of the decorative arts; he also needed to intervene in “the aesthetic education of the citizenry.”73 To this end, he founded the magazine Le Arti Decorative, which he published between 1923 and 1925 with the assistance of Carlo Felice—an important figure in subsequent biennales. The magazine provided a platform for the developing discourse on the decorative arts while ensuring that the content of the shows reached a larger audience, beyond those who were able to visit them in person. The coordination of these different initiatives seemed to suggest that, while the development of the Italian decorative arts depended upon the education “of the citizenry” (as Marangoni had it), the Italian people could become “citizens”—worthy inhabitants of the “new Italian house”—contingent upon their aesthetic education.

Not everyone was convinced by this project from the outset. One skeptic was none other than Ojetti, who declared that the first exhibition’s pursuit of a “modern style” had yielded “too few signs of life.”74 For Ojetti, this style needed to develop as “a natural and unavoidable fact,” rather than in “the wards of health centers or the incubating machines of an exhibition.” It could not simply be conjured anew, but had to be rooted in what he deemed to be the values of the nation. He bemoaned the major “error” of “our inventors of styles”: “building furniture for a house that doesn’t exist.”75 Milanese critic Raffaello Giolli made a similar point in his own review of the exhibition: “None of the rooms on display [. . .] could be brought into the home.”76 But the premise of his critique was the opposite of Ojetti’s, for Giolli thought the culture of everyday life in the country’s households was outdated and needed to be transformed.77

Ojetti and Giolli were on opposite sides of contemporary debates, the former emphasizing an idealized set of values for Italians that new decorative arts should embody, the other a pursuit for the modernization of those values. They also understood their dissemination differently. Ojetti considered that a “decorative style [could] not but arise in a luxurious environment” in which “the primary needs of life” had already been fulfilled, and thus linked the leadership in the furnishing of Italian households to the values of affluent socioeconomic strata as model inhabitants for Italian households.78 Giolli, meanwhile, expressed appreciation for the “humbleness” embodied in peasant art, as an alternative origin for the pursued transformation.79 They also had radically different aesthetic preferences, since Ojetti was an avid defender of classicism and Giolli supported more radical modernist trends. And finally, they had opposing political affiliations—the former a deep-seated fascist, the latter an unyielding anti-fascist. In fact, while they both understood domestic interiors as a site in which stylistic pursuits could be coordinated with the necessarily regenerated values of the nation, their two positions could have led, at this early stage, in radically different directions and toward different ideological developments.

The Monza exhibitions would increasingly become, if not the “incubator,” then at least the laboratory in which different programs for the furnishing of the “new Italian house” were tested and disputed.80 These shows operated in a different way to art or architecture exhibitions—which, as others have discussed, typically presented the work of art itself or materials produced around the work of architecture, but not architecture itself.81 While displaying actual pieces of furnishing, the exhibition functioned as a device connecting these pieces with their imagined ensembles throughout the nation, maintaining the understanding of the exhibition “as always in some sense dealing with displacement and lack.”82 If what was missing, in this case, was the Italian house itself, the exhibition oriented visitors to their own homes for the construction of such an absent entity and its fulfillment, making them participants of a collective furnishing project.

The III Monza Biennale of 1927 represented a significant step in the pursuit of that house, with the exhibits displaying more decisively modern aesthetics. While many critics celebrated its achievements, others still questioned the exhibition’s pursuit of a unifying style. Writing in Architettura e Arti Decorative, which would become the mouthpiece of the National Fascist Syndicate of Architects, Ferdinando Reggiori defended the diversity of national production: “I do not accept that a piece of furniture conceived in Naples should turn out like one designed in Milan; there are barriers of imperishable feelings, the characters and environments are too different, the demographic divisions too deep-rooted, the uses and customs incompatible.”83 Following these arguments, distinctive styles arose not only from the local craft traditions that had historically sustained them, but from the natural diversity of the Italian populations. And yet, rather than waiting for them to fade away, the exhibition undertook to homogenize these diverse expressions.

Some of the most significant contributions to this pursuit were paradoxically connected to international modernist developments. They included a number of rooms designed by a group of young architects from Turin, among them Giuseppe Terragni, Felice Casorati, Alberto Sartoris, and Gigi Chessa. Their designs consisted of abstract compositions of simple volumes with minimal decoration, grounding the precepts that many of these protagonists would later develop under the umbrella of the so-called “rationalism.”84 Aiming at a comprehensive transformation of the interior environment, with a complete coordination of the various elements of the composition, they were conceived as fixed stages, rather than ensembles of elements to be taken home. Indeed, rather than domestic interiors, the designs were mostly for commercial spaces, including a pharmacy and a butcher’s shop (Figure 1.3, above).

While seemingly less radical in their aesthetic proposition, other furnishings unfolded the pursuit for a national interior more effectively with pieces conceived for the regeneration of the decorative arts of the home, including works designed by architects Tomaso Buzzi, Michele Marelli, Emilio Lancia, and Gio Ponti as well as designers Pietro Chiesa, Paolo Venini, and Contessa Carla Visconti di Modrone Erba. Sometimes arranged as cohesive ensembles, other times displayed in looser groupings of pieces by diverse authors, the works combined an increasing pursuit of abstraction with the reassertion of classicist ornamental motifs in the spirit of the Novecento group (Figure 1.3, below). The Novecento (initially a collective of artists formed in Milan in 1922 by Mario Sironi, Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba, Piero Marussig, and Ubaldo Oppi, under the auspices of the art critic Margherita Sarfatti) percolated into architecture in the late 1920s, when it was embraced by Giovanni Muzio, Giuseppe De Finetti, and Gio Ponti, among others.85 Significantly, Ponti, Sarfatti, and Sironi were all members of the new artistic council for the 1927 Biennale, along with painter Carlo Carrà. The movement aimed to cultivate a distinctively modern Italian sensibility, but it was strongly linked to the contemporaneous European impulse for stability that was framed as a “return to order.”86 The group’s work was known to Mussolini, given his close ties to Sarfatti (editor of his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia), and its ambitions echoed with the fascist project in its simultaneous drive for cultural regeneration with an appeal to Italy’s glorious past.87

Figure 1.3. Gigi Chessa, pharmacy included in the Piedmontese section (above); and Tomaso Buzzi, Emilio Lancia, Michele Marelli, Gio Ponti, Il Labirinto furnishings (below), featured at the III International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Monza, 1927. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

While these pieces on display seemed to offer a possible conclusion to Marangoni’s pursuit, the aesthetics of Novecento did not result from a “synthesis of collective taste,” bringing together different regional sensitivities. They were designed as a carefully curated “syncretic” project that requires closer examination. And yet, before we take on that task, it is important to highlight that the politics of these pieces were not only enacted in their aesthetics, but also related to their capacity to circulate in the market and address the households of the nation in ensembles like the ones constructed for the show. These pieces, let us remember, needed to be “brought into the home.” This was essential for them to be both an “effective instrument of life” and a source of “economic benefit” for the nation, as Marangoni put it.88 Though Marangoni would step down as director of the next Monza Biennale, this duality—the framing of collective cultural life (in the form of the “new Italian house”) and the economic enterprise (the consolidation of the national market for furnishing)—would remain central to the exhibition and to the larger discourse into which it fed.

Domus Nova, La Rinascente, and the Linking of “Art and Life”

Central among the Novecento contributions to the 1927 Monza Biennale were the pieces designed for the Domus Nova furniture collection by Emilio Lancia and Gio Ponti. Ponti’s family were well-placed members of Milan’s entrepreneurial elite, with connections to the Lombard textile industry reaching back to the eighteenth century (Figure 1.4).89 His father, Enrico Ponti, was a director of Società Edison, the company that supplied electricity to Milan. His uncle Ettore Ponti had been the city’s mayor between 1902 and 1905. And Ponti’s wife, Giulia Vimercati, was related to the Borletti family, key figures in the industrial and political landscape of northern Italy and directors, among many other enterprises, of La Rinascente. Ponti graduated from the Milan Polytechnic in 1921, his education interrupted by period of military service in World War I. During his studies, Ponti met Giovanni Muzio (some years his senior), with whom he shared the Novecento sensibility, as well as Lancia, with whom he set up a practice and collaborated on a number of early projects.

Figure 1.4. Gio Ponti, circa 1923. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Key to his early design initiatives was his engagement with the ceramic company Richard Ginori, with which he collaborated immediately after graduating. He would eventually serve as its artistic director until 1930 (Figure 1.5).90 A selection of ceramic vases designed for the firm were shown at the 1925 Monza Biennale and at the Paris International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts that same year, where they were awarded first prize in the ceramics section. Ugo Ojetti praised them as embodying a “cordial modern spirit.”91 The art critic would be a mentor to Ponti in the early phase of his career, though their positions on style increasingly diverged.92 Ojetti also facilitated Ponti’s collaboration with La Rinascente, which included the luxury Il Labirinto collection in addition to the Domus Nova line.93 In these same years, Ponti built his first architectural projects in collaboration with Lancia, among them his own family house on Via Randaccio in Milan (1925) and, following the Paris Expo, the Villa Bouilhet (“L’Ange Volant”) in Garches (1927), developed along with Buzzi (Figure 1.6). Both combined simple volumes with classical motifs, often decontextualized and used to punctuate the facade as free-floating decorative elements. The Novecento vocabulary of the Domus Nova line resonated in these first projects across these different media, from ceramics to architecture.

Figure 1.5. Gio Ponti, ceramic and porcelain works for Richard Ginori, manufactured by Doccia, Sesto Fiorentino, 1923. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 1.6. Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, house in Via Randaccio, Milan, 1925. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

The broad focus of Ponti’s early work was supported by his close links to the productive networks of the region, and it was also a manifestation of the shifting and “ambiguous” profile of the architectural profession during this period.94 In the prewar years when Ponti began his studies, the education of architects oscillated between the academies of fine arts, which cultivated the use of historical styles, and the polytechnic schools, which had a stronger technical emphasis.95 It was not until 1919 that Italy’s first dedicated architecture school was established in Rome. Official recognition for the architectural profession belatedly followed in 1923, as part of a nationwide reform of professional studies instituted by fascist philosopher and politician Giovanni Gentile—a central figure in the definition of fascist culture.96 Gustavo Giovannoni, founder of the school in Rome, was key to the contemporary conception of the “integral architect” (architetto integrale) who, following his own profile, combined the roles of historian and designer, integrating technical and artistic skills.97 In line with Giovannoni’s own interests, his program for the school encapsulated a broader negotiation of historical traditions and the modern impetus for newness that was at the core of Italian stylistic debates at the time.

The Domus Nova furniture line was embedded in these debates. The pieces on show at the 1927 Monza Biennale were rather austere and abstract in their formal definition in comparison to earlier exhibits at Monza, and yet they were not void of ornamentation. Some were made in dark woods, including walnut and mahogany, and had classically inspired moldings. Others, painted in white lacquer, incorporated linear designs referencing classical motifs. Different from Novecento architectures and more uniquely aligned with other explorations in the decorative arts, these different features were combined with the use of popular techniques such as braided rush for some seats, altogether defining a distinctive aesthetic. Photographs of the exhibition show the furniture against a backdrop of murals by Ettore Colombo and Arturo Songa that featured trompe l’oeil ornamental motifs resembling plaster detailing (Figures 1.7 and 1.8). The classical motifs echoed the architecture of the Royal Palace that had hosted the Monza exhibition from its first edition—a significant framing for their aesthetic pursuit. These murals provided the furniture with a sense of unity that would have enveloped the visitor and made them one with the pieces on display. In contributing to this totality, the murals might be considered to advance how Sironi would embrace the medium as the catalyst of a new style that “the new generation will be able to identify with” (in spite of the differences between Songa’s and Sironi’s aesthetics).98 And yet, in contrast to the public vocation of Sironi’s work and its representational nature, which Romy Golan has explored as pursuing “a social, educative, and ethical function,” this identification would occur through abstract motifs in domestic interiors.99

Figure 1.7. Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, Domus Nova chairs featured at the III International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Monza, 1927. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

Figure 1.8. Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, Domus Nova, master bedroom (above) and bedroom for a girl (below), featured at the III International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Monza, 1927. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

Within the schema provided by Songa’s work, the Domus Nova furnishings were shown as complete ensembles occupying entire rooms—among them a Family Room, Dining Room, Double Bedroom, and Lady’s Bedroom. By contrast, the displays of Il Labirinto collection mixed individual pieces by different designers. Both offered an alternative to the regional groupings that had originally provided a framework for the displays, with the pieces now brought together by a unified aesthetic pursuit. Consequently, the exhibition visitor was invited to identify with these ensembles, not as an inhabitant of a distinct Italian region, curious about the artistic expressions of a diverse nation, but rather as a prospective inhabitant of the unified identity that the ensembles sought to embody. In imagining these pieces in their own homes, individual visitors would be involved in the construction of that identity, distributing concrete proof of its existence within their own interiors. While coordinated with the ornamental framework of the palace and the murals, furnishings were perfect for this dissemination since, as Alina Payne proposes, they are “cultural disseminators, portable and therefore accessible, viewed and handled more readily than large works of art rooted to their places of origin.”100

The exact nature of such an identity was a subject of discussion. Ponti described the aesthetics of the Domus Nova pieces as characteristically “modern,” but not everyone perceived them that way. Historian and critic Roberto Papini, for example, wished they could be less reminiscent of “models from the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s.”101 Others, including Buzzi, celebrated their “simple forms, resolutely modern in their linearity but still adorned with a call to a nineteenth-century local nobility.”102 What is significant about these critiques is not just the chronologies they deployed, but the idea of “locality.” While some would link the territorial condition of this style to its mobilization of classicism, the tension between a modernist impetus and its local grounding within Italy—a crucial element of the cultural negotiations of fascism—was addressed by Mussolini at the opening of the Novecento art exhibition in Milan in February 1926 in a different way: celebrating the style’s rejection of mere copy and its condition as “creation,” he considered that its work was the “result of a severe internal discipline [which] resonates in this Italy that has been through two wars, which has become disdainful of long speeches and of everything that reproaches the democratic rubbish, which in twenty-five years has advanced and almost reached and sometimes surpassed other peoples.”103

The Novecento was not the only alternative explored by artists and intellectuals with the aim of rooting a national project. Those gathered around the Strapaese group, for example, embraced a vision of wholesome folk cultures and peasant traditions as an alternative to the international values and influences they saw manifesting in Novecento work.104 And yet they similarly captured a drive to provide a new interpretation of the country, with the goal to become “an expression of its time,” as Fabrizio Brunetti has explained.105 Emily Braun has also encapsulated the desire of the Strapaese members to provide “a rejuvenation of Italian society through continuity with the past” in their reconsideration of folk cultures.106 This drive was not unlike the goal of the Novecento, even if its appropriation of classicist motifs reached to different sources in its appeal to the past. But it similarly mobilized past sources in a pursuit for “new forms and attitudes,” as Sarfatti explicitly stated regarding Novecento.107 Ultimately, both of these movements were committed to giving new meaning to inherited forms as a means of constructing a new collective—that of the nation—in line with Mussolini’s understanding of both art and politics as a form of “creation.”

The project of fascism was able to absorb both of these movements and accept, even instrumentalize, their contradictions.108 And yet, the tension between these two embodied the frictions between city and countryside that was characteristic of the national consolidation—the “locations” that would provide an identity to the new nation.109 In fact, while the Novecento’s use of classicist motifs might not have overtly invoked a specific “local” context—given that classicism was found throughout Italy as much as beyond its borders—it was nevertheless linked to the sensibility, and hegemonic power, of the northern metropolitan bourgeoisie, which provided this style with a specific site.110 Even more, the model for Novecento architects was neoclassicism’s provision of a unified language for Milan and the wider Lombard region during the Napoleonic era—and it was this model that they now hoped to expand to the entire nation.111 And if, as Cesare de Seta has argued, the impetus of Novecento architecture was to “recover” from that nineteenth-century model an “order [that] constituted the last serious response to an urbanism born from the industrial revolution,”112 then its implementation in furnishing was not just an attempt to build a unified identity for Italians, but could also be interpreted as a response led by the bourgeoisie to the effects that such a revolution would have within the household, with an intervention in the production and dissemination of objects as much as in their stylization.

In fact, the evaluation of such a response, in the case of the Domus Nova pieces, was not only concerned with their aesthetics but with their materialization and valorization—addressing, precisely, their relation with the transformed systems of production and commercialization. One critic saw them as having resolved “the dual problem of [producing] furniture that is at once economical and beautiful.”113 Others, however, thought them too expensive, particularly in view of their aesthetic qualities: “Six thousand plus lire for a bedroom with a few pieces of furniture, naked and bare, seems excessive to me.”114 Those kinds of prices—equivalent to half a salaried employee’s annual earnings, or all of a manual worker’s yearly wage—would have put the pieces out of the reach of large segments of the population.115 Significantly, however, their pricing was not coupled to their aesthetic or material qualities—even if these were highlighted in many advertisements at the time (“optimal material of tested solidity,” “perfect manufacturing and finishing,” “practical conception—safe elegance”). Their pricing needs to be regarded, as Karl Marx had it in the definition of commodities, as “social.”116 What people were paying for was not the quality of manufacture, nor the amount of ornament, but rather the opportunity to access the forms of citizenship promoted by the Monza exhibitions.117

Looking at the Domus Nova pieces in the context in which they were commercialized, amid the totality of commodities available in La Rinascente, helps to illuminate this social value. The enterprise began life in the second half of the nineteenth century as the chain of department stores (the first in Italy) founded by politician and entrepreneur Ferdinando Bocconi and his brother Luigi Bocconi. Initially called Aux Villes d’Italie, then Alle Città d’Italia, they were modeled on Le Bon Marché in Paris.118 The metropolitan context (signaled by the name of the stores) was significant. New forms of commercial activity developed in cities throughout Europe during this period, which in Italy coincided with the Risorgimento. The activities of the Bocconi brothers, which were framed “with a legitimate sense of national pride,” cannot be separated from this political enterprise.119 The Bocconis built up a network of stores that reached beyond Milan to Rome, Florence, Naples, Turin, Genoa, Bologna, and Palermo. By the outbreak of World War I, however, the company was in decline, and in 1917 it was acquired by Milanese politician and industrialist Senatore Borletti, who was soon joined by entrepreneur Umberto Brustio.120 The new name—meaning “The Reborn One”—was suggested by the poet and national war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio, in a brief note from the front. “I write you in haste,” he started; “in half an hour I am leaving to bomb Grahovo. I have led my group in nine aerial bombings in five days.” After celebrating his own “mystical invulnerability” in the war, D’Annunzio went on to propose: “The name of the company should be this. I discovered it yesterday in the deep narrow valley of Chiapovan: ‘LA RINASCENTE.’ It is simple, clear, and adequate.”121 Borletti readily embraced the suggestion, writing of how La Rinascente, “born when the firestorm was still raging,” was now “taking on the project included in the name imposed by the Poet; and rising from the ruins to signify the imperious vitality of the works generated by this profound idea.”122 In a letter to Brustio, he expressed his concern that La Rinascente should be not only a “serious financial success” but also a means to realize a “moral” project—for the rebirth invoked by D’Annunzio was not merely economic but a project of cultural renewal.123 For many, D’Annunzio was the embodiment of that renewal: for Sarfatti, he was an “emblem of velocity, modernity, extreme urbanity, of a heroic vision of life, of daring, hope, greatness, and limitless faith [. . .]. It is D’Annunzio, in short, who deprovincialized Italy’s spirit and culture, as well as its social and political aspirations.”124 With these attributes, D’Annunzio was at once a role model for the clientele of the department store and a key ideologue of fascism.125

The Domus Nova furniture items were among those in the department store that would advance the economic and moral dimensions of Borletti’s project through “the dressing of the person and the furnishing of the house.”126 As a matter of fact, the house was not only a receptacle for the store’s merchandise, but also a key element in the broader process of modernization and regeneration that could later be appropriated by the fascist regime.127 Speaking at the opening of the Rinascente store on Milan’s Piazza del Duomo in Milan in 1921, Borletti declared: “There cannot be true culture [civiltà] in a community, and lasting well-being, if the house is not an environment of affection, of elevation, of wise use of time, energy, and money—a place in which there is a domestic awareness thanks to which the love for the family extends to the community, and to the Homeland, finding its ultimate expression in universal fraternity.”128 Here, the house and the family were presented as the most basic component of the national community which, writing before Mussolini’s arrival to power, Borletti conceived within a larger coalition that transcended national boundaries. However, this community was one that the regime sought to appropriate for itself, with the family thus becoming essential to achieving its goals, even if it was also considered a “private haven” that could fulfill its role of perpetuating the race and guaranteeing the continuity of religion without state interference.129 The furnishing of the house, as the framework for family life, constituted a unique space of intervention, one that was considered vital to the articulation of national life but was largely unmediated by the state and left instead to the workings of the market and the operations of other institutions.

The artistic dimension of the home interior, guaranteed through the collaboration with designers such as Ponti and Lancia, was central to the social and political role that La Rinascente attempted to play in this space. In fact, design was not merely mobilized to fuel consumption, but was framed by La Rinascente’s larger goal under the premise “link art to life.”130 The Domus Nova pieces resonated with the revolutionary emphasis encapsulated in that expression and with the larger project of modernism, which saw the arts as a means to transform society. Within this project, the artistic condition of the interior constructed a common realm of cultural forms that was articulated with the impulse to define “a sphere of custom- and ritual-based suprapersonal meaning” that Griffin deems essential to modernism and equates with an “elaborate trompe l’oeil” not unlike the backdrop to the Domus Nova collection at Monza. It was “an integral component of the socially constructed stage-set”—one that La Rinascente aimed to perform at the scale of the nation.131 The unified artistic condition of furniture transformed the everyday life of the interior into national life and the customers of the department store into national citizens. And if these citizens could have been entangled in transnational “fraternity” bonds, fascism’s pursuit to exalt them in their exceptionality could benefit from the role that the furnishing of the house played in “staging” their order and cohesion.

The national reach of this home-furnishing project was advanced in Borletti’s understanding that La Rinascente’s goods were addressed to “not any class, but all classes,”132 even if, stated intentions aside, La Rinascente’s offerings appealed most directly to the imaginations and spending power of the Milanese bourgeoisie, rather than any other constituent part of the population.133 For some, this was not a problem, since good taste would trickle down. In a published letter to Gio Ponti on the idea of “necessary luxury,” Ugo Ojetti described how imaginations in the realm of furnishing operated within established social hierarchies: “The middle class, the lower middle class, workers, and farmers have always desired and always will desire to imitate even in furniture the classes that are socially placed above them and that serve as their models.”134 If the store aimed to permeate different classes, it was primarily in shaping the imaginations of the population.135

The management of those imaginations was significant, as the country’s population was experiencing rapid change. The influx of migrant workers from the South posed a threat to the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in northern cities and the model of stability it proposed for the nation. And this threat particularly manifested at the scale of the household, with a severe shortage of housing at the time.136 In 1927, the year Domus Nova was presented at Monza, the Milanese delegation of the Istituto per le Case Popolari (ICP, Institute for public housing), which had been founded in 1907 at the initiative of the Socialists, reported on the need for forty thousand more rooms in the city.137 This mass urban migration was a major headache for the regime: Mussolini considered urbanization “not a sign of power [. . .] but a sign of decadence,” and proposed to “evacuate the cities.”138 But despite a concerted anti-urban program, Italy’s major metropolis continued to expand.139 In response to the housing shortage, the ICP proposed to build twenty thousand houses before the end of the decade: initially offered for rent, they would later be made available for purchase, as property owners (tied down by mortgages) were considered “the most stable element of the population.”140 This increase in homeownership was key to the increased circulation of furniture pursued by La Rinascente—if not as objects that could be purchased since they remained beyond the means of most, then at least as objects of aspiration: stabilizing illusions.

The Domus Nova products offered an alternative to both the challenge to prevailing cultural hierarchies brought about by migration as well as the “decadence” that the regime associated with urban life. In fact, while the circulation of furniture in the market operated within the practices of “conspicuous consumption” identified by Thorstein Veblen, which performed for some affluent groups “as a means of reputability,”141 their role in Italy was much more specific in the first years of the fascist period. In this version, the furnishing of the house served as the medium by which the bourgeoisie sought to underwrite the stability of the nation and would become a key instrument for fascism in pursuit of order and cohesion.142 And yet, rather than being something to restore (as in the conventional understanding of the arts of the period as a “return to order”), social stability was seen, within the logics of the market and those of fascism, as something that would need to be continuously crafted and stylized anew.143

Furnishing Networks

In enacting this project, the stylistic consolidation pursued by Domus Nova products was coordinated with a consolidation of commercial relations unfolded by La Rinascente. In the interwar years, the department store’s network expanded throughout Italy, with its center of power remaining its flagship store on Piazza del Duomo in Milan, the country’s economic capital—a network we shall now follow before returning to the analysis of furnishing.144 Piazza del Duomo was traditionally the site of ecclesiastical power (the exuberant Gothic cathedral) as well as the seat of civil government (the neoclassical Royal Palace, supplemented from 1939 by the arengario, built for the fascist regime by Giovanni Muzio, Piero Portaluppi, Enrico Griffini, and Pier Giulio Magistretti). In 1867, the square also became an important commercial setting, with the inauguration of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II designed by Giuseppe Mengoni—a building that reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie and its new influence over the aristocracy.145 The 1883 master plan by Cesare Beruto would make the square the focus of a new road and tram network while a new system of urban lighting, among the first of its kind in Europe, was installed in the area following a joint initiative by the Bocconi brothers’ department store and the Manzoni theater.146 These infrastructure projects supported the economic development of the city and facilitated the movement of its growing population while simultaneously leading to its spatial segregation—with urban workers and arriving rural migrants settling farther out from the city center.147 The maximization of circulation, in accordance with the exercise of modern forms of power, became a key concern in the urban plans developed throughout the late 1920s.148

Though the Rinascente store on Piazza del Duomo occupied the same site as the Bocconis’ Alle Città d’Italia, the building was largely reconstructed after a major fire on Christmas Eve, 1918. Arson was suspected, as the store remained an exception in the fabric of small businesses in the city, which it aimed to substitute.149 The store was redesigned by Giovanni Giachi, the architect of the original structure. And, following the urban strategy, the circulation of both people and information was maximized: the single entrance was replaced with three points of access, while the old display windows gave way to what contemporary press reviews called an extensive “exhibition gallery.”150 Transparent elevators maximized the sense of theater, opening onto a grandiose atrium decorated in ornate Beaux Arts style. Modern techniques were introduced for the display of goods: glass shelves put the objects for sale within customers’ direct line of sight. Furnishing was displayed in small ensembles separated by light textile walls that defined temporary rooms, as they rehearsed their role in the transformation of a space. These rooms were arranged along the store’s broad galleries, playing their part in La Rinascente’s larger encapsulation of metropolitan life, which also incorporated other services such as a tea room, a beauty salon, and a nursery.151 Performing akin to, and in coordination with, what Tony Bennett calls the “exhibitionary complex,” the department store’s programmatic and spatial logics made both objects and life increasingly visible and transformed them into conduits of power (Figure 1.9).152

Figure 1.9. Giovanni Giachi, central atrium (above) and furniture galleries (below) of La Rinascente department store building in Piazza del Duomo, Milan, 1922. La Illustrazione Italiana, April 3, 1921. Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives. Courtesy of La Rinascente.

The Piazza del Duomo store was the flagship for a project that Borletti equated with a military campaign: one “that the rest of the fleet, battle-hardened but given impetus by an improved situation, would follow across the wide sea in an equally triumphant way.”153 The company certainly prevailed in its battle with smaller businesses. By 1929, a little more than a decade after the new building’s inauguration, La Rinascente was a major property owner, with a real estate empire extending across the nation.154 In addition to its geographical expansion, the company also sought to target new kinds of consumers with the introduction of “fixed-price stores” (UPIMs) aimed at the popular classes. The increased flows of consumer goods were facilitated by the fascist regime’s focus on developing networks of transportation, among them the new system of highways, which grew as a tool of territorial consolidation.155 Through these networks, La Rinascente’s project of accessing the interiors of the nation was constituted as complementary to other forms of control.156

Though patterns of consumption in Italy were changing, the circulation of La Rinascente’s products continued to be constrained by the nation’s industrial capacity.157 In an attempt to overcome this, the department store collaborated with a number of state-sponsored initiatives and organizations intended to support the small local industries that still accounted for a large share of the country’s output.158 A significant example was the Ente Nationale per la Piccola Industria e l’Artigianato (ENAPI, National organization for small industry and crafts), founded in 1922 to promote models suitable for industrial production. Under the artistic directorship of Giovanni Guerrini, this modernizing impetus was coupled with a classicist emphasis in some of the designs in the first year of the organization and contributed to solidify this trend as a hegemonic one across initiatives.159 The organization also used different media, including exhibitions, to strengthen the links between production and consumption, and it presented its products in diverse venues, including the Monza Biennale from 1927 on. Advancing this goal, La Rinascente’s collaboration with the ENAPI aimed to develop models that the small industries could put into production and department stores would distribute across the nation.

In expanding the reach of its pursuits, La Rinascente also collaborated with the fascist regime’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National leisure-time organization), which ran a number of competitions related to the furnishing of Italian households between 1927 and 1929.160 The largest of these, organized together with the ENAPI, resulted in a series of exhibitions throughout Italy, including in Milan, Florence, Rome, and Naples.161 The competition asked designers, furniture-makers, and commercial distributors to envision economical workers’ housing for a family of four (two parents and two offspring)—an ideal family unit that would better fit urban standards, smaller than the typical rural household.162 Ponti and Lancia submitted their Domus Nova project; other entries by young architects such as Carlo Enrico Rava and Sebastiano Larco, Luigi Figini, and Enrico Griffini proposed more abstract geometries. One contemporary review celebrated the pragmatic quality of these latter projects, as a way of bringing modernist design into Italian homes, in contrast to the “more fantastical” pieces on show at the Monza Biennale, which could only appeal to the imagination of Italians.163 Other entries were directly submitted by manufacturers. The firm Fratelli Suemin, for example, presented an ensemble of cherry plywood pieces characterized by their “straightforward modesty,” which were both photographed and sold as a cohesive room (Figure 1.10).164 In fact, the Dopolavoro worked to stimulate both production and consumption while shaping a culture of “modesty” that would balance the values of individuality with a “cult of the home.”165 And yet, in spite of this emphasis, the initiative was not framed by new networks of distribution, but remained buttressed by the same commercial system that La Rinascente sought to consolidate.

Figure 1.10. Ditta Fratelli Suemin, wood bedroom furnishings, featured at the Exhibition of the National Competition for Economic Furnishing, organized by the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, Milan, 1928. Domus 11 (November 1928). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

The article’s title, in Italian, reads: “The Milan Exhibition for the National Competition for the Economic Furnishing of the House, Announced by the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro.” The image is accompanied by a caption, in Italian, which reads: “This bedroom in natural plywood cherry wood, by the Suemin Brothers company, is of pure modesty in concept and is one of the most pleasant among the items featured at the Milan Exhibition. It is on sale at L/1171 (Bed, wardrobe, bedside table, sink, coat hanger).”

Initiatives like these sought to enlist the whole population in a unified project of furnishing—a project in which individual interiors throughout the nation would be connected to networks of circulating commodities beyond the individual’s control. As a matter of fact, the furnishing principles disseminated through these exhibitions and commercial platforms incorporated individuals in this nationwide project in ways that fascism could then appropriate and mobilize, but they did so without the need of coercion: in engaging citizens to furnish their homes along shared principles, they contributed to organize what Bennett has described as “a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry,” while buttressing what Antonio Gramsci defined as “the ethical and educative function of the modern state.”166

The participation of architects was vital to the performance of this newly constituted market-exhibitionary complex. Architects had traditionally designed individual pieces of furniture for singular interiors, but now they took on an expanded role, as epitomized by the design consultancy service at La Rinascente. The interior was no longer a mere reproduction of individual decisions or local traditions, nor a total work of art under the control of an individual author, but part of modern furnishing networks that architects were asked to mediate. These mediations interrupted local traditions enacted in furnishing and family links manifested in households good passed from generation to generation. They offered instead alternative networks of kinship increasingly consolidated at the scale of the nation.

“Social Arts”

These diverse forms of intervention in the furnishing of the nation were a key concern for Marangoni and Ponti when they founded La casa bella and Domus, which began publication simultaneously in January 1928. Marangoni saw La casa bella as an extension of the project he had begun with the Monza Biennale, with the desire to build “a new and bluntly modern originality of style” while providing “the solution to an economic problem of great relevance.”167 His magazine thus sought to both inspire the work of architects, designers, and furniture-makers and to educate the masses in its appreciation. Marangoni’s presence in the pages of the magazine, however, would soon fade away: he left La casa bella in 1930 and was barely active in the discourse on furnishing after that.168

Domus, for its part, continued the work that Ponti had begun in previous design and curatorial projects, and was similarly promoted by Ugo Ojetti.169 While aligned with Marangoni’s endeavor, its editorial direction emphasized the role of the house as a social unit rather than simply a receptacle for market products, and advanced its role in the social regeneration of the country. This emphasis was initially influenced by Giovanni Semeria, a priest close to Ojetti, who was particularly interested in the house’s contribution to consolidating social order, and Ponti would align this interest with the nationalist premises of fascism.170 His first editorial, “La casa all’italiana,” framed the house as providing more than lodging and operating as a framework for shared life—not just the life of the family, but that of the nation. Linking this proposition to contemporaneous architectural discussions, Ponti argued that the Italian house was “not just a machine à habiter,” in a clear rebuttal of Le Corbusier’s famous arguments, but the container of a set of values deemed to be shared by Italians: “In the Italian house, comfort [in English in the original] is not only the correspondence between things and necessity [. . .]. This comfort is something superior. [. . .] [T]he Italian house invites the spirit to regenerate itself in restful, peaceful views, and in this resides the full sense of the fine Italian word conforto.”171 Defined as a national construct, the house was additionally presented as site for Italians to enjoy the framework of their shared life: “The Italian house is not the insulated and furnished refuge that protects inhabitants against the rigors of climate [. . .]. [It] is the place we choose to enjoy the beauties of our landscape.”172

In their appeal to the house as a receptacle of new products and for the shared life of Italians, these two journals became key media for architects to intervene in the furnishing of Italian interiors (to which we shall turn in the next chapter), in coordination with exhibitions and commercial platforms. And as Marangoni stepped back from the Monza exhibitions, Ponti became increasingly involved and would co-direct its fourth edition, held in 1930, along with architect Alberto Alpago-Novello and Mario Sironi, with Carlo Felice as secretary. Now renamed the International Exhibition of the Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, the show became a triennial event. Its program addressed the reciprocal relationship between the shifting conditions of production and consumption and the values and traditions of Italian society, with a focus on what was presented as “exemplary production.”173 This term simultaneously appealed to the condition of pieces that could serve as models produced by industrial means, as well as pieces that had a particular instructive value, communicating the new style to the population. The import of this focus and the growing relevance of the event in the public life of the country was marked with a visit by Il Duce himself.174

While maintaining a certain diversity, the works on show increasingly embraced less ornate versions of modernism. While some, authored by Ponti, Buzzi, and Melchiore Bega, among others, continued to display the traits characteristic of Novecento, others engaged more radical explorations of abstract form—as was the case for the work of younger designers such as Rava and Larco, Giuseppe Pagano, and Gino Levi-Montalcini. International contributions similarly represented different strands of modernism through the works of the Deutscher Werkbund, Wiener Werkstätte, and Bauhaus. These diverse sensibilities were also mirrored in various interventions in the neoclassical architecture of the Royal Palace, from the playful handling of classicist motifs in the floor patterns designed by Alpago-Novello to the more abstract spatial intervention of Terragni’s Sartoria (Tailor’s shop), a model room for modern tailoring.

In his introductory remarks, Ponti used the term “applied arts” to define the content of the exhibition. More than “decorative arts,” this suggested both the practical dimension of the objects on display and the way they could be deployed to achieve the higher goal of social transformation. In fact, more than just providing economic benefit to the country, Ponti proposed that these objects served as both “testimony and propaganda [. . .] for our style, our work, our taste, and our customs.”175 More precisely, they were both a form of representation and an agent in the dissemination of the properties of a national collective, both a result of those properties and a medium for their transformation. Considering that double valence, Ponti regarded the applied arts as the “collective work” of not only “creators [and] makers” but of “the person who orders them and the one who makes use of them.”176 Producers and consumers were seen as equally relevant actors in these operations, leading to the evaluation of the applied arts as “social arts.”177

Key to these arguments was the understanding that the applied arts could not achieve their “social” dimension without the mediation of industry. Ponti had addressed this theme in his earlier writings, including those he had developed for the 1925 Paris Expo. And yet his argument was radically different from the polemic advanced by Le Corbusier on the same occasion: whereas the French architect claimed that decorative arts needed to be stripped of decoration and made the remit of industry, rather than art, Ponti saw industry not as a substitute for art, but rather as a condition that would expand the reach of artists and allow their work to have a greater social impact.178 “In the coupling of art and industry,” he wrote, “art is the form, industry the precondition.”179 This position represented a shift from the supposedly organic relationship between the values of a specific society and its forms of expression for which the likes of Ojetti had previously argued. Instead, Ponti recognized the agency of the object itself in defining those values through its reproduction and distribution. But he also distanced himself from the understanding of a “productivist organicity,” where the object was directly determined by the logics of production, as Le Corbusier had it. Rather than emphasizing its impact on production, Ponti focused on the potential of industrialization to expand the circulation of the applied arts. He saw this as allowing the designer to pursue a “stylistic” enterprise of collective reach, broadening the audience for the objects and, with it, their participation in the desired process of social transformation.180 Nationalist organicism—the understanding of the organic relationship among all individuals in the nation—was to be pursued as a design project aided by the industry.

The “collective” nature of the applied arts was also supported by the consolidation of the educational platform associated with the Monza Biennale from the outset. The Università delle Arti Decorative, which relocated to Milan in 1926, was restructured as the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA, Higher institute for artistic industries) in 1929.181 The ISIA initially navigated the ongoing tensions between historical styles and modernism, between traditional crafts and new modes of production, local developments and international trends. Increasingly embracing modernism with both local and international faculty, the work of the school featured prominently in the 1930 Triennale.

And yet, the mere design of these objects did not suffice—they needed to be brought home, as Ojetti and Giolli had proposed. Material and cultural processes were inextricably linked in this concern: while the distribution of the industrially produced goods was meant to transform the domestic life of Italians, society itself needed to be remade to create a demand for those objects and set in motion the industrial processes that would allow them to become more widely diffused. This issue was addressed in a pair of articles published in Domus by Ponti and Carlo Felice in the wake of the 1930 Triennale. “We need an internal market for modern production” was the blunt title of Ponti’s text, which compared the backward nature of Italian production to the “impressive and overwhelming” output of other countries, supported by the “great market it enjoys at home.”182 In the next month’s issue, Felice responded to Ponti’s argument under the rubric: “We need an internal market for modern production, we need domestic production for this market.” In the absence of the necessary development of Italian industry, Felice wrote, the furniture market would operate in a void.183 The attempt to match production and distribution with reception and consumption was directed toward the international battle for Italian primacy in the applied arts while entangled with the transformation of both Italian houses and of the Italians who would bring those furnishings home.

The Modern Italian House

At this stage, however, the “new Italian house” had not yet assumed a definitive form: the furnishing articulated in the market-exhibitionary complex had developed faster than any architectural reality that could host it. The 1928 National Exposition in Turin, held on the same site as the 1911 World’s Fair, showed how furnishing had taken the lead. A model house (La Casa degli Architetti) was built to demonstrate the advances made in the architecture of housing, and yet it was the interiors designed by the GANT group of young Turin architects that attracted the most attention.184 These displayed a growing concern with coordinating the constituent elements of the interior to produce a unified environment, often through patterns linking floors, curtains, and upholstery (Figure 1.11). Here, the architects sought “to tighten the agreement that unites their taste, their knowledge and their will,” working with the contents of the house as a whole rather than with ensembles of furniture or isolated pieces of decorative arts.185 A living room designed by Giuseppe Pagano, Levi-Montalcini, and Ettore Pittini enacted this carefully crafted coordination of the environment of the house, which one critic deemed “organically unified.”186 Ponti praised the project as representing the work of “the modern Architect in the conception of the house” but at the same time insisted, as he had done before, on the role of the Italian population at large: “The public should now inform this effort, contributing their own demands for their own house, from the lines of the floorplan to the efficiency of its services, from the shape of the rooms to its lighting and, ultimately, its furnishing.”187

Figure 1.11. Gino Levi-Montalcini, Giuseppe Pagano, and Ettore Pittini, living room of La Casa degli Architetti, included in the National Exposition, Turin, 1928. Architettura e Arti Decorative VIII, 1.4 (December 1928).

If the National Exposition framed the project of furnishing with increasing clarity, the IV Monza Triennale of 1930 would bring its relation to the “new Italian house” into sharper focus, with a new dedicated architecture section of three model houses. Designed by different teams, each presented different visions rehearsed at the time for a unified modernist pursuit of social transformation articulated around the idea of the nation. The first of these projects was designed by Lancia and Ponti himself. The ultimate manifestation of their Domus Nova furnishing project, the Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house) carried this collaboration into the field of architecture. The single-story structure, formed of two volumes of different heights, was defined by Ponti as both a villino tipico (typical little house) and a “very suitable example of modern housing.”188 And yet it was neither “typical” nor simply “modern” but was, like the Domus Nova furniture items, a complex amalgamation of design features, combining classicist decorative motifs, including pediments above the windows, with novelties borrowed from European trends such as the tubular steel pergola over the flat roof of one of the volumes and traditional elements like the pitched roof of the other volume. The taller of the two volumes contained a single large space with the combined living/dining area; the bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom were ranged along a central corridor in the lower volume. The main space was organized as a stage set for Domus Nova furniture items, framed by decorated walls and ceilings—the former covered with printed fabric designed by De Angeli Frua, the latter with paintings by Arturo Songa (Figure 1.12). More than any of its stylistic features, it was the relation of this house with La Rinascente’s nationwide furnishing networks that supplied this project with its “Italian” characterization.

Figure 1.12. Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, Domus Nova vacation house, exterior and interior photographs, included in the Fourth International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Monza, 1930. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

The second house, the Casa del Dopolavorista, was designed and furnished by architect Luisa Lovarini for the Dopolavoro. In line with the organization’s larger agenda, the project favored aesthetic restraint and was furnished with simple and rather abstract pieces, even if Ponti thought these still carried the trace of a “bourgeois memory.”189 Although Lovarini was a fairly well-known designer who had previously exhibited in the decorative arts section of the Venice Biennale, this house received less attention than the others, with some reviews regarding it as “less original.”190 Here, the national reach of the project was enacted by the Dopolavoro’s direct engagement with the structures of the regime.

Last was the Casa Elettrica (Electric house), co-sponsored by Società Edison and designed by the young collective Gruppo 7. Unlike anything else seen in Italy at the time, the project was a more radical embracement of modern architecture developments in Europe. Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini were responsible for the architectural expression of the building—a white horizontal volume with floor-to-ceiling windows and a smaller upper level pierced with a thin horizontal opening, both covered with a flat roof expanding into a pergola.191 The interiors were by Guido Frette, Adalberto Libera, and the kitchen by Piero Bottoni. While expansive in both plan and section, with a double-height living area, the interior was sparsely furnished but featured some striking pieces, such as the armchairs defined as striped cylindrical volumes and a matching coffee table made of a stack of circular planes of glass (Figure 1.13). If these pieces displayed an avant-garde aesthetic in their radical abstract language and materiality, the kitchen, designed by Bottoni, unfolded its modernist agenda by following principles of domestic economy.192 The presentation of the project in Domus was followed by a text by Alberto Sartoris that helped situate many of the features of the house and the principles that guided its design within international trends, for which Sartoris proposed the term “rationalism.”193

Figure 1.13. Piero Bottoni, Luigi Figini, Guido Frette, Adalberto Libera, and Gino Pollini, Casa Elettrica, exterior and interior photographs, included in the Fourth International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts, Monza, 1930. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

In spite of all its innovations, Casa Elettrica did not come as a surprise to architects visiting Monza, since the architects of Gruppo 7 (who initially included Ubaldo Castiglioni along with Figini, Frette, Larco, Pollini, Rava, and Terragni) had already exhibited a series of speculative projects at the 1927 Biennale. Their position had gained significant attention with a series of articles published in the monthly La Rassegna Italiana in 1926–27, where they promoted a program of technical modernization and rationalization in conversation with other European explorations.194 Their approach to modernism had also been recognized in 1928, when it was featured in the First Italian Exposition of Rational Architecture (held in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome) alongside other examples of what was then called the Movimento Italiano per l’Architettura Razionale (MIAR). Gruppo 7 embraced the tenets of international modernism, which they saw as responding to a “new spirit [. . .] in the air.”195 Rava, most likely the author of these arguments, had close connections with the international networks in which the tenets of modernism were developed.196 And while this “spirit” could have developed toward different ideological programs, Gruppo 7 linked those principles to a project of regeneration that they argued had a “classical foundation” and distinctive “national characteristics.”197 Their goal was to articulate a collective project for the nation that would go beyond the sensibilities of individual artists and architects. “Architecture can no longer be individual,” they wrote in their first Rassegna article in 1926; “In the coordinated effort to save it, to lead it back to the most rigid logic, to the direct derivation from the problems of our times, we must sacrifice our own personalities; and only through this temporary standardization, through this fusion of all tendencies into one, can a new architecture, truly ours, be born.”198 In line with the broader project of fascism, the cultural regeneration and technical modernization that their house embodied was framed as a national pursuit—one that subsumed the individual into a collective “us” unified by the regime. At stake was the reorientation of both modernism and the national market of furnishing toward the production of such an exclusionary collective.

Together, the three different projects offered different versions of the “new Italian house,” a house that was simultaneously modern and Italian, “truly ours.” Within the unifying framework provided by architecture, the 1930 Monza Biennale completed the project of previous exhibitions, abandoning any regional classification of the works and, in the words of one critic, “finally renouncing peasant art, the mere representation of folklore, of blissful ignorance and sterile inexperience.”199 In place of that “inexperience,” it presented the expertise of the architect as the guarantor of a shared project that overcame stylistic differences: “Since Italian interior designers and decorators are most of them architects and, in any case, people of the trade, it is no longer possible to maintain boundaries among them even if we find they follow different trends and tastes. Neoclassicists and rationalists are in Milan as much as in Palermo, Turin, and Rome.”200 The architect, presented as the professional in charge of furnishing the “new Italian house” interiors, was understood to supersede regional practices and traditions. Linked to the complex of exhibitions and commercial platforms that framed their work, their designs not only contributed to the “rhetorical elaboration” of this house, as Marangoni had it, but aligned with an economic endeavor and a social quest—with the house operating both as an agent and consequence of the transformation of Italian society.

Epilogue: Traveling Designs

The circulation of Italian furniture expanded beyond the walls of Monza’s Royal Palace and La Rinascente’s stores. While the Domus Nova line grew to include pieces by various designers, projects by Ponti and Lancia (including the Schejoja apartment in 1929) incorporated their own pieces from the collection. Moreover, these furnishings would also reach beyond national borders. In 1928, only a few months after the closing of the III Monza Biennale, an International Exhibition of Art in Industry was hosted by Macy’s department store in that great city of commerce, New York. The Italian contribution to the show included pieces of glassware, textiles, and ceramics along with two installations from Monza, Casorati’s butcher’s shop and one of the Domus Nova interiors. Ponti and Lancia’s project for the 1927 Biennale was set against a new backdrop, again designed by Arturo Songa, but this time featuring Liberty style curvilinear and plant motifs. The easily reproduced decorative framework made the project highly suited to this kind of traveling display.

In an article in Domus Carlo Felice proudly noted that “the so-called experts from America had acknowledged the value and character of Italian production”—though he omitted to mention the source of this evaluation.201 In a parallel display of national pride, one American reviewer interpreted the exhibition as a “prodigal return” of modern art to its spiritual home: “All the contributions, whether from Scandinavia, from Italy, from Munich or Vienna or Paris, are very much in the American spirit. In fact, many things too familiar to Americans to be really looked at by them are here attractively set before us by artists of other countries, and by American artists too.”202 The distinctive character of the Italian contribution was thus dismissed, and the furnishing of the Italian house was merged with the rest of the furniture in the common spaces of the department store. But even if this review might be regarded as superficial, eliding the clear differences between the different objects on display, its invoking of the “familiarity” of these domestic interiors reflected the increasingly transnational circulation of forms, arguments, and ideas. In fact, the “Italian” condition of the Domus Nova products and interiors depended less on their specific design features than it did on their socialization—on their discussion, display, and contextualization in the exhibitions and market venues in which “Italianness” was shaped, made ready for its consumption and its performance at home.

While the Macy’s exhibition integrated modern Italian furnishings into an international community, contemporaneous ethnographic exhibitions tended to other the Italians, mainly from the South, who had migrated in their millions to the United States.203 At the time, New York had the fourth-largest Italian population of any city, after only Rome, Milan, and Naples, and Italy’s domestic economy benefited hugely from the remittances they sent to their homeland. But while the contribution of the diaspora was critical in Italy, the migrant population residing in New York was belittled not only by Americans but by their own compatriots. In the words of the intellectual Giuseppe Prezzolini, head of Columbia University’s Casa Italiana, they were “not Italians, because they have never been Italians. Here they have taken on certain American habits [. . .], but at base they have remained southern peasants without a culture, without learning, without a language, people for whom the moment of ‘italianità’ has never arrived. They leave Italy before being Italians. They have settled here but have become real Americans.”204 “Italianness” was seen as a condition that did not necessarily apply to all Italians (and particularly not to the peasants, or to people from the South).

Like the “making” of Italy and Italians, the construction of the Italian home, with its inclusions and exclusions, remained a contingent definition requiring the mediation of design. And such mediation was negotiated with transient populations, commodities in motion, and traveling imaginaries. Furnishing decisively contributed to shape and disseminate “Italianness” (italianità) itself as a circulating condition that framed the life of Italians both throughout the peninsula and in the diaspora.205 Transformed into commodities, furnishings had the capacity to disseminate and mobilize meanings and populations but, at the same time, they also stabilized and consolidated them.

Two

Interiors in Print Media

“The Question of Taste”

In a letter dated September 29, 1933, the editor of Corriere della Sera invited architect and designer Gio Ponti to write for his newspaper, Italy’s best-selling daily. Ponti had already contributed an article on “Women and the Applied Arts” in 1930, but it was this letter from Aldo Borelli that prompted his lifelong collaboration with Corriere.1 The invitation set out the scope of Ponti’s contributions, explicitly requesting columns on domestic interiors, as distinct from architecture: “I propose that you write two articles every month for Corriere della Sera on the topic of the house and all related questions: furnishing, modern services, use of the space, etc.” While the invitation signaled the relevance that such topics had gained for the national readership of the newspaper, a preemptive warning completed this definition of Ponti’s remit: “You should be careful to keep a descriptive tone, avoiding artistic criticism, which has, as you know, been left to His Excellency Ojetti.”2 It was the journalist and art critic Ugo Ojetti who had served as the go-between for Ponti and Borelli, telling the newspaper’s editor of the architect’s interest in writing the column.3 Ponti appeared to accept Borelli’s constraints: in one of his first articles, he spells out his intention to avoid “speaking about modern architecture from an artistic point of view, that is, in terms of all those issues that have been the object of such fierce controversy, such passionate partisanship, and such angry resistance.”4

Borelli’s careful treading around the issue of criticism should be seen in relation to critic Pietro Maria Bardi’s call, in 1931, to consider architecture as an “art of the state,”5 in line with the regime’s increased efforts to manage and reshape Italian culture throughout the 1930s.6 Ojetti’s close ties to both the fascist regime and the newspaper (of which he had been managing editor for two years) ensured that Corriere would avoid unnecessary polemics—even if those polemics were inscribed in the regime’s engagement with architecture. While the internal tensions of the fascist ideology had found a privileged outlet in the syncretism of the Novecento style, as discussed in the previous chapter, during the 1930s the regime allied itself with multiple approaches, from those with clear references to classicism (represented by Ojetti and some initially close to him, among them Ponti himself) to the avant-garde aesthetics of rationalism (including those promoted by Bardi, such as famed architect Giuseppe Terragni). All options found a place within the program of fascism, albeit with explicit tensions and shifting emphases throughout this period.

Seemingly situated beyond these polemics, the concerns with the house and its furnishings were framed as either a practical matter or a question of taste. This latter paradigm was the one deployed by critic and designer Edoardo Persico to navigate the aforementioned controversies in his analysis of the relation between Ponti and Emilio Lancia’s Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house) and Terragni’s Sartoria (Tailor’s shop)—both designed for the IV Monza Triennale of 1930, with which we concluded the previous chapter. Writing in the magazine La casa bella, Persico proposed that, in spite of their different versions of modernism, the furnishings of both interiors shared the same impetus, since both were intended “to decorate the new house, imagining the people of our time”—“imagining” because, one would have to assume, these people did not yet exist in Italy.7 According to Persico, the two projects shared a broad commitment—one commonly pursued across different modernist trends—to a process of renewal of the house that was framed within the social and cultural regeneration of the country. And yet, Persico concluded his arguments by proposing that “the two aesthetic positions, as they appear in Monza, leave open the debate on the question of taste [gusto].”8

Ponti’s contributions to Corriere, along with his work for the magazine Domus (which he had founded in 1928 and edited up to 1940), were framed by the broad emphasis on the renewal of the house that Persico outlined.9 And far from avoiding “artistic criticism” or remaining isolated from the development of fascism, as Borrelli had requested, they became a means to participate in the manifold entanglements between modernism and fascist politics—not through the stylistic polemics that so concerned the newspaper’s editor, but by participating in the so-called “question of taste.”10 Ponti’s pursuits were, in fact, in conversation with Persico’s, which the latter developed as a contributor to La casa bella (founded by Guido Marangoni at the same time as Domus).11 After Marangoni left the magazine in 1930, its profile was increasingly shaped by Persico himself alongside architect and critic Giuseppe Pagano. Pagano would become the magazine’s editor from 1933 to 1943, with Persico as his coeditor from 1935 until his premature death in 1936.

In analyzing these publications, my goal is not to explore how the stylistic agendas they promoted sought to embody fascist ideology through their diverse versions of modernist aesthetics. In fact, stylistic debates were meddled by “elements of ‘ambiguity,’” as Fabrizio Brunetti has argued, where “the identification between novecento and rationalism”—two among the camps involved in the aforementioned “fierce controversies”—“was not unusual at the time.”12 My analysis also departs from any attempt to distill a unified line of argumentation in these publications. I rather discuss them as a medium resulting in a broad assemblage of information on the house and address their role in the articulation of furnishings as information. Consequently, I evaluate the politics of furnishings in the forms of power that they mediated through their role in the renewal of the house interior and the formation of taste for the Italian population with their new condition as information.

The role of modernist furnishing in the transformation of domestic spaces throughout the country and their challenge to entrenched tastes (with their associated values) might have been used in a collective pursuit of dignity or as a medium for liberation from established hierarchies. But I explore how instead it consistently followed elitist agendas and often referred to the nation as the ideological apparatus of the state in the service of fascism. As a result, the “people of our time” that Persico imagined within modernist interiors were frequently aligned with the “new Italians” that Mussolini aimed to shape—sometimes through the mediation of designers and critics, and others in spite of their will. Consequently, I discuss how the pursuit for the renewal of the house and the formation of taste related, in different forms, both to the ethos of modernism and the palingenetic project of fascism: its emphasis on social regeneration and national rebirth.13

I discuss this overarching pursuit in relation to the seemingly contradictory cultural stances of Mussolini’s government, which some historians see as a corollary of the regime’s attempt to legitimize its power through “hegemonic pluralism,”14 and others as fundamental to fascism—offering, following Jeffrey Schnapp, “the taut but hollow frame over which a canvas must be stretched in order for the illusion of fullness to spring forth.”15 To the ambiguities and contradictions of fascism I add the insecurities of Italian society in general, and the readership of these publications in particular, in the face of the country’s rapid transformation.16 If fascism offered a response to those insecurities by providing meaning to the lives of Italians through their collective allegiance to Mussolini, the program of these publications offered a way for their readers to participate in that transformation—ultimately bringing them together by linking their houses with the framework provided by nation.

In this exploration, I am inspired by Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the nation “as a form of cultural elaboration” that, following Edward Said’s reading of Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci, involves “subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding.”17 Iargue that the assemblage of information within these publications engaged in these operations as they aimed to modernize Italian households and regenerate Italian society, a task that was both constructive and destructive.

A Publication Arena

The “fierce controversies” that so concerned Borelli were aired in a variety of publications. Ojetti himself wrote criticism for a number of art journals, always promoting a conservative appropriation of classicism as an Italian style.18 However, this period also saw the creation of print platforms specific to architecture, supporting an increasingly sophisticated discourse for the newly constituted profession. Of these, Architettura e Arti Decorative, founded by Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini in 1921, was the closest thing the regime had to an official mouthpiece in architecture.19 The magazine conveyed diverse tendencies and a moderate approach to modernism, while Piacentini’s own work privileged a simplified classicism that evolved beyond the ornate projects of Novecento to incorporate some of the sensibilities of rationalism.20

Also seeking to align architecture and fascist politics was Bardi’s and Massimo Bontempelli’s Quadrante. From 1933 to 1936, the magazine provided the main platform for the more radical rationalists, bringing together some former members of Gruppo 7 and a younger generation including the BBPR group (Gianluigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Ernesto Nathan Rogers).21 While Quadrante was not an official organ of the regime, it was supported by the fascist politician Giuseppe Bottai as well as the industrialist Adriano Olivetti. And like Architettura, it sought to strengthen the connections between architecture and the political structures of Mussolini’s government and diverse aspects of its programs. It promoted rationalism as the embodiment of Italian values and the proper means of representation for fascism, included arguments on urbanism as an enactment of corporate ideology, and engaged in sophisticated discussions of modernism in the high arts and its ideology.

With his focus on the house, Ponti’s publications seemingly offered an alternative to the more explicit political program of those journals. And yet, his arguments built on a well-established tradition of Italian publications that explored diverse relations between domestic space and politics. Paramount among them were publications on domestic economy, including Maria Gasca Diez’s article “Aesthetic and Hygienic Notes on Furnishing” (1925) and her book Kitchen of Yesterday and Kitchen of Tomorrow (1928).22 Educated in the medical field, her arguments were in conversation with foreign titles such as Christine Frederick’s The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management (1913) and Paulette Bernège’s De la méthode ménagère (1926), both of which she translated into Italian. Domestic economy had a longer history in Italy, going back to the first decades of the twentieth century, when bourgeois women’s groups and Catholic associations offered courses for working-class families within a broader culture of household management or massaismo.23 This reformist agenda was soon embraced by the regime-sponsored Ente Nazionale Italiano per l’Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro (National Italian institute for the scientific organization of work).24 Focusing first on concerns with hygiene, and on what Maristella Casciato has termed “the preparation of the woman for her technological household,” arguments on domestic economy increasingly hinged on the rationalization of the house and its furnishing.25 And, while such a project was developed throughout different geographies with diverse politics, in Italy it was often articulated as a way to perfect the house as a manifestation of the revolutionary spirit of fascist modernization.26

Architects were quick to elaborate this knowledge for professional audiences. Significant in this regard was the dissemination in Italy of European housing models, but Italian architects also contributed to the advancement and systematization of this knowledge.27 Enrico Griffini, a member of the Movimento Italiano per l’Architettura Razionale (MIAR), helped to shape the debate both through his own projects and through his comprehensive and widely read manual Costruzione razionale della casa (Rational house construction, 1931).28 Griffini rehearsed his theories of housing in his project for the Quartiere “Alla Fontana” in Milan with E. Manfredi in 1930, his competition entry for public housing in San Siro with Piero Bottoni in 1932, and his contribution to the 1933 Milan Triennale, again with Bottoni.29 His manual developed some of the same references as publications on domestic economy, but also incorporated studies by Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, and Alexander Klein, and gathered taxonomies of housing typologies, light studies, model furnishings, and prescriptions on room dimensions and devices similar to those developed by Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper for Architectural Graphic Standards in 1932 and by Ernst Neufert for the Architect’s Data of 1936 (Figure 2.1).30

Figure 2.1. Enrico A. Griffini, diagrams of different bedroom types and furniture distributions. Costruzione razionale della casa: La teoria dell’abitazione. Nuovi sistemi costruttivi. Orientamenti attuali nella costruzione, la distribuzione, la organizzazione della casa (Milano: Hoepli, 1933). Courtesy of Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti.

Figure Description

Title, in Italian, reads: “Organization of the bedroom.” Text also describes different categories: “Bedroom for one bed / Bedroom for two beds / Master Bedroom / Master Bedroom with Concealable Beds (curtains) / Bedroom for the Children and Guests.”

While seeking to convey a technoscientific form of authority with his manual, Griffini presented his program as a part of a historical quest that aligned with that of fascism, by framing the modern house within an “evolution” that went from “prehistoric dwelling” to the classical architecture of Rome. He additionally referenced the vernacular architecture of Italy, which he knew well, and while acknowledging that it offered “useful comparisons” for the study of modern housing, his pursuit of rationalization was at odds with the diversity of these regional architectures.31

A number of bestsellers simultaneously made modern housing and furnishing tenets available for wider audiences and had more ambiguous political orientations. These included Elisa Ricci’s La casa of 1921 and, from around the same period as Ponti’s publications, Lidia Morelli’s La casa che vorrei avere (The house I wish I had, 1930) and Como sistemare e gobernare la casa mia (How to fix and manage my house, 1931).32 Morelli, who had started her career as an educator, helped to advance functionalist principles in line with the ethos of domestic management while helping to promote both guidelines and models explored in architecture debates both nationally and internationally—including international references to the likes of Le Corbusier, and local ones to Griffini and even Ponti, and furnishings ranging from tubular steel frame chairs to ornated Novecento desks.

These publications prioritized straightforward communication, using plain language and making technical documents easier to understand (with instructions on how to read a plan, for example). In this way, they hoped to ensure that large segments of the population came to see the principles of simplicity, utility, and economy as a plausible and desirable project, integral to the renewal of the home for “the new era,” in opposition to both “traditionalism” and “imitation.”33 While addressed to the occupants of the modern house, Morelli’s texts significantly emphasize the needed contribution of an expert “furnisher” (arredatore) for the definition of domestic space. And this was a role that she identified along gender lines: even if “women” might have “the most fantastic and practical ideas,” she argued that it was still “the architect who is specialized in making beautiful homes and rejuvenating old ones”34—deferring to an external agent, defined as distinct from “women,” the control of this modernization (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2. Lidia Morelli, perspective of a room with a sofa bed. La casa che vorrei avere, Come ideare, disporre, arredare, abbellire, rimodernare la mia casa (Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 1931).

Figure Description

The image includes typed caption text, in Italian, which reads: “The sofa bed is providential in a bedroom with carefully measured space. If not too soft, it retains its shape, without giving away its dual purpose.”

Other publications located this specialist knowledge within the transformations wrought by modernity, encompassing new artistic practices and technologies as well as the development of a new culture of commodities. One example was Problemi d’arte attuale, a magazine published in 1927 by the art and architecture critic Raffaello Giolli, which conceived the house as the ultimate receptacle for all the manifestations of modernity and an impetus toward renewal that was framed by his liberal politics. Overcoming the traditional boundaries of artistic disciplines, this broad exploration of the house sought to challenge “those who ignore that art is to be found as much in a cheap alarm clock or a telephone as in a painting.”35 Indeed, along with more conventional articles devoted to modernist painting and sculpture, the short-lived magazine aimed to shape modern interiors and domestic practices, with pieces of advice on everyday life and a goal to “become as practical as possible.”36

Ponti’s critical and editorial work built on, and dialogued with, these diverse traditions. Taking advantage of the serial and multivocal nature of the journal format, from 1928 the monthly Domus brought together the different knowledges, languages, and forms of representation mobilized in these other publications. The magazine characteristically framed this assemblage by situating the house within a larger quest that Ponti defined as gathering the best expressions of culture “in relation to the men and the affairs of the day”—a pursuit that manifested both in a commitment to the technical modernization of the household and an engagement with the aesthetics of modernism.37 While its agenda was clear, its enactment was characteristically less streamlined. The magazine’s engagement with technical concerns was very varied and addressed in a range of genres. Some articles were clearly aimed at professionals, addressing topics such as spatial distributions of furnishing, dimensions for the rationalization of housing, recommendations for new materials, and construction details. Others presented technical subjects in a way that was easy for a general audience to follow—including, for example, recommendations for the organization of storage. But Ponti’s agenda was far from limited to technical concerns: famously, his editorial in the first issue of Domus rejects the reduction of the home to a machine à habiter, even if he would later praise the capacity of the concept to address “clearly and effectively [. . .] the rational tendency of modern architecture.”38 In fact, the magazine placed those technical concerns in dialogue with cultural values, appealing to an understanding of the house as “the ‘container’ of our happy and sad times, [. . .] the temple of our noblest thoughts.”39 This resulted in an expansive approach to modernity, conveyed through diverse (and sometimes contradictory) interventions in contemporary architectural debates, in illustrated reviews of architectural projects, in proposals for different pieces of furniture and decoration, and in commentaries on culture and domestic practices, from literature to cooking (Plate 1).

La casa bella also adopted a loose approach to the modernization of the house in its early years. In an article from December 1930, Persico set out the magazine’s agenda in terms similar to Domus and discussed its search “for the intimate accord between a chair and the page of a book, between a room and a statue, between a piece of fabric and a piece of glass.”40 Persico would develop this program in a series of articles on “Stile” (Style) published during the early 1930s, which combined broad reflections on modern culture with images of interiors, pictures of artworks, new technological innovations, and changing urban landscapes, among others (Figure 2.3). Significantly both Domus and La casa bella were a meeting point of positions conveyed in other publications. Both featured projects by BBPR and Griffini and reviews of Morelli’s books, and Griffini penned articles for both magazines while Morelli regularly contributed to La casa bella on subjects such as needlework.

Figure 2.3. Spread of Edoardo Persico, “Style,” La casa bella 2 (August 1930). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The profiles of the two magazines would become more distinct after 1933, when La casa bella was acquired by the publisher of Domus and renamed Casabella—a title that abandoned the emphasis on the “house.”41 Under Pagano and Persico, Casabella shifted toward a more professional focus on architecture, even if specific articles occasionally targeted a broader audience (as in the arguments addressed by Pagano to the “ladies who are asking to have their houses built”).42 The contents were now more clearly structured around building descriptions and technical documentation and a more unequivocal embrace of new building technologies and the aesthetics of rationalism.43 The shift in Casabella’s contents was accompanied by a new format, with squared pages and a radical modern graphic design influenced by Persico, with a sans serif font and justified type (Figure 2.4).44 While Pagano spearheaded this new direction, Persico’s writings continued to engage with furnishing and interiors, providing an intellectual response to the topics raised in Domus. The work of other members of the editorial staff, such as Anna Maria Mazzucchelli and Giulia Veronesi, along with the contributions of Giulio Carlo Argan and Carlo Levi, among others, helped to shape a strong intellectual agenda that supported the magazine’s new emphasis while decisively grounding it in conversation with the arts.45 But in spite of an increasing distillation of the materials featured in its articles and the aesthetics it promoted, the magazine continued to be regarded by other critics as too eclectic in its scope.46

Figure 2.4. Table of contents, Casabella 63 (March 1933). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure Description

Headline reads "Casabella” and identifies the issue with text in Italian: “Year VI, Number 3, March 1933, XI. Monthly magazine. Director Giuseppe Pagano - Pogatschnig. Editor: Edoardo Persico.”

With its broader remit, Domus provided a unique platform for a number of alliances between architects, experts in domestic management, furniture producers, and cultural critics. It also sought to cut across different audiences; its stated intention was, in fact, to reach large swaths of the growing middle classes and to contribute to the renewal of the nation’s housing. And yet, the tastes and practices it mobilized were often restricted to specific constituencies, essentially the urban elites who, along with architects and designers, constituted its primary readership. In its early years, La casa bella had addressed a similar readership, but increasingly it focused on architects—and its print run was reduced accordingly.47 The difference between these two sets of audiences should be treated with caution, however, given that architects were critically related to the same urban elites whom Domus addressed.48 The conflation of the imagined readership of idealized inhabitants of Italian households with the actual, selected readership was critical in affirming both the architect and the upper-class city dweller as the leaders of a project of domestic renewal that sought to reach the middle classes and even the population as a whole. As a matter of fact, these magazines fused the bourgeois culture of household management and reform with a new professional commitment in architecture to the modernization of the house interior and the stylization of its furniture and decoration.

The magazines shared their condition with the modernist interiors that they featured: both were spaces in which diverse arguments and materials were brought together, making clear their interrelations but also their points of divergence. Flipping through the pages of the February 1930 issue of Domus, one finds reviews of domestic architectural projects such as Villa Fiocchi a Castello by Tomaso Buzzi (a favorite of the magazine), furniture ads for the Thonet bentwood chairs so celebrated by Le Corbusier, an article dedicated to flowers for the house, a retrospective essay on English cottages, images of furniture with a clear Viennese inspiration, and columns on art publications, along with music recommendations. Within this miscellany, a photograph showing a partial view of an interior features “a very sweet and practical” wicker table with a mirrored tray on top, slightly tilted in relation to its support, holding a coffee set designed by Gio Ponti and produced by Richard Ginori, alongside a publication on furnishings by none other than Domus (Figure 2.5).49 Rather than being an external agent, the magazine was itself part of the set of materials that modern interiors brought together—an object one would have expected to find there.50 The interior of the home that these magazines addressed was not only featured in the media and inclusive of media but was ultimately shaped by the media. As I shall now discuss, the editors of both Domus and Casabella understood their magazines as key instruments in the formation of taste that the interiors they featured sought to reflect.

Figure 2.5. Page of Domus with photographs of a wicker table, including copies of a Domus publication. Domus 27 (March 1930). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

A “Modern Tradition”

In spite of the increasing differences between Domus and Casabella, the emphasis on taste allowed both of them to extend architectural discourse on interiors beyond the limits imposed by the positivist emphasis of housing manuals or the arguments of those who sought to make a direct link between architecture and fascism through symbolic programs: “Functional architecture? Architecture as an expression of society?” Persico prompted, before suggesting: “There is only the concept of taste.”51 While the category was embraced by Ponti in Domus, it was particularly developed and also mobilized by Persico in Casabella.

The introduction of the notion of taste into Italian aesthetic discourse owed a great deal to the art historian and critic Lionello Venturi, whom Persico had met after moving to Turin from his native Naples in 1927. A devout Catholic, Persico became part of a broad intellectual circle that included the anti-fascist journalist Piero Gobetti and was attuned to the developments in art and architecture in the rest of Europe.52 While some have seen these sources as indicating an anti-fascist stance, Persico also published in Bottai’s journal Critica Fascista throughout this period and was friends with Bardi, who was rather close to the regime.53 In fact, it was at Bardi’s invitation that Persico moved to Milan in 1929 to work with La casa bella.54 Pagano, his collaborator at the magazine, had been born into a Jewish family in Parenzo, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now part of Croatia). He attended the Italian-language Lyceum in Trieste and enlisted in the Italian Army in World War 1. After graduating from the Turin Polytechnic School in 1924, he became an early adherent of fascism and a pioneer of rationalism, first as a member of the young group of Turin architects GANT (Giovani Architetti Novatori Torinese), later in collaborations with Gino Levi-Montalcini, and then on his own.55

The rich context of 1920s Turin—which was not only one of Italy’s main industrial centers but also a cultural powerhouse, home to both Gobetti and Gramsci—was key to Venturi’s intellectual project.56 There, he was closely linked to the industrialist Riccardo Gualino, vice president of Fiat in partnership with Giovanni Agnelli, president of SNIA Viscosa and owner of the newspapers Stampa, Gazzetta del Popolo, and Ambrosiano.57 As Gualino’s artistic adviser, Venturi brought together a significant group of artists and intellectuals, including the so-called “Six Painters of Turin” (Jessie Boswell, Gigi Chessa, Nicola Galante, Carlo Levi, Francesco Menzio, and Enrico Paulucci) whose work rejected the classicist language of the Novecento artists and was more closely tied to post-Impressionist painting in France.58 Both Pagano and Persico were part of this circle, and the former, along with Levi-Montalcini, was commissioned to design Gualino’s office building and family apartment.59 Led by Venturi, who was often quoted by both of the magazine’s editors, the whole group cemented Casabella’s contribution to modernist discourse, in spite of the different politics that motivated them, which included, significantly, the antifascist position of both Venturi (who left Italy, going first to France and then to the United States, only returning after the war) and Levi (who was exiled in the South between 1935 and 1936, then lived in France from 1939 until 1941, when he was imprisoned; he was released only after Mussolini’s arrest in 1943).

The notion of taste was central to Venturi’s work, which sought to situate aesthetic production within historical frameworks of interpretation by linking the work of individual artists to their context and the work of their contemporaries.60 This connection was particularly relevant in relation to the work of philosopher Benedetto Croce, who played a key role in artistic discourse in Italy at the time.61 Croce’s idealist approach emphasized the judgment of the individual artist and explicitly defined art as standing apart from other realms of life—a distinction Venturi aimed to overcome: “Since history is history not only of heroic moments, but also of everyday life, without which the heroic moments would neither be possible nor understood, the history of art is, always has been, and, so far as can be foreseen, always will be, a history of taste.”62 For him, this connection provided vital insight into the moral and political dimension of artistic phenomena, which he thought emanated from their relation to specific traditions.63

Venturi first set out his ideas on taste in Il gusto dei primitivi (1926), but he would develop his arguments for an architectural audience in a text that he published in Casabella after Pagano and Persico took over as editors. The title of the article, “Per la nuova architettura” (Toward a new architecture), was a play on Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, with the addition of the qualifier “new,” emphasizing the historicity of Venturi’s own program.64 As Venturi saw it, Le Corbusier had confused the notion of tradition with something fixed—“with the pensée du clocher, that is, with folkloric taste”—and had therefore come to see it as an obstacle to the development of the new architecture. The tradition that Venturi invoked, by contrast, was not the popular customs of the regions of Italy, or the classicist heritage that others sought to mobilize, but a new construction—one aligned with an already existing “European artistic tradition” and a shifting “way of seeing” that he thought underpinned “our general artistic taste.”65

Persico embraced Venturi’s emphases with an understanding of the collective nature of artistic creation that he outlined in La casa bella: “The creation of a style is never a commitment to a solitary effort, but the living cooperation of the entire epoch.”66 Within this understanding, Persico addressed different manifestations of culture and devoted specific attention to how architectural interiors folded these in as a form of expression where the emphasis on taste was detached from “any programmatic limitation.”67 This approach was in conversation with the writings of other contributors to Casabella’s discourse—including Argan (who explored how modern architecture brought together construction and decoration in a form of “completeness” that could only be evaluated by considering architecture as a producer of effects) and Levi (who similarly emphasized architecture’s capacity to “fold into a superior unity the particular elements of which it is formed.”)68 In line with this understanding, the group advanced a project for a modern architecture characterized by the “taste of impressionism”—a proposition that resonated in particular with the realm of furnishing and the understanding of architectural interiors as ambienti (environments).69

In fact, while both Domus and Casabella operated as characteristically modern assembles of diverse information, their editors emphasized the need for aesthetic cohesion within modernist interiors. While some interior ensembles remained a provisional arrangement of furniture and objects, a proper project of “furnishing” (arredamento), in Persico’s view, was one that had the capacity to bring them together as a “work of art.”70 In reviews of interiors designed by Luciano Baldessari, Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini, Franco Albini, and Giancarlo Palanti, among others, Persico highlighted the harmony achieved through color and pattern, the rhythmic modulation of spaces, and the spatial order obtained through the arrangement of the furniture.71 But rather than evaluating the intrinsic stylistic qualities of these aesthetic features or examining their functional properties, Persico focused on the way furnishings provided an “expression” of their function as a characteristic emphasis of the time, or provided evidence of the shifting culture of the country.72 While Croce had also taken account of art’s “expressive” capacity, he had explored the artwork as a manifestation of the individual creator’s “mood,” whereas Persico proposed that the interior mirrored societal values, in accordance with Venturi’s emphasis.73

Figure 2.6. Franco Albini, interior of an apartment for Laura Petti, Milan, 1934. Domus 82 (October 1934). Courtesy Fondazione Franco Albini.

The pursuit of coordination characteristic of the furnishing of interiors manifested in the prominent role played by photographs in both Domus and Casabella. Most of these emphasized a comprehensive and cohesive image of a room, using wide angles in both diagonal and frontal perspectives (Figure 2.6). Furnishing was the main focus of the photographs, as it was through objects rather than spatial relations that interiors were defined within architecture. Relations between rooms were rarely featured, given that the spatial organization of interiors remained for the most part rather simple. Perspective drawings of rooms were often modeled after photographs, with the use of wide angles and three-point perspectives simulating the views forcibly framed by the camera (Plate 2). These representations were key to the magazines’ project, inasmuch as they brought together the heterogeneous elements that constituted the interiors, defining a cohesive aesthetic that ultimately developed the capacity of the photograph as a medium for “composition” and “construction.”74 In photographs, different fragments could be regarded as an environment and evaluated as a question of taste.

Significantly, these photographs were media representations of interiors that were understood as forms of “expression”—operating, as Claire Zimmerman has argued about the photographs of modern architecture, as “mediated images that mediate other forms of images.”75 The capacity of interiors to be themselves regarded as a form of expression was the object of reviews not only in Casabella, but also in Domus. Borrowing from Persico’s sophisticated critical emphases, Ponti regarded a project by BBPR as embodying a “very human and lively sense of inhabitation,” rather than evaluating how it was directly engaged with its actual occupancy.76 He viewed the project’s technical properties in a similar way, celebrating the interior for its “poetry of precision” rather than its actual precision.77 Ultimately, the whole design was regarded as a “suggestion” of “a real domestic atmosphere (atmosfera),” subverting the relationship between the interior and its communication. The understanding of furnishings as aesthetic expressions along with the emphases of the discourse of taste was, in fact, entangled with their mediated representation in print media.78

“The Consciousness of a Polemic”

If furnishings and interiors could become a form of “expression” for a specific context and a “suggestion” of specific values, then it was not without polemics that they were evaluated—particularly in the increasingly politicized Italy of the 1930s. While the 1930 Triennale had “left open the question of taste,” these polemics became evident in the context of the 1933 Exhibition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts and Modern Architecture, the first of this series of exhibitions to move from Monza to Milan and curated by Gio Ponti and artist Mario Sironi.79 The exhibition demonstrated the diverse, even if increasingly consolidated, positions in modern Italian architecture and design, with the radical rationalist proposals of Italian architects set in contrast to the classicist framework provided by the new Palazzo dell’Arte designed by Giovanni Muzio, the sculptures of Leone Lodi with Mario Sironi, and the murals of Carlo Carrà. Also on show were avant-garde projects from across Europe, with exhibits dedicated to major modernist figures, from Loos to Le Corbusier. In the realm of furnishing, the pieces featured in the exhibition reflected a broad range of sensibilities, from an elegant bent tubular steel frame chair by Agnoldomenico Pica to the painted wood structure with woven rush sponsored by the ENAPI, Bauhaus-like teapots, and lavishly decorated wood chests of drawers (Figure 2.7). A number of structures built in the park put the arguments of these furnishings in relation to architecture, with houses designed by a cadre of modernist architects. And as much as Domus and Casabella made an effort to present this diversity as a unified form of expression (a taste), the show made evident the conflicting agendas that the diverse designs proposed.

Figure 2.7. Agnoldomenico Pica, tubular steel frame and leather seat chair (left) and Emanuele Rambaldi, painted wood and woven rush seat chairs (right) produced by Guidi Chaippe, Chiavari, featured in the ENAPI hall, V Milan Triennale, 1933. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

The Triennale set out to explore “the rapport: style civiltà [culture, civilization],” that is, the relation between aesthetic and societal values, as well as between design and politics.80 And in the evaluation of that relation, the exhibition’s program (essentially outlined by Ponti) addressed both the influence of processes of modernization and the values deemed characteristic of the Italian population: while “universally adopted uses and techniques, intense scientific and cultural exchange, rapid and continuous communication” were seen to link Italian culture to an international process of progress, “the fervor, pride, commitment of each nation and the impulse of each race brings to this common culture the most unique contribution, imprinting forms of life and customs, transforming the taste and thinking of the men of today—dominating, finally, our time.”81 The uniqueness of Italy as a nation was highlighted in the understanding of the term culture (civiltà) as a specific construct linked to a collectivity that was framed along territorial and racial lines.82 Mussolini himself had argued that a unified art had the potential to both express and anticipate the values of a unified Italian culture (for which he also used the term civiltà).83

Ponti used Domus to advance the implications of this curatorial framework in conversation with the understanding of architectural interiors as a form of expression, with the proposition of buildings as an “interpretation of contemporary life expressed fundamentally through architecture and as a complement through furniture.”84 And, quite decisively, these expressions were also a way of “anticipating” such life by shaping “the environment in which [it] should unfold.”85 Formal and decorative propositions would not only stem from a specific set of values that the work of the architect would seek to translate: they were also a form of “anticipation” of those values produced by the architect, with the interior’s expressive capacity projected into the future and consequently conceptualized as a productive reality. If the interior was a representation that carried the values “of our own culture,” he argued, such values were the ones that “we build” through this representation.86

Just as in the exhibition, Ponti aligned this approach both with the ethos of modernism and with the cultural program of the regime by evaluating certain aesthetic characteristics of modern furnishings within a national framework and embracing a sense of cultural exceptionalism, insisting that “in the simplification, in the health, purity, and sincerity of forms and means that the best pursue, we find an ideal will for creating a superior and more honest form for our life, and the will to follow it.”87 Furnishings could be then evaluated in relation to “ideal, moral, and civil values,” along with the understanding that “the architecture of the house is as much a problem of culture [civiltà] as it is a problem of art.”88 If the discourse of taste evaluated furnishings as synthetic aesthetic expressions, it was through the dissemination of these expressions, Ponti proposed, that it could engage in a process of social transformation and cultural regeneration. Italian furnishings could then be understood, in Ponti’s words, to “mirror today’s culture and customs”—with the mirror operating both in the reflection and shaping of new Italians.89

Persico, similarly, saw architecture and decoration as “the mirror of human affairs, establishing a relevant network of relations and reflections.”90 And yet, he was less consistent in constraining these mutually constitutive relations within a national framework, and his more open and liberal critical approach typically lacked the sense of national exceptionality that permeated Ponti’s statements. In fact, his work was grounded in a broad European lineage that ranged from Augustus Pugin to William Morris and from Josef Hoffmann to Le Corbusier, and understood the renewal of the house to be an extremely serious question linked to “the moral fate of the modern European”—in the understanding of this house as “the conscience of a new world.”91 And yet, some of his writings did evaluate how, for example, Italian and French interiors “belong to two different tastes, one would like to say to two cultures [civiltà]: ours and a foreign one,” even if “both are European trends that want for the house of men a bit of grace, a bit of poetry, a bit of beauty.”92 And others even celebrated Italy’s exceptionality within European trends in the understanding that, “in Italy, the problem of a modern taste [lies] in the current strengthening of what constitutes the real heritage of the race; the love of beauty.”93

While these different writings demonstrate Persico’s ambiguous embrace of the relationship between “style and culture” as manifestation of an alignment between modernism and the nationalist program of fascism, as Ponti’s Triennale proposed, he was explicitly critical of the particular values mirrored in the works included in the exhibition, which were in his view reactionary. For Persico, modernism had to be committed to social renewal, and he found commitment lacking in the works on show, with their bourgeois tendencies.94 And yet, while dismissive of the Triennale’s contents, he did celebrate Ponti’s own design commitments, noting that his work demonstrated the “responsibility [. . .] to be modern at any cost”—as an ethical pursuit that brought the two of them together.95

While Persico discussed the diverse tastes contemporaneously expressed by furnishing in Italy, his colleague Pagano joined in the discussion of this ethical pursuit by addressing “international bad taste” as a symptom of social decay.96 He found in the United States, for example, not only a praiseworthy openness to progress, but also the counterposed forces of the market, of unbridled ambition, “of gangsters and divas” that dragged on “modern culture [civiltà] . . . as a dead weight.” These values manifested in objects and spaces defined by luxuriousness, superfluity, and irrationality—all of which he despised.97 Pagano’s own preferences encompassed Venturi’s own predilection for what he called “pride in modesty” as both a taste and the “moral tuning fork” for modern architecture.98 As an alternative to the manifestations of excess that he saw in U.S. culture (and which he rejected also in the monumental rhetoric of some of his colleagues in Italy), Pagano found in Italian rural architectures a “rigor of technique” and “expressive essentiality” that he pursued in his own work.99 With a more technical emphasis, and a more decisive engagement with standardization and industrial production than Ponti had sought, he wanted modern design and architecture to be characterized by a “new honesty.”100

Significantly, taste was framed in these different arguments as an arena of choice and debate—one that could be evaluated aesthetically as much as in moral or political terms.101 As a consequence, Pagano drew attention to the active contribution that the public made, through its choices, to “aesthetic creation” and its attending values. But he also highlighted the agency of architects and critics in shaping these very choices, even if he generally had a low opinion of the latter: with a few honorable exceptions, critics inflicted on their readers “their own inability to judge, their doubts, and even more their own unchecked aversion toward a new taste and a new moral aesthetic.”102 Against this, Pagano suggested that the relations between taste and societal values allowed architects and designers to counter negative tendencies “with the consciousness of a polemic, not only artistic, but above all civil.”103 And it is within these polemics, and mobilizing the condition of design expressions as a mirror, that both Domus and Casabella committed themselves not just to expressing the taste of their times but to its formation—shaping not only the design choices of Italian society, but the very values of this society.

Significantly, this polemical condition was also addressed around this time by Gramsci, who considered architecture “the most reformable and ‘disputable’ of the arts.”104 Seeking to intervene in these disputes, he broadly praised the project of “rationalism,” even if he used this term to appeal to “nothing other than a way of expressing the beautiful according to the taste of a given period.”105 Here, and indeed throughout his writings, Gramsci emphasized the historicity of the artwork, just as Venturi had done. For both anti-fascist intellectuals that connection was fundamental to ground new works of culture in relation to their context as “distinctive signs of an epoch,” as Cesare de Seta has explored.106 Addressing that pursuit, though writing about literature, Gramsci saw the value of “new” work as lying in its capacity to be regarded as “historical, political, and popular. [. . .] What is relevant is that it sinks its roots into the humus of popular culture as it is, with its tastes and tendencies, and with its moral and intellectual world, even if it is backward and conventional.”107 The “popular” condition invoked here cannot be reduced to local customs or a picturesque understanding of folklore. This position differed from that of the regime for, as Victoria de Grazia has suggested, “[i]n the regime’s definition, ‘popular’ culture simply involved the transmission of an already formulated body of precepts and information, whereas true culture was formed by the elite and purveyed to the masses.”108 Similar to Venturi’s understanding of tradition, Gramsci considered folklore a “‘conception of the world and life’ implicit to a large extent in determinate [in time and space] strata of society and in opposition [. . .] to ‘official’ conceptions of the world.”109 The understanding of the way in which different works manifest diverse “conceptions of the world” is what defined taste as a realm of confrontation in what we could also consider as the disputing of hegemony.110

Within these confrontations, the different voices shaping the discourse of taste for architectural interiors sought to align their own aesthetic preferences with diverse values and shifting “conceptions of the world.” And yet, Gramsci’s arguments indicate that it was not with the characteristics of any one taste, but rather through the process of forming or elaborating a taste in relation to its context, that diverse politics were advanced and different alliances with power consolidated.111 It is not, then, in the specific alignments of their stylistic preferences but in their publications’ commitment to the formation of taste that a politics might be identified for them. In this regard, seemingly aligned with Gramsci’s and Venturi’s thesis, Persico proposed that his program for La casa bella after his first year working for the magazine was to “strengthen a taste that is already spontaneously being shaped.”112 But, writing for Domus some years later, he acknowledged the ongoing struggle of modernism to establish itself and called on Italian architects and artists to defend it “against the claims of an ‘anti-modern’ majority”—detaching his version of modernism from a “popular” grounding.113 Pagano, more than his interlocutors, took on a discourse that seemed to echo the pursuit of a “popular” taste as the basis for modern architecture in Italy, in the understanding that “[t]he closer Italian architecture moves toward the people, the more national it will be,” yet he similarly understood that his program was moving away from most Italians, as he acknowledged the difficulty of converting a majority who remained “blocked by inertia, made lazy in their habits, fossilized in common ideas.”114

The constitution of this “anti-modern” majority in Persico’s and Pagano’s arguments remains ambiguous and shifting throughout their writings. Even if, as with many modernists, they might have imagined their critical projects to fundamentally challenge the tastes of the high bourgeoisie, their positions also dismissed the preferences of a diverse and broad set of subaltern constituencies who found no space in the cohesive aesthetic expressions provided by modernism. In Ponti’s case, he explicitly referred to a “narrow class of artists and technicians” who were leading the institution of modernism, along “the ‘conditions’ dictated by today’s life.”115 And, in spite of the differences between these three critics and their own individual shifts, the programs of both Domus and Casabella articulated that project, which was not only characteristically elitist, as with most modernist pursuits throughout Europe, but in Italy aligned with the fascist notion of gerarchia (hierarchy), as Diane Ghirardo has noted of modernist architects in Italy more generally, writing that “the duty of the masses was to obey, and the duty of the leaders was to provide them with guidelines.”116 The shaping of a modernist taste was rarely a representation of shared values, but rather resulted in a form of cultural subordination for the population.117

While Persico and Pagano’s Casabella contributed to outline this modernist pursuit, it was Ponti, rather than his two interlocutors, who more clearly insisted on its alignment with the shaping of a shared culture for Italians, with the hope that his publications would help to disseminate “a diffused new opinion; an educated, intelligent, and Italian widespread opinion on the house, on dwelling.”118 And it is significant that this pursuit was defined as a national project, for in Ponti’s endeavors this would align the renewal of the house and its furnishing with the project of national regeneration or palingenesis of fascism. The articulation of a taste within the pages of the magazine would be simultaneously concerned with the definition of an interior as an architectural space and as a social unit with its corresponding exterior—in effect, a system of exclusion.119 And it is notable that Ponti qualified this new Italian taste as “educated,” for it was a value judgment that needed to be mediated by those who were widely informed, and specifically those in command of the new furnishing principles that publications transformed into information. It is to the management of that information in Ponti’s publications that this chapter now turns.

Domus’s Compositions

While Ponti’s editorial projects throughout the 1930s were characterized by the pursuit of a cohesive taste for the interiors of the nation, Domus’s diverse contents were matched by a characteristically broad approach to modernist aesthetics for furnishing. Within its pages, the expressive potential of abstract forms devoid of ornamentation using new materials such as steel and tempered glass was demonstrated by avant-garde pieces produced by former Gruppo 7 members Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini as well as the younger BBPR and the more experienced Luciano Baldessari, among others. But the magazine also continued to feature Novecento furnishings among others that incorporated subtle ornamentation and links to diverse traditions, including pieces by Tomaso Buzzi. Contributing to this multiperspectival approach to modernism, most issues included also diverse international trends in articles discussing a wide range of styles, from the art deco French interiors of Jean-Michel Frank to American designers such as Gilbert Rohde. While a place was also found for international avant-garde designs, such as those by Mallet-Stevens, these were reviewed as mere “tendencies” along with less radical furnishings and interiors.120 It is not insignificant that one of the main voices responsible for introducing modernist precepts to readers was Carlo Enrico Rava, who, after collaborating with Gruppo 7, distanced himself in the 1930s from what he saw as the “intransigent” strand of rationalism and advocated a more personal interpretation of modernism.121

The diversity of furnishings featured in the magazine not only resulted in a complex assemblage, but privileged pieces and interiors that might in themselves be characterized as assemblies of diverse aesthetic sensibilities and traditions.122 If Novecento pieces captured this condition at the turn of the decade, rationalist designers similarly embraced that tendency throughout the 1930s. Take, for example, the dining set by rationalist architect Piero Bottoni featured in Domus, with a black polished pearwood table on a central white maple support (Figure 2.8). In her careful analysis of the piece, Marianne Lamonaca proposed that the illuminated glass slabs set into the support and the center of the table served as a hearth—albeit a technological one.123 The dining chairs combine perfectly circular seats, more akin to modernist abstract forms, with white curved steel legs and wooden ladderbacks reminiscent of those from the chair-making region of Chiavari in Liguria. In these furnishings and interiors, we can see an embrace of complex and heterogeneous agendas within fascist ideology, from its appropriation of classicism to its fascination with technology and its resignification of regional traditions. Taken together, these represent an essential feature of fascism itself, which characteristically fractured established material and symbolic programs and reassembled them in new forms in order to advance its project of regeneration.

Figure 2.8. Piero Bottoni, dining room of the Bedarida residence, 1938. Domus 131 (November 1938). Archivio Piero Bottoni, Dastu, Politecnico di Milano.

The same compositional logics were at stake in the messages of advertisements, which were a significant component of the magazine. Indeed, sometimes there was little to distinguish the ads from the photographs featured in articles, which often featured isolated pieces of furniture just as if they were for sale (Figure 2.9). The advertised pieces were often presented as conveying a broad compilation of values: an armchair, for example, was “the most comfortable, the most practical, the strongest, the most elegant, the most modern, the most economical.”124 Domus made this compilation of values a characteristic of modernity.

Figure 2.9. Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, furnishing for Casa Manusardi, Milan, 1937. Domus 109 (February 1937). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Praising Ponti’s compositional approach to modernism, Persico described his work as that of an “isolated inventor, for whom the history of art is not a mechanical process, but a succession of diversity.”125 The temporality invoked here was key to the project of Domus: while challenging the idea of complete rupture pursued by other strands of modernity, it also questioned the idea of a continuous evolution. Decades-old pieces by Josef Hoffmann, for example, were presented as a “living model,” while the bent-tubular steel furniture of Marcel Breuer was only featured years after its production, when its influence had percolated through the work of Italian designers.126 This approach resulted in temporal conflations in the pages of the magazine and in the very interiors that it featured.127 Pieces of furniture were made to adapt to those negotiations—with ads, for example, celebrating how an armchair’s “sober elegance harmonizes with any old or modern interior.”128 Significantly, some of the most radical components of modern housing, including the kitchen, were presented as part of the renovation of existing buildings—setting in tension old and new aesthetics, orders, and technologies. In contrast to modernist pieces that either disengaged from the past or unfolded as its mythical appropriation, the magazine’s engagement with the “modernization,” “transformation,” and “regeneration” of interiors—all terms mobilized by Domus—increasingly operated as an ideological intervention in the “temporal orientations” of fascism, involving the disjunction, selection, and assemblage of different temporal segments.129

Ponti’s own designs embraced the same approach that the magazine privileged. Moving on from the assemblage of abstract forms and classical ornamental motifs characteristic of Novecento, his work developed in an increasingly personal vein that was less clearly anchored in history, but at the same time did not adhere to the radical abstraction of forms that the rationalists promoted in their arguments. This can be seen in his work in ceramics—which he continued to design for Richard Ginori in addition to new collaborations with Fontana Arte (with Pietro Chiesa), among others—but it was particularly evident at the scale of furniture, which also unfolded as diverse collaborations with producers and new ventures with La Rinascente. Out of these design endeavors came original works that added to the formal repertoire of modernism: take, for example, a series of dressing tables with undulating contours and markedly acute angles, which emphasized lightness at the expense of simplicity; an ebony chest of drawers with a leather front and rounded corners that challenged its perceived stability; or a sculptural walnut desk, a prismatic volume supported by three legs in gilded latticework. The identity of the pieces was shaped by inventive forms and patterns, increasingly free in their references to classicism (Figures 2.10 and 2.11). If, as Alina Payne has argued, modern interiors were characterized by a transition from ornament to object, such a transition was not without its “undulations,” as Spyros Papapetros has suggested.130

Figure 2.10. Gio Ponti, ebony chest of drawers with leather front (left) and walnut desk with golden ornamentation (right) for Casa Marmont, Milan, 1934. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 2.11. Gio Ponti, sketches of furnishings for the Marchesano apartment, Milan, 1936. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

The realization of Ponti’s designs was also far from straightforward, bringing together materials and techniques commonly used in bourgeois Italian furnishings, such as walnut and bronze, and characteristically modern materials such as rubber and aluminum. These assemblies responded to diverse and conflicting agendas, among them the impetus of industrialization, the appeal to local genealogies, and the increasing pressure from the regime to use materials available within the country, even before the adoption of specific policies to promote autarky.131 Thus, for example, when Ponti designed an aluminum table in 1930 he justified his choice on the basis that the material was a “noble” one, “abundant in Italy,” rather than emphasizing a commitment to industrial materials.132 The same table would be celebrated by Ojetti for its distinctive Italian qualities, which for him lay not in the choice of materials, but rather in its formal vocabulary, reminiscent of “the tables in the museums and the paintings of Rome and Pompeii.”133 While some might have emphasized those formal analogies in Ponti’s furnishings, others could embrace their material experimentations with their associated myths.134 And yet, what Ponti defined was a diffuse but characteristic “Italian manner” that was not anchored in historical canons as Ojetti proposed, nor resulted from a radical embrace of avant-garde practices. Compositions of different material and formal choices both agitated and assembled a shifting identity for Italians as they characteristically negotiated diverse aspects of the politics of the regime.135

Print Types

The dissemination of these compositions was a specific subject of discussion of relevance to Ponti as a magazine editor. Ojetti invited Ponti to pursue models that accorded with the root meaning of the word—“from modus, that is modules, norms, measures, the form that serves as the rule”—but were removed from the “democratic chimera” of modernism and the serial forms of production that he saw as debasing the decorative arts, producing not “exemplars” but a form of “impoverishment.”136 Of particular concern to Ojetti were the designs developed by “well-intentioned bourgeois architects” for lower-income groups, such as the proposals by rationalist architects Bottoni and Griffini for furnishing public housing.137 However, in letters to Ojetti, Ponti distanced himself from the critic’s position by expressing sympathy with the agenda of rationalism and the possibilities of serial forms of production, asserting an interest in the notion of “type,” a term from the wider European discourse that Italian modernist architects had enthusiastically embraced, even if its definition remained rather loose.138

Ponti’s embrace of the term did not remain constrained to the impact of industrial modes of production on the design object.139 In fact, while starting to standardize furnishing designs, most Italian architects at the time continued to work in the production of furnishing with small family-owned companies that for the most part remained craft-based and only implemented industrial means of production in a limited way—even if, throughout the 1930s, different companies increasingly developed multiple models diversely related to industrialization.140 While interested in those developments, Ponti’s approach to type focused on the analogies between the properties of different designs—with types mobilized to consolidate those properties in an “operative” way.141 Most significantly, while the term was used with different programs across the spectrum of modernist sensibilities, Ponti saw the “typical” condition of furnishing as part of a project of normalization with which he would participate in shaping a sensibility (an “Italian manner”) that would contribute to provide a cohesive identity for the Italian population.

Lacking a substantive relation to industrial methods of furniture production, the notion of type was more clearly supported by the increasing systematization of representation techniques used by Italian designers and by their reproduction in print media—both decisively contributing to the dissemination of specific designs. In fact, in the original and precise shapes of the furniture pieces Ponti designed or included in Domus one can see the enduring influence of late nineteenth-century drawing practices popularized by Italian art pedagogy, with their emphasis on disegno and on techniques that foregrounded the contour line and were supported by the use of the camera lucida.142 These techniques were systematized in various manuals, such as the popular Grammatica del disegno, published at the turn of the century and continuously reprinted in the following decades, with four editions between 1923 and 1946 (Figure 2.12).143

Figure 2.12. Illustrations for drawing instruction. Giuseppe Ronchetti, Grammatica del Disegno: Metodo Pratico Per Imparare il Disegno (1902).

In the pages of Domus we see how the use of crisp black line drawings on white backgrounds—or sometimes reversed white on black, emphasizing the contours of the pieces—endows the furnishings with a characteristic aesthetic that results from what Zeynep Çelik Alexander defines as “interrelated practical, artifactual, and procedural material conditions” of design.144 The reproduction of these line drawings in the pages of the magazine may have contributed more decisively to their “typical” condition than the prospect of their serial production (Figure 2.13). However, these seemingly straightforward drawings were not like diagrams, leading to any kind of formal “economy.”145 Nor did they align with Neufert’s contemporaneous notion of “rapid design,” which similarly acknowledged the relevance of print reproduction, but dismissed the role of disegno, remaining most decisively focused on “uniting craft and industry.”146 Instead, these drawings allowed for a broadening of the modernist vocabulary that linked their design more literally to drawing practices. The relevance of drawing and print reproduction became apparent not only in the forms of furnishings, but in decorative elements directly derived from practices of doodling and in patterns for upholstery fabrics, which resembled the logics of collage—all helping to define an “Italian manner” through information reproduced in print (Figures 2.14 and 2.15).

Figure 2.13. Drawings of furnishing types. Domus 49 (January 1932). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure 2.14. Gio Ponti, “Sedia a volute” (“Chair with coils”) produced by Casa e Giardino, presented at the VI Milan Triennale, 1936. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 2.15. Gio Ponti, sketches of furnishing for the Abizatione Dimostrativa, 1936. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure Description

Print text on the page, in Italian, reads: “Arma Veritatis: World Exhibition of Catholic Print." Handwritten notes include recommendations on the manufacturing of the cushions and the aluminum bed frame. Signed “P” for Ponti.

Nonetheless, the source of this characteristic “manner” remained contentious. Who would give shape to an Italian sensibility in the context of fascism, other than Il Duce? Significantly, drawings of furnishing “types” frequently appeared in Domus without an assigned author. However, they were far from generic and were clearly related to Ponti’s own sensibility; many were unattributed reproductions of his own works. While the notion of “type” is frequently linked to the dilution of the role of the author, in this case authorship acquired expanded relevance through the reproduction of individual designs. Also at stake was the question of the audience for these “types,” since the drawings did not represent specific items for potential customers to acquire. This question was particularly pressing given that Ponti’s commitment to transform Italian households conflicted with the rather limited audience of Domus at the time. Some drawings seem to present models for production, addressed to the small manufacturers who were still the major force in the Italian furniture industry. These drawings were akin to those Ponti disseminated (sometimes in collaboration with Franco Albini) in a number of pamphlets produced in the early 1930s for ENAPI (Plate 3).147 Other drawings seem closer to those featured in the home improvement manuals inspired by the “do-it-yourself” culture that was gaining traction in the United States, even if, in the case of the drawings featured in Domus, the designs were often extremely idiosyncratic (Figure 2.16, Plate 4).148 Still others appear to present a modernist kit of parts, encompassing everything from furniture to railings to window frames, for designers to choose from (Plate 5).149 Ponti’s project of transforming Italian households through new furnishings took advantage of the disguised authorship of these print-disseminated types, even if he ultimately emphasized the role of designers in its realization. Alongside industry leaders and the cultural elites who were the audience for the magazine, it was the designers who remained mediators of the new condition of these furnishings, not as objects but as print-disseminated information.

Figure 2.16. Page of the article “Designs for the carpenter that ought to build your kitchen.” Domus 97 (January 1936). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

Text, in Italian, reads: “An example of Composition. Designs for the carpenter that ought to build your kitchen. Some elements that can be added as the family grows.”

Information Ensembles

The definition of these furnishing objects in the pages of the magazine was accompanied by an exploration of their relations as new ensembles within an expanded framework of architectural practice. Just as Ponti sought to manage the relation of these designs as information in the articulation of diverse contents within the pages of his magazine, he pushed architects to take on the organization of interiors: “If at one time the architect offered the inhabitant a space to organize, we are now inclined to offer him an organization that he can take advantage of and enjoy.”150 In some cases, furnishings reinforced the spatial structure of the room. In others, specific pieces were used to define different areas within a larger space often bringing together functions that had previously been kept apart. These explorations were not unique to Domus, or indeed to Italy, but they were developed to a high degree of sophistication within this context, with the role of arredamento developing its promise as space-building-furniture. Ponti’s magazine rack in the Vanzetti apartment of 1938 (which could be either freestanding or attached to an existing wall) or the bookcase designed by Franco Albini for his own house of 1941 (whose autonomy within the room is transformed into an expressive structural challenge) bear witness to the development of these trends throughout the decade (Figure 2.17, Plate 6).

Figure 2.17. Gio Ponti, magazine rack in wood and safety glass, produced by Fontana Arte, for the Vanzetti apartment, 1938. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

These furnishings supported the modernization of the house and advanced new social relations. Though conceived for both single-family homes and apartment buildings, the latter were the focus of most speculations, which were mainly targeted at the middle-class households that were seen as a characteristic product of modernity and a fundamental buttress for the regime. Mirroring developments in other industrialized countries, most of the housing plans published in the magazine promoted the use of the corridor to separate the night and day activities that often unfolded in the same spaces in rural households, while others merged rooms and functions that were traditionally segregated in larger bourgeois villas.151 Most significant, the salon (salotto)—a room primarily dedicated to social gatherings, remnant of a previous social order—gave way to the living room (camera di soggiorno) in smaller apartments.152

In analyzing and promoting these developments, Domus contributed to a larger discourse involving Elisa Ricci, Lidia Morelli, and rationalist architect Levi-Montalcini, among many other voices with diverse agendas. Ricci saw the shrinking size of apartments as a “cruel necessity of the new times,”153 while Morelli celebrated it as an embrace of new ways of living that left behind the segregation of husband, wife, and children and acknowledged the increasing participation of women in public life.154 In Domus, Ponti negotiated these different positions by referring to how larger living rooms, often integrating the dining room, could balance out the loss of rooms for previously segregated functions.155 In La casa bella, Levi-Montalcini explored the dimensions and distributions of this new space as a representation of new system of values that Italy should embrace through the renewal of the house and its furnishings: different from the “antiquated and provincial” notion of the salon, the living room was defined as being “for the convenience of the body and the peacefulness of the soul.”156

Within these larger and more flexible living rooms, furnishings played an ever more significant role.157 A plethora of examples featured in Domus, some designed by Ponti himself, explored ways of articulating the living and dining areas, some separated by a sideboard or a curtain, others joined by large sliding doors (Plate 7).158 In La casa bella, Levi-Montalcini described furnishings in these larger spaces as “planets,” and while these pieces and their relations were discussed at length, rooms often remained a neutral framework.159 If domestic spaces were considered to embody new values and shape new social relations, furnishings were the technology mobilized for their articulation.

The kitchen was another quintessential space of speculation in Domus, with features on principles of domestic economy as well the concrete realization in specific projects—going back to Piero Bottoni’s design for the Casa Elettrica at the 1930 Monza Triennale.160 Architect Ignazio Gardella contributed decisively to these conversations in Domus, considering issues of hygiene and social norms for the definition of the kitchen’s furnishing and architecture. But he also tracked the internal tensions between these concerns. While celebrating the rationalization effected by the Frankfurt Kitchen, for example, he voiced a nostalgia for the “very nice kitchens of rural homes”—an attitude that reflected the competing demands within fascism to address both local traditions and the program of modernization.161

As a matter of fact, just like the living room, the kitchen was an arena where contradictory social trends were mediated by architecture. While Morelli suggested that kitchens in public housing should be large enough to hold all the family, both she and Gardella advocated for smaller kitchens for the middle classes, so the family would not gather there, but in the living room.162 This concern was captured in the title of Morelli’s book, Dalla cucina al salotto (From the kitchen to the living room, 1928, revised in 1935).163 And while the living room was supposed to break gender roles, the separation of cooking and dining led to a retrenchment, with the woman remaining in the kitchen and dining happening in the living room.164 New kinds of furnishings were developed in an attempt to resolve these tensions: Domus, for example, published a design coauthored by Gardella for a cabinet-style pasapiatti that allowed plates to be passed between the kitchen and the dining room, a characteristic socio-spatial technology of the period.

Discussions on the kitchen tackled everyday concerns with smells and noise while simultaneously appealing to the lofty ambitions of fascist Italy. Gardella, for example, described how the kitchen should aspire to be “coherent with the spiritual and moral world of modern man,” again situating the modernization of interiors within an agenda of social and cultural transformation.165 But even if these transformations of the kitchen were held up as an unquestionable sign of progress, they were offered as an alternative to more radical transformations of the domestic space in other, politically opposed regimes: after a visit to the Soviet Union, Bardi reported on the “homes with and without kitchens,” regarding the latter as “brutish.”166 The transformation of domestic spaces negotiated by furnishing characteristically held different agendas in tension and became a medium for ideological mediation.

Typically for Domus, Ponti absorbed different positions and worked to disseminate them through the compiling of information on model projects and specific technologies (Figure 2.18). But the magazine also worked to socialize these different positions in parallel with other cultural transformations—reflecting, for example, on new cooking paradigms at the same time as it explored the transformation of the kitchen. Recipes featured by Ponti chimed with the making and unmaking of cooking traditions around the country, from Ada Boni’s groundbreaking Il talismano della felicità (The talisman of happiness, 1929), which was addressed to housewives and sought to celebrate, and unify, Italy’s diverse cuisines,167 to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Luigi Colombo Fillia’s “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking” (1930), which rejected those traditions in favor of new methods of cooking based on sensory transgressions.168 Boni argued that “among its merits, fascism also had that of breaking down every parochial bond by bringing together each region in a single great ideal,” effectively capturing the regime’s cultural operations, and Domus supported that re-composition with a tour through the country’s cuisine with dedicated stops in different regions, soon followed by unified menus for what was presented as simply “a good meal.”169

Figure 2.18. Studies for organizing kitchen storage included in “An example of composition.” Domus (January 1936). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

Texts in Italian accompanying each layout read: “First year / After 2 kids / After 4 kids.”

In all these discussions, Domus brought together different opinions, materials, and practices, and a diversity of voices cutting across fields of expertise and gender lines.170 Their distinct positions were presented as something the public could choose from according “to their own desires and to their own heart [. . .] after twenty years of polemics in architecture, technical experiences, and social revolution and evolution.”171 And yet, the magazine decisively articulated them as a new and totalizing body of information that broke down existing traditions and programs, purposefully rearticulated them, and consistently corralled this apparent diversity into a homogenizing understanding of the house and the family that dismissed many of the frameworks of living and social norms found throughout the Italian peninsula.

Advancing these pursuits, Ponti developed “types” for small houses and apartment blocks just as he had done for furnishings, similarly presented in the form of simple drawings and anonymous models. Many of these mirrored his own designs, such as vacation houses that evolved from his 1930 contribution to the Monza Biennale, while others anticipated future projects: the “Typical Houses” that Ponti published from 1931 to 1937, for example, rehearsed layouts that he then enacted in the Domus Fausta, Domus Julia, Domus Carola, Domus Onoria, Domus Serena, Domus Aurelia, and Domus Livia in Via De Togni and Via Letizia in Milan (Figures 2.19 and 2.20). The imagined dissemination of these types as models to be implemented throughout Italy helped frame the renewal of the house as a national project that was aligned with its understanding as a “pivot of the revolution.”172

Figure 2.19. Studies for a small vacation house. Domus 49 (January 1932). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure 2.20. Gio Ponti, Domus Onoria in Via Letizia, one of his “Typical Houses,” floor plan, elevation, and photograph, Milan, 1931. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

In this pursuit, furnishing and housing types had a pedagogical function that unfolded in parallel with the development of the architect’s expertise in these realms and the consolidation of the new discipline of furnishing and interiors. While the design of furniture had traditionally been taught in schools of decorative arts, it was in architecture schools that knowledge on furnishing and interiors was incorporated. In 1927, “Furnishing and Interior Decoration” was introduced as a fourth-year course at the architecture school in Rome while, in 1934, the faculty of architecture at the Milan Polytechnic gained a new chair in “Decoration and Figure (Furnishing),” which was then renamed, in 1936, “Architecture of Interiors, Furnishing, and Decoration.”173 Ponti, who held this professorship from 1937 onward, used Domus to situate furnishing within an inclusive field of knowledges and practices while helping to consolidate it as a distinct discipline within architecture. Types mediated these two orientations, circulating among different materials and disseminating a new expert knowledge among the population.

The dissemination of types was thus both a professional and a social project, with types operating as information that architects could reproduce and that readers could engage in the transformation of Italian households. And while the association of type with mass production connoted a lack of identity, as was implied in Ojetti’s criticism, Ponti conceived types for the media dissemination of an identity for furniture objects and interiors, with the hope they would become a national phenomenon.

“Social Politics”

More than with Domus, Ponti engaged the national scale of his pursuit with his articles in Corriere della Sera, intervening in shaping what Benedict Anderson has called the “imagined worlds” of the nation. Ponti’s contributions introduced discussions on furnishing and interiors into the national “mass ceremony” of daily newspaper reading—one that, quoting Hegel, Anderson describes as “a substitute for morning prayers.”174 With a print run of close to half a million at the time, Corriere was a major agent in the formation of national opinion.175 Along with radio, which helped reach illiterate populations, the press was a key channel for the propaganda mobilized by fascism; Mussolini himself had edited the newspapers Avanti and Popolo d’Italia before taking office.176 Increasingly, the government sought to control newspapers that had shaped the politics of the liberal period, and in many cases it installed party members in all managerial positions: at Corriere della Sera, Augusto Turati, secretary of the National Fascist Party, also insisted on the dismissal of any “elements on the editorial board who had displayed anti-fascist tendencies in the past.”177 In this more tightly controlled context, coinciding with the creation of the Ministry of Press and Propaganda in 1933, Ponti was allowed a certain measure of freedom, as his articles were deemed apolitical.

Different from the diversity of materials gathered in Domus, Ponti’s contributions to the newspaper were unified by a didactic tone and a certain representational consistency, with accompanying illustrations typically consisting of schematic floorplans or axonometric drawings and simple line perspectives of interior layouts, often including a range of permutations on the different topics of concern (Figures 2.21 and 2.22).178 In spite of the didactic tone, Ponti stated that his contributions to Corriere were not intended to “substitute for a manual.”179 Manuals were commonly understood to be neutral and “purposely devoid of aesthetic expression,”180 a characterization he explicitly rejected in his goal of simultaneously addressing the technical modernization of the house and the provision of an identity for the Italian population with the teachings he disseminated in this medium.

Figure 2.21. Gio Ponti, “Digressions on a space,” Corriere della Sera, November 5, 1933. Courtesy Archivio Corriere della Sera.

Figure 2.22. Gio Ponti, “The studio apartment,” Corriere della Sera, February 22, 1934. Courtesy Archivio Corriere della Sera.

Figure Description

Article headlines, in Italian, read: "Vegetables." "Hospitality on Lake Garda." “Italian costumes." "Today’s House: Digressions on a space."

Figure Description

Article headlines, in Italian, read: “The Cotton War and the Delhi Armistice" and “Today’s House: The studio apartment."

Ponti’s articles reached his national audience with seemingly mundane questions: the position of a door within a room; furniture arrangements for different programs and room sizes; or the organization of roof terraces in apartment buildings. And yet, through these he outlined ways for his readers to join the national pursuit of the modernization of Italian households, even if he did not necessarily aim to directly involve them in the organization of their own homes—most of the questions addressed required the intervention of an architect. Rather, they positioned the readers’ own domestic environments in relation to new aesthetic paradigms and technical realities beyond their control, triggering their insecurities as much as a pursuit of affirmation that was essential to achieve their consent for leaving behind personal preferences and local traditions and participating in this collective project of national reach.

This new collectivity was framed as overcoming what he presented as the “faded class struggle” privileged by traditional politics, with the pursuit for his articles to shape a “social politics”181—an agenda aligned with one of the goals of fascism, which was to shift the focus of the anxieties of modern life away from class conflict. And, just as with Domus, Ponti sought to reorient those anxieties toward the renewal of the country’s domestic interiors, but in the pages of the newspaper this pursuit was in closer conversation with the politics of the period. In fact, the “social politics” that Ponti pursed were effectively enacted in the articulation of the scale of the household, which his arguments addressed, with that of the nation, as represented throughout the newspaper in other articles.

Ponti’s goal to participate in the consolidation of a “public opinion” on the question of domestic interiors gained particular meaning in relation to other forms of consolidation: for example, the “indissoluble fusion” provided by the nation in its identification with the Army—with both questions addressed the same day in the pages of Corriere.182 While the newspaper’s cover addressed the common “courage and glories” of Italians, the article Ponti published alongside it proposed shared ideas for “our comfort and our pleasure.”183 The repeated use of the first person possessive in Ponti’s articles identified the newspaper readers simultaneously as members of a national community and as inhabitants of modernist interiors.184

Ponti was not shy in addressing the connection between the family home and the nation as homeland explicitly in the paper: “The ethics of our national politics returns to the family the higher and more jealous functions, and it is unnecessary to explain how much the house contributes to the family.”185 While his articles were fundamentally practical—tackling both small domestic interiors able to accommodate family life for “the greatest mass of people,” as well as apartments for large families, which responded to the regime’s concern about the declining birth rates that accompanied urban life—the connection between the family and the nation was a fundamental mediator for fascism to enhance the identification of individuals and the State.186 The connections between domestic interiors and the nation were strengthened by the economic arguments set out in the pages of the newspaper. On the same day that Ponti published housing studies for smaller apartments, Corriere addressed the relevance of household savings and national savings banks (casse di risparmio), which Mussolini considered essential to strengthening of the national economy.187 Italians were brought together as a collectivity of readers in their family households and as a community sharing the risk of family savings—with overlapping imaginary and material associations passing through their domestic interiors.

At stake in all these associations was the relation between the individual newspaper readers and their articulation as a collectivity, which fascism often conceived as an organism. As Italian politician Alfredo Rocco put it in his address to the Chamber of Deputies, the state’s role was “to guarantee the individual the conditions required for the free development of his faculties. [. . .] But not because it recognizes a right of the individual to liberty, superior to the state, to be invoked against the very interest of the state—but rather because it believes that the development of the human personality is an interest of the state.”188 Manifesting across different fields, from legal to demographic paradigms, this tension was evident in Ponti’s simultaneous rejection of the formal homogenization that he saw as characteristic of certain trends of modernism (“all those pieces of furniture with so many corners and cubic forms”) combined with his involvement in the dissemination of new principles that he believed would contribute to the regenerated life of a cohesive nation.189

And this tension permeated different articles beyond Ponti’s section: on the same day Ponti addressed such homogenization, another article addressed the dissemination of products throughout the Italian territory as part of a larger endeavor to strengthen ties among Italians.190 The article invoked, among others, the Pope’s condemnation of “the enemies of uniformity,” which the paper presented as antagonistic to the interests of the regime: “Diversity and changing tastes imply a cost in technical progress, but there is also a cost to humanity and to the single national individual.”191 Yet another article that same day covered the regime’s efforts to remedy the shortcomings of Italy’s communication infrastructures, which were blamed on the previous liberal administration, in the name of reinforcing national cohesion.192 The relationship between these three articles is particularly significant for the light it sheds on Ponti’s pursuits: more than in any particular style he put forward or promoted, the politics of his furnishing agenda was manifested in the coordination of circulating products and information. And this relation was effectively embedded in what Ponti described as a “techno-aesthetic formation,” one that allegedly reflected a new taste and, quoting Persico, he proposed (writing in Corriere) as a “modern tradition.”193 And the consolidation of that tradition as an exclusionary characterization of Italians and a manifestation of their exceptionality was articulated in the relationship between the different articles of the newspaper.

Epilogue: A Demonstration

While Ponti’s critical and editorial endeavors and his own designs frequently intersected, they were specifically fused in what was conceived as an exemplary interior: a project he developed for the Mostra dell’arredamento (Furnishing show) of the 1936 Milan Triennale. As its title suggests, the Abitazione Dimostrativa (Demonstration house) was intended as an exposition of the discourse and practices of furnishing that he had helped to consolidate during this period. The process leading to the final design reveals the relevance that Ponti assigned to furniture in the organization of domestic interiors. While architecture offers quite a neutral framework, various options studied show furniture used to enclose a bedroom; a desk defining a small office; and living and dining furniture structuring diverse arrangements within a larger space (Figure 2.23). The changing relations of these different elements, sometimes conveyed through arrows in the sketches, are not just the result of a difficult decision-making process, revealed to us in the stack of archived tracing paper. They characteristically involve the architect in the organization of space and in the definition of its possible occupations, while embedding change in its very design, with some pieces specifically intended to move: a folding table was to be placed by the wall and a couch was put on wheels, for example. The project was ultimately defined as a permutation of different furnishing pieces, all included as a list in the project’s presentation in Domus and synthetically captured in its photographed representation, with their different colors and patterns (from the carpet to the armchairs), their characteristically light design (including a table and stools with extremely slender legs), and their rich ornamentation (as in the bedroom sofa with steel arms in the shape of a doodle) (Figure 2.24 and Plate 8).

Figure 2.23. Gio Ponti, sketches for the Abizatione Dimostrativa, 1936. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 2.24. Gio Ponti, floor plan of the Abizatione Dimostrativa, including complete list of furnishings, 1936. Domus 103 (July 1936). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

The page has a title, in Italian, which reads, “A Demonstration House [Architect Gio Ponti].” The image caption, in Italian, reads: “The floorplan of this house with three components (living room, bedroom, terrace) integrates the services (bathroom, office, kitchen). In the structure of the building itself there are the wardrobes, the library, and the display cases while all the other furnishings are mobile. Observe the large window in the living room and the display windows in safety glass, in the bedroom, between it and the living room, and between the living room and the terrace.”

The playful design of each of the pieces and their shifting arrangements seemed to undermine the attribution of a political meaning or ideological interpretation for this project of furnishing. Throughout the same period architecture had developed a clearer alignment of aesthetic and political features: Terragni’s famous Casa del Fascio, for example, completed that same year, had been hailed as “fascist, limpid and naked like the truth,” with its modernist facade defined as a regular grid of carefully calibrated proportions and clad in white Botticino marble.194 In contrast, how was one meant to interpret the floral-patterned upholstery of an egg-shaped armchair in this interior, or the colorful and dynamic diagonal striped pattern of the carpet that brought together the different pieces of furniture?

At stake, here, was something more than “a question of taste,” as Persico had put it in comparing works by these same two authors in 1930. The projects convey two different understandings of the relationship between design and politics. While insisting on the political dimension of his project, Ponti had in fact explicitly cautioned “against purely formal understandings of furnishing,” proposing instead that the project represented “all the postulates and propaganda” that he was developing in Domus and Corriere della Sera, linking their politics to their media dissemination.195 Significantly, the interior was conceived not as a mostra, a display, but rather as a dimostrazione, a materially constituted piece of evidence for a politically charged set of principles that preceded it.

Even more, with texts on the walls indicating the principles underlying different design features, this interior worked as a form of media alongside other propaganda campaigns and publications. The Demonstration House paradigmatically captured how diverse furnishings and shifting arrangements of interiors constituted the unstable framework for modern life and simultaneously sought to provide it with consistency—incorporating as well as disrupting existing social practices, aesthetic paradigms, and traditions in an approach that can be regarded both creative and destructive. And while Ponti’s unbounded creativity and the rich set of materials contained in his magazine might obscure its unsteady nature, this was a framework that was primarily sustained through its representation and its socialization in the form of information. Ponti’s project demonstrated that modern life, in Italy, required one to learn how to inhabit the nation’s regenerated interiors.

While the Demonstration House crystallized Ponti’s pursuits, a range of different tendencies in furnishings and domestic interiors were on display at the Triennale, which was directed by Pagano together with Sironi and Felice.196 Their attempt, in Dennis Doordan’s words, was “to reconcile all the competing tendencies within the modern movement in Italy.”197 And yet a fissure become apparent in the realm of domestic interiors with a new Mostra dell’abitazione (Dwelling show) independent from the section devoted to furnishing. According to the president of the Triennale, Giulio Barella, the new section sought to offer “different criteria” from those of the fifth Triennale.198 The differences were not substantial in its goals: The BBPR group, who curated the show, framed the house in relation to the needs and demands of individuals, but considered individuals “in their own function within the state,” explicitly embracing the logics of totalitarianism, not unlike it had been done in the practices of furnishing that Ponti sponsored.199 Still, this section sought to enact this program through a more radical embrace of modernist principles of serial production, modularity, and functionalism—with the piece of furniture “thought of, and realized, like an utensil—as a function of its use,” as Pagano put it (Figure 2.25).200 The Triennale’s Furnishing show, by contrast, only ambiguously embraced these premises: the critic Raffaello Giolli regarded the lack of any internal logics in the ensembles on display as a sort of “limbo.”201 And yet, as I have argued in this chapter, a new fascist collective might not need to be grounded in consistent principles but could be gathered in the contingent arrangements and shifting interiors articulated in design publications with their shifting information.

Figure 2.25. Albini, Camus, Clausetti, Garedlla, Mazzoleni, Minoletti, Mucchi, Palanti, and Romano, apartment for four people, featured at the Exhibition of Dwelling, VI Milan Triennale, 1936. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

In the years that followed, both the discourse on the house and the political context would be transformed and radicalized. Typological explorations of collective housing and the concern with serial production would be progressively disentangled from the cultural and aesthetic emphasis framing discussions around the stylization of furnishing and the transformation of interiors. While Domus continued to address furnishing, Casabella, under Pagano’s leadership, spearheaded the debate around housing and displayed an increasing technical emphasis, with the magazine being rebranded as Casabella Costruzioni in 1937 and Costruzioni Casabella in 1940.202 Persico’s sudden death in 1936 robbed the discourse of its most articulate voice and a mediator of different interests. For Pagano, the focus of Ponti’s Domus was “not enough. It does not suffice for living.”203 Its editorial approach, he thought, was an “ineffective attempt at conciliation.”204 Ponti, on the other hand, defended his magazine’s position of “not abandoning any point of view”; its contents were not “articles of entertainment,” as some critics charged, but rather “articles of life,” as he maintained—a life that was sustained through these very articles.205 His contributions to Corriere, however, increasingly abandoned their focus on furnishing and interiors and paid greater attention to the city. Ponti even made a proposal to the editors to write about colonial architecture.206

The declaration of the colonial Empire in 1936 coincided with this shift, and the divisions imposed by the racial laws followed soon after. Ponti himself was involved in defining those divisions: the plan for Addis Ababa that he developed with Enrico del Debbio and Giuseppe Vaccaro and engineers Cesare Valle and Ignazio Guidi soon after the city’s conquest had as its “guiding and fundamental criterion [. . .] the clear separation between indigenous life and Italian life” following the French colonial model.207 And yet, Ponti’s own arguments attest to more complex political entanglements between these different areas of activity: the shaping of Italian life through furnishings and interiors was complementary to colonialism’s violent enactment of a realm of otherness.

His publications, in closing, sought to contribute to define the interior as a shifting space of social identification for Italians that was opposed to the realm of the “unrepresentable.”208 Furnishing was among the forms of cultural signification through which a space of domesticity and belonging “came into being” for the Italian nation, in opposition to a space of foreignness.209 While many have understood Ponti’s continuing commitment to the interior in the following years as a means of evasion, evasion continued to play a significant political role in shaping the location of fictions, with their own inclusions and exclusions.210 It is to these that the next chapter will turn.

Three

National Film Sets

The Synthesizing of Modernist Fictions

Consider the following scene from Mario Camerini’s 1939 black-and-white film I grandi magazzini: a man and a woman, Bruno and Lauretta, sit in matching leather armchairs and talk about the memories evoked by the various pieces of furniture that surround them. The intimate setting prompts the couple to imagine what it might mean to embark on a possible shared future: “You don’t want a wife, you want a couch!” complains Lauretta. Their armchairs flank a shiny round glass table; behind them is a wooden cabinet with a built-in radio console. Although far from avant-garde and composed within a rather idiosyncratic ensemble (with a patterned carpet and a porcelain terrier standing guard over the radio), the furnishings still suggest a modernist concern for simple forms and new materials. And while these types of furnishings had been extensively promoted by a number of exhibitions and publications that we have considered in previous chapters, they remained foreign to most Italians at the time. Viewers might at first have thought that Bruno and Lauretta were at home, and that the partially coordinated objects denoted an educated taste. However, as the camera gradually zoomed out, the audience would begin to realize these are objects of which the man and woman can only dream. Rather than their own living room, the couple are ensconced in the furniture display of a department store, the titular grandi magazzini (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1. Frames from I grandi magazzini (dir. Mario Camerini, 1939), showing characters Lauretta (Assia Noris) and Bruno (Vittorio De Sica) in the department store. Copyright 1939 Era Film / ENIC; copyright 2003 RIPLEY’S FILM Sr. / all rights reserved. Published under license of VIGGO Srl.

While the film invites viewers to imagine this department store display as a domestic environment for the couple, the furnishings also prompt them to think of their own belongings in terms of either memory or desire. This chapter explores how film converged with modernist furnishing under Italian fascism as an apparatus that pushed audiences both inward, into imaginary filmed spaces, and outward, into the lived environments of their own homes, dispersed throughout the territory of Italy.1 And it discusses how these reorientations, participated in by modernist interior design and film techniques mobilized during this period, helped to organize new social and spatial networks that connected the members of the Italian nation.

Throughout the film, the characters in I grandi magazzini inhabit a particular spatial construct constituted as a sequence of interior spaces, including elegant urban residences, apartments in housing blocks on the periphery, cafés, hotels, as well as the department store that hosts Bruno and Lauretta’s encounter. The commodities available in the department store decorate, and ultimately structure, all the other interiors in the film, linking them in an overlapping network. Characters in the film simultaneously negotiate their relationships with others and with this network of commodities, desiring products, acquiring them, and shipping them from one interior to another.

Mannequins wearing the newest fashions, glass vitrines with the most exquisite jewelry, stands showing the latest novelties, sumptuous furniture displays—all are arranged around the store’s central atrium, with its striated columns and balustrades of intertwining plant motifs. A monumental stair and flanking sets of elevators move the endless flow of customers and employees around the building. The set was supposed to remind viewers of the Rinascente store on the Piazza del Duomo in Milan, but as the director noted, it was a fictional creation: larger and more beautiful than any store in Italy at the time.2 Perceptive moviegoers in 1939 might have noted that the stylish atrium was more up to date than the Beaux Arts interior of the flagship store in Milan, or any of the chain’s later satellites in other major Italian cities. In fact, all of the architectural structures and interiors depicted in this film were constructed as film sets (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Frame from I grandi magazzini (dir. Mario Camerini, 1939), showing the main atrium of the department store. Copyright 1939 Era Film / ENIC; copyright 2003 RIPLEY’S FILM Sr. / all rights reserved. Published under license of VIGGO Srl.

Designed by Guido Fiorini with famous set designer Gastone Medin and architect Carlo Enrico Rava, the sets for I grandi magazzini were built not in Milan but in Rome, at the Cinecittà studios, a major facility for film production supported by the fascist regime. The founding of Cinecittà in 1937 and the commercial success of I grandi magazzini reflected the growing cultural relevance of film in fascist Italy.3 At the same time as the merchandise circulated by La Rinascente attempted to find its way into Italian interiors, the interiors featured in films produced at Cinecittà were more effectively bringing together Italian audiences. A new genre of films, popularly known as cinema dei telefoni bianchi, or “white telephone films,” critically mobilized modernist design in relation to new media networks.4 I grandi magazzini, like other films by Camerini, follows this trend as it centers on the growing concern with consumption and lifestyle mediated by furnishings and other commodities, even if its protagonists are typically middle class and do not engage in the lavish lifestyles that often characterized this film genre.

The premiere of I grandi magazzini at the seventh Venice International Film Festival was attended not only by film connoisseurs but by representatives of the fascist regime including Dino Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture in Mussolini’s government, as well as his Nazi counterpart, the Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.5 Camerini’s films had enjoyed great popularity for over a decade and were greatly anticipated by the public; the pair who play the leads (Assia Noris and Vittorio De Sica) were stars of the period.6 I grandi magazzini epitomized the expansion of film production that brought Italians together in movie theaters; that year 354,413,000 tickets were sold to a population of 44 million (an average of eight tickets per person).7 Still, the film failed to win any prizes at Venice, which was already a significant event on the international film scene. The main prize, the Mussolini Cup, went instead to Abuna Messias (dir. Goffredo Alessandrini, 1939), a film narrating the life of a nineteenth-century Christian missionary in Abyssinia. More clearly aligned with the regime’s propaganda, Abuna Messias is an example of what Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls “Empire cinema,” which “assert[ed] the Italians’ ability to impose a vision of modernity in sync with fascist social and military aims, one founded on the regimentation of bodies and the mastery and transformation of terrain.”8 While Camerini directed some similar films, I grandi magazzini could easily be seen as apolitical, or at least ambiguously aligned with the regime’s agenda. Camerini had faced difficulties in having his films showcased at the Venice festival: indeed, his Il Signor Max (1937) narrowly escaped a ban even if, like I grandi magazzini, it seemed nothing more than a light romantic comedy.9

On the surface, it might seem strange to align I grandi magazzini with the notion that cinema was the fascist regime’s arma più forte (strongest weapon), as it was regarded at the time, or to discuss the architecture featured in it as arte di stato (art of the state), as critics wanted it to perform.10 And yet, the passage with which I started suggests that the film did not just address the organization of bodies and territorial transformations of the period, as the more overtly political films did, but actively participated in them. While previous scholarship has characteristically emphasized the politics of design and architecture at the time as a question of representation within an effort “to give concrete form to abstract political values,” as David Rifkind has it, my emphasis here will be on the political performance of furnishing and the architecture of interiors as technologies operating within another form of representation, that of film.11 The modernist furnishing practices and montage techniques deployed in white telephone films enacted new socio-spatial articulations and territorial organizations. And, as this chapter explores, these also had their own politics.

Film Sets like Our Homes

Interest in the relation between architecture and film in Italy predated the construction of Cinecittà and the political radicalization of the regime that followed the proclamation of the Empire in 1936. From the early 1930s an emerging discourse that focused precisely on the furnishing of film coincided with an increasing tendency to define architectural interiors as sets within larger spaces.12 Rather than being structured by architectural enclosures, interiors were delineated primarily by furniture objects placed within modern open floor plans. Architecture critics of the time often described interiors as if they were film sets, and some explicitly made that connection. In Casabella, for example, Edoardo Persico discussed the capacity of colors to have “a real value of ‘representation’” in interior spaces; he also approached lighting solutions as if resolving technical display problems.13 In his account, these elements allowed the Milanese designer Luciano Baldessari to create “a vibrant and expressive atmosphere.”14 The term atmosphere, key to the discourse of furnishing, effectively captured the way that colors and lighting unified the distinct elements of this interior, which was defined not by walls but rather organized as a sum of fragmented stage sets, each composed of abstract modern furnishings. In fact, Persico referred to this interior as “a true and proper mise-en-scène” and suggested that life within it could be understood as a form of “spectacle,” altering the relationship between the site of individual habitation and its exposure and communication.15

Persico’s stage set analogy was not so surprising, given that he had previously analyzed film sets in Casabella. In 1931, for example, he discussed the interiors designed for the film Patatrac (dir. Gennaro Righelli, 1931) by Carlo Levi and Enrico Paulucci, members of the so-called “Six Painters of Turin,” part of Lionello Venturi’s circle and very close to Persico and his partner in Casabella, Giuseppe Pagano.16 Persico praised Levi and Paulucci’s work for displaying “rigorously modern taste” while simultaneously addressing the “problems offered by a new spectacle.”17 In one of the Patatrac sets highlighted by Persico, the abstract forms and light materials of the furniture are mirrored and partially enclosed by grids of thin tubes. Photographed as an empty set, they evoke not only an appreciation of the expressive potential of modern industrial materials and technologies but also, inevitably, the gantries used to support film and stage machinery (Figure 3.3). And yet, even if the designs in this image are clearly aligned with modernist aesthetic trends circulating beyond the country, some elements denote certain differences: chairs and tables that mirror the expressive forms of bent tubular steel models are fully made of rattan, while the grids enclosing the set are most likely built out of wood rather than steel. Persico grounded these fictional constructions in the reality of Italy, claiming that the designs could be considered unquestionably Italian: “This ‘Italian’ film offers the public a way of considering the nature of the contemporary house that is being built in our country.”18 Even if his description remains a program of intentions and is not explicitly connected with any of the aesthetic or material features of the sets in his assessment, Persico understood that the two painters had freed Italian cinema from international references and, at the same time, had raised it to a level where it could compete with them.

Figure 3.3. Carlo Levi and Enrico Paulucci, set design for Patatrac (dir. Gennaro Righelli, 1931). Collection of the National Museum of Cinema, Turin. Courtesy of Mattia Acetoso.

While the distinctive design used in the film sets was deemed by Persico as a emblematic of the contemporary houses being built in the country, Persico’s embrace of modernism was not always clearly aligned with the nationalist premises of fascism. Even if his writings are characterized by their ambiguity and contradictions, he often criticized attempts to associate the new style with the national myths invoked to support the regime.19 Instead, he sought to broaden the set of references for Italian modernism by insisting on its European filiation, which he explicitly linked to universal values.20 And while this European genealogy of Italian modernism offered an alternative to nationalist myths, it also dismissed local traditions and provided an alternative to the forms of housing characteristic of Italy’s rural and southern regions (where Persico himself grew up)—contributing, in Persico’s words, to “the renewal of a taste that can no longer bear comparison with that of other countries” (a project I discussed in the previous chapter).21

The structures used by Levi and Paulucci to frame the sets were not unlike those mobilized in projects designed some years later by Persico along with Marcelo Nizzoli in their own contributions to this renewal. These included the famous Parker shop in Milan and the Sala delle Medaglie d’Oro at the Mostra dell’Aeronautica at the Milan Triennale building, both in 1934. There was also an even more significant project for its direct political program: the construction for the Plebiscite in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, where the abstract grid of the steel tubes manufactured by the German conglomerate Mannesmann was filled with propaganda material in support of Mussolini (Figure 3.4). This project showed that modernist aesthetics could easily serve not only to signal the alliance with European values that Persico aimed to promote but could also provide a comprehensive scaffolding holding up (quite literally) an image in which the Italian population needed to see themselves reflected as citizens of fascism in the image of Il Duce.22 In spite of Persico’s ambiguous and contradictory politics—and those of the regime, for that matter—these abstract structures seem to offer a frame where conflicting realities and cultural programs could be placed in order to build the illusion of unity that was required for the construction of the nation.23

Figure 3.4. Cover of Corriere della Sera featuring a perspective of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, including the construction for the Plebiscite of March 25, 1934, designed by Edoardo Persico and Marcelo Nizzoli, Milan. Corriere della Sera, April 1, 1934. Courtesy Archivio Corriere della Sera.

Figure Description

Newspaper title, in Italian, reads: “Corriere’s Sunday. Illustrated supplement for ‘Corriere della Sera.’ April 1st, 1934. Year XII.” The image caption, in Italian, reads: “The Plebiscite of Year XII. Shining evenings in Milan, in the Gallery."

Persico advanced an additional project for these modernist structures in the understanding of this film not only as providing an image of the “contemporary house built within our country” but also a demonstration for Italians of how “to live within it,” as characteristic and worthy inhabitants of the houses of the nation24—even if, it should be clarified, this was Persico’s reading rather than the pursuit of the film set designers, who left nothing written on this work and were declared anti-fascists.25 As a matter of fact, the interiors in these films were significant not just for their aesthetic features but for the way they aligned those features with the life and customs of their protagonists. These were many times members of the urban bourgeoisie and, while modernist designers (along with fascism) allegedly sought to overcome bourgeois vices with their project of cultural renewal, modernist designs were often socialized, in these films, as pertaining to this social group—just as they had previously done in other media. White telephone films made by Camerini, Righelli, and others, including Baldassarre Negroni and Alessandro De Stefani, also showed new lifestyles engaged by other social groups in Italy and their relation to their shifting built environments—including their aspiration to modernize their domestic interiors, as was the case for Bruno and Lauretta. And significantly, rather than being presented as one stylistic choice among many possible alternatives, the modernist furnishings of these films were intended to define, in Persico’s words, “the model house of today”—one that they should aspire to inhabit.26

The strong relations between the sets of white telephone films and the modernist designs that filled contemporary architecture magazines, including Casabella, contributed to their understanding as a model. The interiors designed by Gastone Medin for Due cuori felici (Two happy hearts, dir. Baldassarre Negroni, 1932), with their long ribbon windows, reflected international designs widely featured in magazines at the time. And yet, both the photographs published in the magazine and their performance in the film obscure the substantial differences: the windows in the set were made of cellophane rather than glass, and the linoleum floor (an increasingly popular modern choice for domestic interiors) was merely represented by a special kind of varnish. The use of real materials was not considered relevant to either the logics of film or the aesthetic appreciation of the set.27 The specific programs assigned to these interiors were also sometimes dismissed: the airport passenger lounge in O la borsa o la vita (Your money or your life, dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1932), also designed by Medin, was included in the section of the magazine dedicated to the house, as Persico was just interested in the aesthetic properties of the objects that populated it: “It’s really a contemporary interior” (Figure 3.5).28 It was through their aesthetics that these interiors were thought to serve as a “model.” This role was facilitated by the fact that the interiors in these films followed some of the principles that had transformed the organization of domestic interior into an analog of a set, characteristically structured by the furniture objects themselves (Figure 3.6). Quite simply, since real interiors were organized as sets, sets served as a model for real interiors. As representations of “true and proper modern houses,” film interiors transcended the staging of cinematic performances through their connections to the homes of the people in the audience.29

Figure 3.5. Gastone Medin, set design for Due cuori felici (dir. Baldassarre Negroni, 1932) (above) and set design for O la borsa o la vita (dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, 1932, based on the radio play La dinamo dell’eroismo by Alessandro De Stefani) (below). Archivio Fotografico della Cineteca Nazionale–Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome (document of indemnity).

Figure 3.6. Carlo Levi, study for the set design for Patatrac (dir. Gennaro Righelli, 1931). Collection of the National Museum of Cinema, Turin. Courtesy of Mattia Acetoso.

These connections were strengthened by the same pieces of furniture resurfacing in different films and in other representations of domestic interiors. Two examples are Mies van der Rohe’s armless MR chairs, from 1927, and the chaise longue designed by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand in 1929, both featured by Medin in the aforementioned films upholstered with similar striped patterns on the seat and back—dressing their steel frames as a homogeneous set of characters. Persico wrote about Mies’s chair in Casabella around the same time: he described its performance, beyond film, as “the liveliest symbol of the efforts of modern taste achieved until today.”30 While arrangements of furniture acquired symbolic value through film representations, individual pieces outside film were regarded as characters. This was “a new chair, not so much because it is the most comfortable, but because it is the one that is most similar to us. Have you not realized how a Liberty armchair resembles an aunt from the provinces, from thirty years ago, with her feet in tight boots? The chair designed by [Mies], on the other hand, resembles our sister dressed for tennis” (Figure 3.7).31

Figure 3.7. Spread of Edoardo Persico, “A chair,” featuring Mies van der Rohe’s MR Chair of 1927. La casa bella 45 (September 1931). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure Description

Article headline, written in vertical in Italian, reads: “A chair."

The “us” to which Persico referred in the evaluation of this chair encompassed not only the readers of Casabella but also the “model” inhabitants of the Italian house, who were asked to identify with this chair featured in film and use it as furnishing in their houses. Giuseppe Terragni produced his own distinctive take on the steel-frame chair with the Benita and Lariana models designed for the Casa del Fascio in Cuomo, which, as Rifkind has powerfully argued, appealed to the ideology of the building “by instructing their users’ behavior” (Figure 3.8).32 For Terragni, the Casa del Fascio was “not a place to spend long hours in vast or commodious waiting rooms”; so the chairs, according to Rifkind, “discourage slouching or lounging” and “mode[l] the erect posture proper to ‘the servants of Fascism.’”33 Persico’s analysis of the Mies MR chair had highlighted its elasticity, conjuring the image of a tennis player (a sport identified with Mussolini) and evoking the athleticism that was a desired characteristic of the fascist citizen in its association with virility, health, and hygiene—even if Persico partially challenged that construct by appealing to a female sports player.34 If Terragni’s chairs embedded these properties in the seat of government, then the MR chairs featured in film disseminated them, albeit in a domesticated version, all throughout the nation. While lacking some of the sophistication of Terragni’s designs, the MR chairs enacted a continuity between Mussolini as a model Italian citizen (a decisively modern and athletic one) and the film audiences that had to identify with him in order to participate in fascist Italy.

Figure 3.8. Giuseppe Terragni, Sala Per Direttorio featuring the Benita Chair, Casa del Fascio, Cuomo, 1936. Quadrante 35/36 (October 1936). Avery Classics, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

While the MR chair was notably not an Italian product, it is revealing that Persico explicitly discussed its design features in relation to the inhabitants of the country. This “us” was modeled through a rejection of the parochial values assigned to the “aunt” (a term often used derogatorily) “from the provinces” (an expression used to refer to all the territory beyond the metropolises of the country), and in this way contributed to the number of exclusions contemporaneously performed by modernist design and broadcast through film. And while, as I have discussed, fascism often derided urban centers in favor of rural areas, the celebration of this modernist chair as a rejection of “the provinces” aligned with the fascist impetus to shut out those who failed to participate in the national project of regeneration. The modernist objects and interiors in white telephone films created an environment for those engaged in this regeneration.35 Additionally, appeals to style and sports, like the ones mobilized by Persico, were both used at the time as a response to decadence and were mobilized to denigrate specific bodies and groups. And while, in Germany, following Tobin Siebers, “Nazi art [. . .] pursued so relentlessly a bombastic perfection of the body [and] rejected modern art as degenerate and ugly because they viewed it as representing physical and mental disability,” here modernist furnishing provided for Persico an emblem of a non-bombastic yet idealized referent to the athletic body.36 Art and architectural forms, as the tools of these cultural politics, delimited different forms of inclusion and exclusion—with tastes defined, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued, “by the refusal of other tastes [. . .] which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious.”37 Liberty objects outside major cities, like the ones referred to by Persico, would typically be associated to the rural bourgeoisie and land-owning aristocracy, but they help articulate in this statement a project more broadly targeted against those not associated to athleticism as well as those not embracing characteristically urban styles, values, and customs. And given that Persico framed modernist design as a national project, the parallel drawn between outdated furniture styles and the population of “the provinces” might even be understood to result in the production of “noncitizens”—an exclusion traced, in this case, through aesthetic means.38

The relationship between the representation of interiors and the models shaping the identity of the Italian population was grounded in sophisticated connections performed by film—connections between objects, spaces, and bodies assigned specific values and meanings through the performances of film. Through those connections, film was understood to influence the psyches of the audience, fueling their imaginations both as consumers and as designers of the spaces in which they lived. This relationship was addressed not only by architecture critics but also by film theorists, among them Rudolf Arnheim, a German who lived in Italy for most of the 1930s.39 Writing for the Italian magazine Cinema in 1937, Arnheim specifically discussed the expressive possibilities of furniture in the context of film. He argued that the seeming “details” of the furniture of sets were not details at all, but were a means to construct the story: “This expressive condition of things is a precious instrument for film, which should construct characters through visual means.”40 Arnheim was rooted in the tradition of the silent screen and these visual means—the image and its sequencing and editing—were for him the dominant form of expression in film, as opposed to the dialogue of the theater production—or, later, the “talkies.” In his essay “The New Laocoon” (1938), Arnheim criticized the “narrow limiting down to men, imposed by dialogue,” suggesting that objects in film could “speak” as if they were characters: “The universal silence of the image had made the fragments of a vessel ‘speak’ in the same way in which a character ‘spoke’ to a neighbor.”41

Moreover, as Arnheim had argued in his earlier article, the impact of the objects that served to “furnish” characters was not limited to a specific scene but could be extrapolated to construct settings and characters outside the film itself. He even put the furnishing used in film into dialogue with the availability of such furnishings on the market: “The average spectator pays two lire for a seat in the theater, do you want him to pay five hundred for a lamp?”42 A similar complaint could have accompanied most modernist furnishings featured in film, including the MR chair; as Robin Schuldenfrei has proposed, “all too often these designs were out of reach of the very people they purported to serve” and, we could add, those that were compelled to acquire them to become worthy citizens.43

Arnheim’s awareness of film’s potential to manipulate reality linked this medium to the logic of advertising.44 However, film served as a very sophisticated form of advertisement: in developing connections among settings, characters, and lines of narrative, film assigned specific meanings to the choice of furnishing and its performance, incorporating within itself the mediating role that was elsewhere performed by critics, architects, design journals, and commercial agents. As Persico observed: “It seems unnecessary to comment on the taste of these films’ interiors: each of you will choose, without a guide.”45 If the cinema audience were inspired to emulate these designs in their own homes, then they would experience “the pleasure of an optimal interior [as well as] the fascination one gets from the thought of living in an environment created by a poet,” Persico argued.46 The modernist premise of linking “art” and “life” was redirected here by the operations of the market and the logic of desire, at the very time these links were being transformed by platforms such as the department store La Rinascente.47 The fascist project of national regeneration was not managed by the regime alone; it was significantly mediated through architectural design in different alliances with both the market and film.

The Subject of Cinematographic Reality

While deeply entangled with interiors outside film, film sets also had their own logics. The Milanese architect and critic Carlo Enrico Rava was among those most consistently committed to their exploration. Rava was the son of a well-placed colonial administrator, Maurizio Rava, who had been trained as a painter and was later drawn to politics as an avid supporter of nationalism and colonialism. Carlo Enrico Rava sought to develop the artistic sensibilities of his father and initially enrolled at the Milan Polytechnic, which opened in 1923, although he would end up graduating in design from the Academy Braidense.48 Rava’s work was first concerned with the promotion of rationalism as a member of Gruppo 7, even if he would later disregard the most radical stances of the movement, which he deemed a reduction to “sterile dogma or, even worse, to mere numbers.”49 Throughout the 1930s his architectural practice remained mostly linked to that of his former colleague in Gruppo 7, Sebastiano Larco, though he also developed projects on his own, particularly for furniture and interiors. His intellectual endeavors focused most intensely on two subjects: the architecture of the colonial enterprise (to which we shall turn in the next chapter) and film scenography.

A designer of film sets, Rava wrote prolifically on the architecture of film for architecture publications, professional film magazines, and other media, from La Rassegna Italiana to Bianco e Nero and Cinema. From 1937 to 1943 he contributed regularly on the topic to Domus and Ponti’s subsequent editorial project, Lo Stile, in a series of articles: “La casa nel film,” “Dal film a la casa,” “Architettura e arredamento nel film italiano,” and “Il gusto negli interni di film”—all of them prioritizing domestic interiors and furnishing over other architectural domains. In these articles Rava addressed both the role of architecture in the construction of a “cinematographic reality” and its relationship with a geographical and historical reality outside film. Rather than “the exact reproduction of the real,” cinematographic reality involved “a transposition [. . .] similar to the relation that pictorial reality [. . .] establishes with real nature.”50 Rava located the complexity of this operation in the double relation of film, first to the context that it represents, and then to the context to which it belongs: “It is also indisputable that the frame of the scene, and thus the ‘atmosphere’ of the film of a given period, is also influenced by external reality, that is, the tastes, fashions, and intellectual attitudes of its time.”51 Even more, film, through its “universal expansion,” had the capacity to shape the context in which it was received. As Rava argued, “through a series of ideological schemes, aesthetic canons, and examples spread throughout the world simultaneously, [cinematographic reality] creates a sort of real ‘prototype,’ and life, conversely, aspires to become one with it.”52 This back-and-forth between the reality outside film and that projected on the screen seemed to Rava—as it did to Persico—to be “one of the biggest problems in the formation of taste of our time” (Figure 3.9).53

Figure 3.9. Carlo Enrico Rava, “La casa nel film I” (“The house in film I”), with images featuring a film set, a drawing of an interior, a crowd doing the Sieg Heil salute, and people in opera boxes. Domus 119 (November 1937). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Evaluating the aesthetics of film sets, Rava drew parallels with contemporary architectural and artistic explorations, highlighting, among others, modernist principles of composition based on simple volumes, clear rhythms, and contrasting black-and-white elements.54 Some of his analysis focused on the relation with avant-garde practices in photography, including that of Man Ray or Hans Richter.55 And yet, even if film intersected in various ways with photography or painting and sculpture, for Rava the “three-dimensional condition” of the film sets transformed them into “works of architecture.”56 With this argument, Rava sought simultaneously to define the nature of the new medium and to delineate a sphere of professional action. He described how the “realization of a unitary and harmonic environment” went beyond mere decoration, requiring the “architect-scenographer” to control “all the elements that partake in the totality of the frame.”57 Here, the architect took on the role of coordinating an “environment” or atmosphere—not imposing stylistic homogenization, but rather achieving coherence through the careful management of diversity.58 No longer the author of a total work of art, the architect became instead a synthesizer, repurposing fragments to create a meaningful totality.

Rava’s understanding of the way in which cinematographic reality related to the material world outside the framed image differed from many other positions at the time. Critic Umberto de Franciscis, for one, referred to “inconsistencies” in Rava’s sets for Inventiamo l’amore (Let’s invent love, dir. Camilo Mastrocinque, 1938) which were in his view “not justified by any reference to reality.”59 Rava, for his part, dismissed these criticisms, being more concerned with the creation of an “unreal atmosphere” and the way in which a “cinematographic climate” could be obtained through a modern “caricaturing” of stylistic elements.60 “Fantasy” remained central to the definitions of cinematographic reality in Rava’s understanding. He highlighted, for example, Jean Cocteau’s work for La vie d’un poète (1930), singling out the creation of an “extra-real climate,” a “supranatural atmosphere of a ‘lived dream’ that gathers a magic cinematographic reality.”61 For Rava, these properties could also serve as inspiration for the construction of interiors outside film. In fact, he prescribed a dose of “fantasy” as a remedy for the overemphasis on technical considerations in the work of many of his rationalist and functionalist colleagues. He bemoaned, for example, how “what counted in the design of the house (in the famous sense of a ‘machine for living’) was the precise calculation of the ‘minimum path’ between kitchen and living room, so that the cleaning lady would not waste a single step.”62 With this, he could easily have been referring to the paradigmatic diagram for the kitchen of the Casa Elettrica by some of his colleagues in Gruppo 7 (1930), or to the drawings by Enrico Griffini for his 1931 publication Costruzione razionale della casa (Figure 3.10).63 “Everything had to be reduced to ‘technical necessity,’” Rava exclaimed, “while we witnessed the brief splendor of the ‘new materials’ [. . .] we forgot . . . architecture itself!”64

Figure 3.10. Enrico Griffini, diagram of a rationalized kitchen layout confronted with the model of a traditional one. Costruzione razionale della casa, 1939, originally published in La Construction Moderne, 1928. Courtesy of Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti.

Figure Description

Text in Italian reads: “Top: Rational layout of a kitchen designed to avoid unnecessary paths. Bottom: Usual and defective arrangement (The Modern Construction, Paris).”

In the radicalized political context in which these arguments were introduced, Rava’s commitment to “fantasy” was discussed and tested by other architects and critics, both in artistic terms as well as for its political efficacy. In fact, Rava was not alone in his disregard for the faulty underpinnings of Italian rationalism. In Persico’s account, rationalism had from the outset been unable to “establish with any coherence the limits of the problem” of modernity.65 One particularly significant proponent of an alternative to rationalist paradigms within modernism was Turinese architect, interior designer, and scenographer Carlo Mollino, who was closer than Rava to Persico and the group of painters that included Levi and Paulucci, along with others such as Felice Casorati. Writing retrospectively, in the period after World War II, Mollino described a shared concern with the prevalence of “fantasy” within architecture.66 Like Persico and Rava, Mollino criticized positivist strands within modernism, but he also took the opportunity to dismiss diverse political allegiances in architecture: “I really believe that reliance on mechanistic, functional, stylistic, social, servile, revolutionary, or reactionary programs is a source of sterility and academicism and not of art.”67

Son of a highly successful civil engineer, Mollino was something of a polymath: he published two short novels after finishing his architecture studies at the Turin Polytechnic and throughout his career he would combine design with many diverse practices, among them photography and sports (from skiing to aviation).68 In fact, Mollino was not only a “synthesizer” in the way Rava proposed the architect to be, but embodied synthesis in his understanding of the architect as someone that is a “poet and a mathematician” as well as a “mechanic, bookkeeper, lawyer, boor, master of good manners, biter of bullets, and ‘charmeur.’”69 Alongside his interests in fiction, Mollino framed the design of interiors as if they were film sets. He saw the architect as a “demiurge of an imaginary sphere” with the capacity to create worlds “that do not coincide with reality.”70 More explicitly, he contended that the architect had the power “to make clandestine or secretly ironic crossings between these and other worlds,” bridging the realms of the real and the imaginary.71 From his perspective, “fantasy” could underpin not only the design of “cinematographic reality” but also interiors outside film; it would, in fact, relate both in a “secret” or “clandestine” manner.

In exploring these intersections, Mollino’s work was close to that of the Surrealists: he was aware of the developments unfolding in France and owned all thirteen issues of Minotaure, the Surrealist-oriented magazine published between 1933 and 1939.72 In the same way that André Breton had chosen the interior of a castle as the favored realm of surrealism—a space in which we can “live by our fantasies”—Mollino saw domestic interiors as the privileged place in which he could be left “alone with [his] fantasy.”73 He referred to his own home as his “interior landscape” and, contrary to the prevailing discourse on domestic interiors, he did not explore it in relation to notions of comfort or belonging but rather argued, in line with Surrealist thought, that “[t]he only perceptible trace it leaves is the constant sensation of slight nausea that prevents acceptance and settling down.”74

A prime example of this agenda was his design for Casa Miller in Turin, which was presented in Domus in 1938 in the section titled “La casa,” even though it was never actually inhabited as a home. Instead, Casa Miller was a rented apartment that Mollino furnished and used as an escape from his family home, where he continued to live throughout his life, and as a stage for his work as a photographer—and it was precisely as a stage that it was reviewed by Carlo Levi in the pages of the magazine. The article contained twenty-three photographs taken by Mollino and a small floor plan overlaid with a line diagram that indicated the places where the photographs were shot (Figure 3.11).75 More than a conventional architectural drawing, the plan seemed to represent a series of scenes in a screenplay. But within its carefully delineated irrational logic, it also referenced and inverted functionalist diagrams like the ones dismissed by Rava.76 Conventional representations and functional distributions were of no use for understanding this interior, which was entirely unconcerned with function—just like the architecture of film. The interior was certainly not designed for any optimized domestic program; the entrance gallery, for example, was out of scale, and its necessity questionable in such a small space, which even lacked a kitchen. By making Casa Miller kitchenless, Mollino deprived it of one of the emblematic elements that transformed the house into a functionalist “machine for living”—not to mention the core of traditional family values.77

Figure 3.11. Carlo Mollino, floor plan of Casa Miller, Turin, 1937, including the location of photograph shots. Domus 129 (September 1938). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Here, as with filmic interiors, the camera provided the only access to this space. And, as with Rava’s cinematographic reality, the photographs it produced were liberated from any concern with verisimilitude.78 Writing to Raffaello Giolli concerning their reproduction in Domus, Mollino asked that the photos be published full page and encouraged the editors to open the presentation with a mysterious title image featuring the plaster cast of a horse’s head and its reflection in a mirror. Insisting on the mediated nature of the perception of the interior, he claimed this image would explain the project, “at least according to my own way of seeing.”79 The editors demurred and the presentation opened instead with a partial view of the entrance gallery, framed horizontally by a dark, striated dropped ceiling and an equally dark carpet with patterned motifs in light colors. A glass table sits on a single curvilinear metal leg cantilevered from the wall, duplicated on both sides by exaggerated shadows. The fragmented composition of the image is emphasized by plaster cast of an eye on top of the table and the horse’s head below it. Close to the center of the frame, a wall clock freezes the set of fragments in an unbalanced composition (Figure 3.12).

Figure 3.12. Carlo Mollino, photograph of the gallery in Casa Miller, Turin, 1937. Domus 129 (September 1938). Per gentile concessione dell’Agenzia del Demanio, Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino, Sezione Archivi Biblioteca “Gabetti.”

Similar to this image, the other photographs that Mollino published in Domus presented fragments of rooms or pieces of furniture, with the position of the camera consistently denying a comprehensive apprehension of the interior. The rooms and their constitutive elements were hardly designed according to established models, and were rendered in the photographs more uncanny than homey.80 On the walls, two collages by Max Ernst support the disquieting condition of the interior characteristic of Surrealist practices.81 Levi explored this condition, arguing that Mollino had used all available means “to break down the hierarchy of formal and sentimental perspective.”82 Scattered and repeated throughout the images are traces of inhabitation—pieces of clothing and various household items such as the wall clock. One particularly enigmatic shot includes a partial view of two spaces separated by a vertical molding. The lack of any shadows or perspectival lines denies the possibility of the logical reconstruction of the space as an architectural reality. Framed as a fragmented composition, the photograph collapses different spaces and reflections in a sort of collage. The space is only offered to the viewer as a unity in the image, but never becomes that which modernist architecture seems to demand: a systematic and unified space (Figure 3.13). Architectural elements are deployed in a way that undermines any stable composition of the whole and disrupts all continuity. This lack of stability is elaborated within each of the objects: for example, the irregular and unmatched shapes of the two glass pieces of the coffee table and the long cabinet stand in a difficult equilibrium, defying any rational composition (Figure 3.14). Only in the camera frame, “in that rectangle of life surrounded by darkness,” Mollino argued, do “we manage to combine and see the fragment of a world we have dreamed of as the reality before our eyes”—a reality whose coming-into-being depended on the camera.83

Figure 3.13. Carlo Mollino, photograph of Casa Miller, Turin, 1937. Domus 129 (September 1938). Per gentile concessione dell’Agenzia del Demanio, Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino, Sezione Archivi Biblioteca “Gabetti.”

Figure 3.14. Carlo Mollino, sketches of different furnishings and construction details for Casa Miller, Turin, 1937. Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino. Per gentile concessione dell’Agenzia del Demanio, Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino, Sezione Archivi Biblioteca “Gabetti.”

In his review, Levi criticized the interior as falling into the realm of “good taste,” something he found difficult to reconcile with his own preferences.84 As he noted, “the decorative ability considered an end in itself is, rather, a limitation.”85 The review is significant not only in what it tells about Mollino’s project, but also in revealing Levi’s goal for the designs that he had authored with Paulucci—beyond the ways in which they were framed by Persico—and his politics for modernism more broadly—beyond the mobilization of this style in service of fascism.86 In spite of some of his criticisms, Levi’s main focus in discussing Casa Miller was on its relation to the subject inhabiting this photographic interior, which he praised as tending “toward the novel, toward the creation and description of characters rather than toward lyrical outpouring.”87 Framing the space as a “stage” for an “invented character,” Levi highlighted the way it performed in relation to Mollino, who was at once the designer of the interior and the subject, the invented character inhabiting it. Despite the fragmentary presentation, Levi defined this subject as aiming for a “totality” through the “coexistence of [. . .] all his times and all his spaces.”88 And while the recomposition of fragmented realities was a characteristically modernist pursuit, here all fragments remained visible and the pursuit of a “totality” was only granted by the camera—questioning the grounding of any composition in prevailing taste hierarchies or in the naturalized framework of the nation.

Other designs authored by Mollino in this period were regarded in similar terms: writing in Lo Stile, Turinese critic and painter Albino Galvano, close to Levi, described how the interior of Casa Devalle allowed Mollino to explore the artistic traditions of the avant-gardes that rationalism had banished from architecture and turned into what he called “narrated painting.”89 The emphasis on narrative was derived in this case from the difficulty of apprehending interior spaces due to the undulating and broken definition of walls and to the mirroring surfaces endlessly reproducing fragments of the whole (Figures 3.15 and 3.16). Mollino’s “spatial decomposition” was, for Galvano, to be recomposed in the form of a “narrative.”90 Reality was partially reproduced in each of these surfaces, just as in a sequence of film frames, with their totality only emerging from their sequential superimposition.

Figure 3.15. Carlo Mollino, floor plan of Casa Devalle, Turin, 1940. Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino. Per gentile concessione dell’Agenzia del Demanio, Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino, Sezione Archivi Biblioteca “Gabetti.”

Figure 3.16. Carlo Mollino, photograph of Casa Devalle, Turin, 1940. Lo Stile 5–6 (May–June 1941). Per gentile concessione dell’Agenzia del Demanio, Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino, Sezione Archivi Biblioteca “Gabetti.”

By representing reality as fragmented—as needing to be pieced together, artificially, by the camera and the narrative—the interiors designed by Mollino exposed the shaky foundations of the modernist pursuit of order, unity, and stability. Similarly, the inhabiting subject was represented as alienated from their own condition, “an ambiguous personality, simultaneously in the first and third person,” in Levi’s words.91 Particularly significant in this regard is a photograph of Mollino in the gallery of Casa Miller, shot by the painter and photographer Italo Cremona.92 The architect is shown resting his head on top of a glass table, eyes shut. On the tabletop are assorted objects—a pair of globes, a wallet, a pack of cigarettes, a coat, a set of keys, and a plaster cast of a hand that resembles Mollino’s own hand. Mollino’s head and hand appear as just two objects among the many that are reconstituted by the image (Figure 3.17). Rather than revealing “the human in absolute forms that are sufficient in and of themselves and are formally determined,” Mollino’s projects make evident the constructed condition of the subject.93 Just as in the novel À rebours, which Mollino held dear, the interior seems to perform at once as a platform for an “antinaturalist manifesto” and a “homage to artifice,” as Jack Halberstam has defined Joris-Karl Huysmans’s work.94 The interior staged the construction of the subject of the Italian house—the same subject that film and fascism sought to naturalize.95 The inhabitants of the Italian house, simultaneously regarded as worthy Italian citizens, did not obtain their condition by nature, by inheritance, or by rights, but were simultaneously the subject and object of representation. This revelation might be understood to ground an emancipatory process: following Levi, an “effort to liberate oneself objectively as narrative.”96 And while this might be read as Levi’s own reading of modernism away from the politics of the regime, narratives were, simultaneously, used as a form of confinement. Ultimately the interior, like the film set, was the site where the fragmented relations between subjects, objects, and locations were addressed, whether to expose their discontinuities or in pursuit of synthesis.

Figure 3.17. Italo Cremona, portrait of Carlo Mollino in Casa Miller, Turin, 1937. Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino. Per gentile concessione dell’Agenzia del Demanio, Fondo Carlo Mollino conservato al Politecnico di Torino, Sezione Archivi Biblioteca “Gabetti.”

Mediated Proximity and Crafted Simultaneity

Rava described a paradigmatic scene of this fragmentation in his review of the set design of Hanno rapito un uomo (They’ve kidnapped a man, dir. Gennaro Righelli, 1938): “Dining room, or rather auction hall? From the rich merchant to the junk dealer, each one will find here his own taste satiated: Louis XVI console tables or Biedermeier chairs.”97 While such an uncoordinated accumulation of objects might suggest a merchandise mart, the items were instead the accoutrements of a film studio: “No, we were wrong; we are not in an auction, but rather in a studio at ‘Cinecittà’.”98 And just as trade networks mediated the relation of the department store with domestic interiors throughout Italy, so film connected the studios to the homes of individual spectators, resulting in overlapping and changing spatial relations.

Before returning to the operations of furnishing within film, the architecture of the studios requires specific attention. Cinecittà was the new capital of Italian cinema, the successor to the Cines production studios that had stood on Via Veio in central Rome since 1930, the beginning of the sound era. Cines was largely destroyed in a mysterious fire on September 26, 1935, not long after it had been taken over by the regime’s Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI, Institute for industrial reconstruction) and passed into the hands of a new owner, the industrialist and property developer Carlo Roncoroni.99 Mussolini’s head of cinema, Luigi Freddi, then stepped in to offer state support for the construction of a major production facility outside the city center.100 The lot on Via Tuscolana, on the periphery of Rome, would grow to 585,520 square meters.101

A cluster of associated institutions joined the studios. They included the new headquarters of the Istituto LUCE (the acronym LUCE, meaning “light” in Italian, standing for L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), founded in 1924 to produce and distribute films with an educational content, i.e., propaganda. They also included the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC, Experimental center of cinematography), the film school set up by Freddi in 1935 and directed by Luigi Chiarini.102 While primarily concerned with Italian audiences, the complex had an international reach: LUCE documentaries were meant not only to inform the population of the Italian peninsula but to broadcast the regime’s messages throughout the empire; they would be distributed worldwide by commercial corporations as well.103 The CSC, in turn, attracted international figures such as Arnheim, and its students read translations of film theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.

Freddi had first conceived the idea of this city of cinema in 1929, on a trip to the United States as a journalist for Il Popolo d’Italia, when he had the opportunity to meet major film directors, among them D. W. Griffith, and to pay an extended visit to the already famous Hollywood studios. Turning that idea into reality became possible after he was appointed general director of cinematography within the Ministry for Press and Propaganda in 1934—the way to that appointment being smoothed by his impeccable fascist credentials. Close to futurist circles, he had joined the nationalist forces of Gabriele D’Annunzio and, later, Benito Mussolini. In 1927 he was named vice-secretary of Fasci Italiani all’estero, which campaigned for a worldwide expansion of fascism. After discussing it first with Giuseppe Bottai (then editor of Il Popolo d’Italia), Freddi would present his project directly to Mussolini, who understood it as an expansion of a larger engagement with the audiovisual industry, for which the Istituto LUCE was already a key agent.104 The fire at the Cines studio provided Freddi with the perfect opportunity to push forward with his plan. Construction work began in January 1936 and proceeded rapidly, apparently unhindered by the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (which took place just five days after the fire). The complex would be inaugurated in April 1937 by Benito Mussolini.

The commission to design Cinecittà was given to the then little-known architect Gino Peressutti.105 The first drawings were completed in November 1935 (two months after the Cines fire), following a study trip that took in similarly ambitious infrastructures across Europe, including Berlin, London, and Nice, and a comprehensive briefing from Freddi on what he had learned from Hollywood.106 Peressutti’s drawings announced the rationalist aesthetics and monumental presence of the complex, reflecting both its role in the representation of the regime and its functional role in managing the production of filmed representations. Of particular note was the entrance building: a tripartite structure with symmetrical portals flanking a central access office, with a bridging horizontal volume emblazoned with the institution’s name—a building transformed into a media banner (Figure 3.18). Organized as an expandable grid, the studio complex was intended from the outset to enable the simultaneous production of numerous discontinuous fictions. As the architect argued, the design “promises the greatest possible articulation and possibility of separation, while still keeping all the necessary services in contact.”107 In this sense, the operation of the complex seemed analogous to the spatial constructs that it was to produce, likewise characterized by the rearranging of proximities, distances, and spatial connections.

Figure 3.18. Gino Peressutti, Cinecittà, bird’s eye view of the complex (above) and access building (below), Rome, 1936. Fondo Belloni-Peressutti.

While Peressutti emphasized the spatial logic of the plan, others likened Cinecittà’s buildings to the architecture of a “casa,” or a house, for the film industry.108 An effort was made to explain Cinecittà’s role primarily in terms of infrastructural support, leaving the Istituto LUCE concerned with the regime’s propaganda.109 As Freddi saw it, the film studios ensured that a previously inadequate industry was now able to fulfill its national duties, which extended beyond the provision of entertainment and was more nuanced than the mere production of propaganda. Rather, these duties included “(a) the aesthetic and ethical education of the masses, in a human and unitary sense; (b) the dissemination of fundamental ideas and life principles for the Italian peoples; (c) the demonstration of the intellectual, moral, artistic, and political potentiality of Italian civiltà [culture, civilization].”110 Cinecittà became the center of a political project with the “masses” as its target. And, even though Freddi’s interpretation of the relationship between the state and cinema differed from other official positions, the studio complex assumed an importance far greater than that of providing a “house” for the film industry.111 In fact, through its creation of a common roof of shared images, Cinecittà sought to house all Italians.

The choreography of the groundbreaking ceremony demonstrated this lofty aim, invoking all of Italy: church and government officials gathered below an immense image of Mussolini operating a movie camera; towering above the walls around the building site, the image symbolically conveyed the effort to reach out to audiences dispersed across the country. And it was the relations that film established with and among those dispersed audiences that made it the regime’s “strongest weapon” (as the slogan on the ceremonial stage proclaimed)—and not only through propaganda films, but in ways beyond the regime’s direct control (Figure 3.19).

Figure 3.19. Groundbreaking ceremony for Cinecittà, Rome, July 1936. Footage supplied by Istituto Luce Cinecittà Historical Archive.

Figure Description

The banner, in Italian, reads: "Cinematography is the strongest weapon" and includes a cutout of Benito Mussolini operating a camera.

Located on the southeastern outskirts of Rome, Cinecittà lay outside the limits of the recent Regulating Plan, which attempted to respond to the rapid urban growth of the Italian capital (Figure 3.20). In 1931, the year the plan was enacted, the city’s population had reached one million, largely through internal migration from impoverished rural areas.112 If the northern cities were the motor of the Italian economy, then Rome was the vehicle for a new representative program. The fascist regime sought to transform the city into a faro di civiltà (beacon of civilization) for the nation and its growing empire. To support the fictions of a civilization rooted in the glories of ancient Rome, old monuments were excavated and put on public display. At the same time, the urban fabric around them was rationalized and provided with a consistent image.113 The regime also built its own monuments of the “new Rome,” such as the Città Universitaria and, most famously, EUR. Both old and new monuments, together with the avenues that linked them (including Corso del Rinascimento, the new extension of Via delle Botteghe Oscure, Via dell’Imperio, and Via del Mare) were conceived to bring Italian society together around its common past and a shared fascist future.

Figure 3.20. The location of Cinecittà in Rome, outside the limits of the city’s Regulating Plan of 1931. Cinema 1 (July 1936).

The unearthing of the celebrated ruins, however, required the demolition of large numbers of dwellings and led to the displacement of the population from the city center to the growing periphery. In parallel with the construction of highly structured monumental complexes, then, the city expanded in discontinuous patches of informal developments and planned residential areas (borgate ufficiali) promoted by the regime.114 The 1931 Regulating Plan, undermined by a lack of detailed governing principles, proved inadequate to the task of integrating these developments into the fabric of the city.115 The situation would become even more confused in 1935, with the enactment of a new law that explicitly allowed development in areas outside the plan under specific conditions, so that, in the two decades that followed the plan, the population of these outlying areas grew by 200,000. A 1937 newsreel produced by the Istituto LUCE shows the inauguration of Tiburtino Terzo, one of the borgate planned by the regime. The complex, a series of more or less identical white abstract blocks, has no clear connection with the city fabric (Figure 3.21).116 Coming from afar in a number of caravans, its future inhabitants bring their own furnishings, seemingly seeking to counter the alienating nature of these disconnected residential areas with their modernist architectures (Figure 3.22).

Figure 3.21. Borgata Tiburtino Terzo, Rome, construction begun 1936; aerial photograph taken 1940.

Figure 3.22. Frames from the newsreel “The inauguration of a residential complex built by the regime in the neighborhood of Tiburtino Terzo” feature the inhabitants’ arrival to this modernist quarter with their furnishings, Giornale Luce, 1937. Footage supplied by Istituto Luce Cinecittà Historical Archive.

The rapid growth of the periphery, experienced concurrently in other cities across Italy, disrupted the social bonds that the built environment had traditionally reinforced. And it is precisely through its peripheral and unregulated location among these different patches of development that Cinecittà contributed, in a new way, to the structuring of the nation: in lieu of offering a common history as the unearthed monuments did, or facilitating social bonds by spatial proximity, Cinecittà brought the population together through networks of circulating images and imagined locations. In fact, as architecture was consolidating its role as a form of representation through the diverse fictions attached to the monumental complexes, the circulation of architectural interiors and furnishings in film was creating parallel fictions for the Italian population. The structuring of Rome around monumental focal points went hand in hand with the increasing decentralization of the population, while the arrangement of representative architectures around those new centers was accompanied by the surging popularity of new circulation technologies and the furnishings they set in motion as mediated forms of representation.

Peressutti described the Cinecittà complex as the city’s “natural and local extension.”117 His drawings anticipate its distinct spatial operations: rather than adapting to the logics of the city, the complex is represented as the center of an infinitely extendable grid of streets that speak of the project’s ambitions to engage and reorganize the territory of Italy. And yet, the complex was impervious to its surroundings, just like other facilities of its kind. In this sense, Siegfried Kracauer’s description of Germany’s largest filmmaking complex, the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, applies equally to Cinecittà, as a “fenced-in-area that one can enter only after going through various checkpoints.”118 The built perimeter secured the operations of the complex, which brought inside and outside together, albeit not in a spatial continuity; while, according to Kracauer, “the natural things outside [. . .] ha[ve] no place within [the studios’] confines,” the architectures produced in the studios were articulated with others throughout the nation.

Contemporary advertisements celebrated the vital role of the new film studios in enabling “fascist Italy [to spread] the light of Roman civilization more rapidly over the world.”119 The regime facilitated this aim by supporting the creation of an extensive network of theaters across Italy. If Cinecittà offered a “house” for the film industry, more theaters made it possible to create case più grande, or “bigger houses,” for film audiences.120 Cinema attendance was to become, in Freddi’s words, “a necessary complement to daily life, everywhere and for everybody,” with cinemas conceived as an extension of the home.121 Writing in 1936 in the magazine Cinema, futurist architect and scenographer Virgilio Marchi outlined how much still needed to be done to fulfill this ambition: “4,395 communities are still without movie theaters, meaning 15,000,000 Italians are unable to go to the movies.”122

It was not only access to the movies in the traditionally fragmentary distribution of villages in the Italian territory that concerned critics and architects, but also the new infrastructure for the still amorphous peripheries of the cities. The film magazine Lo Schermo described theaters within these contexts as a retreat “where husband and wife, anxious to follow the film’s drama, pay no attention to their lively child conducting gymnastic exercises on the adjoining folding chair, disturbing another couple who, unaware of the drama playing out on the screen, weave their own idyll with sweet words.”123 Focusing on so-called “suburban cinemas,” the article emphasized how these new institutions attracted families and, through their low admission prices, made “everyone equal,” even in areas that lacked traditional urban cohesion.124 Film linked a market strategy of profitability with a social process of normalization, building a common house of images for its “typical” inhabitants and their modes of habitation. And if the theaters gathered the Italian population as if at home, the actors they saw on screen represented their neighbors. To this regard, Freddi looked for actors from the “middle classes” and encouraged not only the “preference for Italian, healthy [. . .] physiognomic characters” but also “the continuous elimination of the less profitable, less flexible, and less typical elements”—a proposition that helped consolidate this process of social normalization with language that borrowed from eugenic principles.125

As a new architectural typology of kinship, movie theaters often resembled churches—some even occupied former parish centers.126 Italo Calvino described how he would go to the movie theater every day, sometimes even twice a day, just as a devout Italian would go to church.127 As he recalled, at the cinema he would witness “a different world from the one that surrounded me, but as far as I was concerned, only what I saw on the screen possessed the properties of a world: the fullness, the necessity, and the coherence. Outside the screen, meanwhile, heterogeneous elements were shuffled together as if by chance, materials of my life that seemed to be devoid of any particular form.”128 The shared visual experience provided by cinema, then, did not just unite the populations of increasingly unstructured Italian cities; it also had the capacity to frame and give coherent shape to reality for the country’s population.

The film studio spliced and recomposed fragmented and heterogeneous realities and provided them with meaning and cohesion. Freddi related a visit to Cinecittà: the most interesting building in the studio complex, he said, was the warehouse storing the elements used in constructing film sets. He wrote of his encounter with the multiple realities that coexisted there, from “vitrines of all kinds” to “economic kitchens,” and drew attention to the architects and set designers (naming, among them, Levi and Paulucci, Mollino, and Cremona) who worked to piece them together into something meaningful.129 Kracauer made a similar observation regarding his visit to the UFA studios: “The ruins of the universe are stored in warehouses for sets, representative samples of all periods, peoples, and styles.” He observed that these fragments were anatomized and then stitched back together in operations analogous to the montage techniques used in filmmaking: “In order for the world to flicker by on film, it is first cut to pieces in the film city. Its interconnections are suspended, its dimensions change at will, and its mythological powers are turned into amusement.”130 And yet, if Kracauer despised these operations as an evasion of the real world, others regarded them as critical to the logic of film. Arnheim in particular understood the work of film as a turning away from the “phenomenal chaos of accident, from which man seeks refuge in art.”131 Malcolm Turvey has explained the former to be, in Arnheim’s understanding, “uninterpreted reality,” and the latter a possible project for film.132

Montage techniques, which Arnheim introduced to Italian audiences following the work of Pudovkin, represented a key creative strategy for intervening in that “chaos.”133 Arnheim explained these techniques as the “active striving for unity and order.”134 By the same token, the ordering of fragmented realities linked the work of architects designing interiors with that of filmmakers. Just as furnishing sought to create meaning through the arrangement of objects otherwise lacking cohesion, so filmic representations could offer “refuge” to Italians seeking to escape the perceived lack of order brought about by modernization.

White telephone films explored a range of possible spatial relations through the “simultaneities” allowed by montage techniques in connection to furnishings. It was precisely the prominent portrayal of telephone conversations in these films that enabled not only “the development of two actions that are related in their contemporaneity,”135 as Arnheim put it, but also the establishing of relations between previously unconnected spaces.136 These filmic simultaneities reinforced the connections between the film characters and the audience and, more important, they brought the whole audience together. Like the omniscient reader in Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the novel’s role in constructing the nation as a community, the audience could, “like God, watch A telephoning C, B shopping, and D playing pool all at once.”137 It is not by chance that Anderson highlights telephoning and shopping as simultaneous actions that can link characters and the audience: “That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds.”138 Even if some scholars have questioned Anderson’s emphasis on the coordination of times, it is clear that these simultaneities construct the audience as a particular kind of community that depends not on physical integration but on mediated forms of proximity provided by shared imaginations.

Citing José Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tángere, Anderson notes “the casual progression of [a] house from the ‘interior’ time of the novel to the ‘exterior’ time of the [. . .] reader’s everyday life,” which, in his view, “gives a hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community, embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through calendrical time.”139 In an analogous passage in I grandi magazzini, the camera moves from an exterior view of a series of tower blocks into a domestic interior, similarly (and yet inversely) linking the everyday reality of Italy’s expanding cities (and increasingly disaggregated urban experiences) with the articulated network of their interior spaces. The massive and abstract white housing projects featured in I grandi magazzini, rising nine stories or more, appear remote and isolated, underscoring the recent urban transformation of Italian cities (with structures even larger than those of the borgate) and the uprooting of traditional social relations (Figure 3.23). No feature grounds these architectures to their specific location (as the location is represented in the film as barren)—no feature other than their very abstraction. Such aesthetic reduction and compliance with the rational laws of construction were celebrated in technical and disciplinary discourses at the time: for Pagano, writing in Casabella in 1937, this form of mass housing represented a “conquest and recognition that goes beyond the chatter of the stylists and overcomes the resistance of dilettante urbanists and romantic critics of Ojetti’s ilk.”140 Ultimately, the lives of the inhabitants were assimilated into the abstraction of the anonymous blocks—the differences in their daily routines and individual identities seemingly eradicated.141

Figure 3.23. Frame from I grandi magazzini (dir. Mario Camerini, 1939), showing the construction of housing blocks in Rome’s outskirts. Copyright 1939 Era Film / ENIC; copyright 2003 RIPLEY’S FILM Sr. / all rights reserved. Published under license of VIGGO Srl.

Both furnishings and films filled these alienated experiences and formal abstractions with shared fictions for the Italian population. Rather than bringing Italians together around shared traditions or established symbols, they provided designed desires and furnished imaginations. While other interpretations of how architecture mediated the goal of fascism to bring Italians together have been shaped have emphasized their physical gathering around unearthed monuments, churches, and government buildings such as case del Fascio, it is important to recognize the essential role of these simultaneities mediated through montage techniques and modernist furniture designs in promoting the consolidation and cohesiveness of the nation. Modernist simultaneity replaced both nineteenth-century patterns of interiority and other forms of spatial and community cohesion.

Delimiting Locations

The definition of these simultaneities for the Italian inhabitants was articulated with other strategies deployed by the fascist government to reinforce the national character of film production. This was particularly significant as the regime’s politics became more radical, leading to the racial laws that, starting in 1937, further discriminated against the African peoples (and particularly the Eritreans and Ethiopians) living in the colonies, and, from 1938, also restricted the rights of Italian Jews. That same year, a law enacted by Dino Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture, closed Italy to foreign film companies, clearing the way for domestic films. At the same time, the regime used films to promote Italian culture abroad, aiming to conquer international film markets.142 This outward expansion was aligned with Rava’s understanding of film as an “ambassador” promoting an Italian taste in furnishing and architecture.143 Rava saw this promotion not only as a means to export Italian architecture as an already constituted reality, but as the condition allowing for the possibility of its “birth,” for the shaping of that taste.144 Reviewing the sets of Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo (Pompey’s Last Days, dir. Mario Mattoli, 1937), Rava noted “the clear ‘Italian’ rhythm of the great pilasters,” among other significant features of the supposedly distinct national style.145 However, foreign locations were also incorporated into Italian productions. The African settings of propaganda films such as Luciano Serra, Pilota (Luciano Serra, pilot, dir. Goffredo Alessandrini, 1938) or Sotto la Croce del Sud (Under the Southern Cross, dir. Guido Brignone, 1938) familiarized the population with the regime’s imperial ambitions and, at the same time, helped to define a distinct Italian identity in dialectical relation to these colonial encounters.146

Rava had to negotiate his emphasis on “fantasy” with the promotion of Italian taste and what he called the “architecture of the Italian race.”147 In response to early criticisms of his work as being too open to foreign influences—which, as he noted, was an accusation also leveled at rationalism—he asserted his long-standing commitment “to the affirmation of a new architecture” that would be “Italian above anything else.”148 His appeals to “Latin civility” and to life “under our Mediterranean sun” (agendas he defended) had nothing to do with “an international yet vulgar contamination” of architecture by “Nordic social-communist ideology and a vaguely French posthumous cubism,” he wrote.149 Despite these assertions, which are quite consistent with the fascist agenda, Rava’s work was always in dialogue with developments elsewhere in Europe, even if the aim was to develop a style “worthy of being part of the national patrimony.”150

In spite of these efforts to cement the relationship of film and its architectures with the territory and imaginations of the nation, their links were not without discontinuities and tensions. The demarcation of “reality” and “fantasy” at stake in the spaces of film posed a difficult challenge at a time of profound aesthetic and political transformation, when accepted styles were being questioned and set truths uprooted. Discussions regarding the role of the “architect-scenographer” allowed architects and critics to address the understanding of the “reality” of the nation within a transnational context—with film interiors viewed along territorial lines. Writing for the magazine Cinema, film critic Gino Visentini criticized the “pretentious falsity” of an Italian interior, which he deemed inferior to the “respect for truth” displayed by an American production. The American “simplicity of true things” was celebrated as a source of a “decorous style,” with truth standing as a keystone of both aesthetic and political values.151 “Reality” manifested itself differently in the diverse locations depicted in the films, and its opposite was found not so much in fantasy as in foreignness. Rava, for instance, responded to a criticism of his work as being too fantastical and distant from reality by arguing that the glamorous interiors under attack drew on a Parisian example, and thus might remain foreign (literally) to the critic.152

The “fantasy” that characterized cinematographic reality played a productive yet contentious role in relation to foreign locations throughout the films of the period, particularly as they permeated white telephone films. Many times dismissed as escapist, the socio-spatial articulations that these films explored—between physical spaces and the space of “fantasy” as well as those between domestic and foreign locations—faced Italians to the complex models that constructed the nation’s network of interiors.153 And they highlighted the relevance of telephones in articulating this network. As a matter of fact, the representation and furnishing of diverse locations, and their socialization through their inhabitation, was introduced into movies with the aid of telephones, which simultaneously linked and separated them. Growing in use throughout those years in Italy from 131,000 private customers and 190,000 telephones in 1925 to 512,000 customers and 700,000 telephones in 1940, telephones became a way for “defining the extensions of national territory/empire, and for coordinating movement among places,” as James Hay has suggested.154 But furnishing and architecture also decisively participated in the network of spaces articulated by this technology—even if the territorial articulations proposed sometimes challenged the nationalist agenda of Mussolini’s government.

As a matter of fact, while set designs had the capacity to evoke locations and values significant to fascism, they could also refer to foreign locations, exposing Italian audiences to lifestyles, values, and desires different from those prescribed by the regime, and offering alternative furnishings for their imaginations. The film Patatrac plays on these associations. The set design by Levi and Paulucci features a modern hotel interior that, in spite of Persico’s review, was associated not with Italians but with the French jockey who is a protagonist of the story. The role of architecture becomes even more powerful when the modern hotel is dialectically opposed to a conventional bourgeois interior for an Italian character, the two depicted at either end of a telephone line (Figures 3.24 and 3.25).155 The scene framing this telephone conversation serves as the conclusion of a complicated series of love affairs full of tricks and deception, in which both telephones and interiors play a key part in demarcating different values and their relations to diverse locations in which the desirable modernist interior is associated to foreignness rather than to a domestic location.

Figure 3.24. Carlo Levi and Enrico Paulucci, set design for hotel room in Patatrac (dir. Gennaro Righelli, 1931). Collection of the National Museum of Cinema, Turin. Courtesy of Mattia Acetoso.

Figure 3.25. Frame from Patatrac (dir. Gennaro Righelli, 1931), with set design by Carlo Levi and Enrico Paulucci, featuring the protagonist’s house. Copyright 1931 Cines / Pittaluga; copyright 2003 RIPLEY’S FILM Sr. / all rights reserved. Published under license of VIGGO Srl.

In addition to the ambiguous politics of furnishing in these territorial associations, white telephone films were sometimes set in unspecified locations. In other films it was anonymous spaces of transit, such as the hotel, that would be presented as the places where unexpected encounters and behaviors could occur, mobilizing the intermixing caused by the dissolution of conventional territorial demarcations allowed by film—with movies also set in steamboats and railway stations, among other spaces of transience.156 And yet in other instances Hungary is invoked as a generic foreign place, simultaneously defined and unknown.157 After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Hungary was led by a right-wing Nationalist Christian government that adopted many of the policies of fascism and Nazism. However, since the country was not a central player in interwar politics at a continental scale, it offered a safe geographic reference for aesthetic experimentation and political speculation—one that allowed architects to explore the spatial ambiguities of film locations while also remaining historically specific and committed to the politics of the regime.158 This particular condition of Hungary was also exploited in the criticism of architectural interiors: in 1932 Persico praised a Hungarian interior designer, Ludwig Kozma, for his ability to “individualize the woman and man of today.” He wrote that “Germans or Italians alike could live in the geometries rendered by this artist” without feeling they were somewhere “anonymous or cold, or international like a hotel.”159 Here, and in films, Hungary offered an international yet specific space in which the condition of modern socialities could be rehearsed within a safe political regime close to that of Italy.

All these different fragments and ambiguous and conflicting spatial demarcations—the uncoordinated components of interiors, the circulating pieces of furniture, the disarticulated quarters of the city, and the partial evocations of territories—enacted the increasingly dispersed experience of modernity, with modern metropolitan life standing as the ultimate cinematic experience.160 Yet, through their role as “synthesizers,” architects participated in the rearticulation of these fragments in new socio-spatial formations thanks to the mediation of modernist interior design in its alliance with film.

Epilogue: Outside the Frame

There was a flip side to the focus on interiors in Italian film. As Freddi reported, many people lamented “the absence of exteriors in filmic production.”161 Piacentini expressed the same concern: “I think that a possibility that has not yet been exploited by cinematography is that of showing the authentic face of our cities.”162 Cities or landscapes were primarily rendered as amorphous spaces linking interiors, and they were rarely the spaces where the plot unfolded. In an attempt to remedy this, Freddi explained how “the Ministry always insists that producers think about how to bring the natural beauties of our country into their films.”163 This engagement with external locations seemed to be driven by a pedagogical and promotional enterprise, rather than being grounded in a parallel critical project that increasingly saw many screenwriters and producers begin to move outside the studio.164 Carlo Felice most clearly delineated this agenda in a Domus article comparing Italian and American films: in order to present the Italian patrimony to larger audiences, it would be necessary to include sequences imitating the “film sets [in which] we have seen—one today and tomorrow another—all the best organized things of America.”165 In their different arguments, critics seemed to pursue a firmer grounding for the sometimes ambiguous and conflicting relations of film sets to their locations.

Camerini’s celebrated Gli uomini, che mascalzoni! (What scoundrels men are!), filmed in 1932 and starring De Sica, remains an early and notable exception, praised in Corriere della Sera for its capacity to render visible the new reality of the contemporary city: “This is the first time we have seen Milan on the screen. And who would have suspected that it is so photogenic?”166 And yet Milan was not depicted as a still scenography grounding the circulation of characters across and within interiors, but rather as the modern infrastructure of circulation: “Camerini has really succeeded in assimilating with the utmost clarity certain characteristics that unmistakably belong to the appearance and movement of Milan, thus conveying to us—subtly, and without the documentary abuses that often reduce films of this kind to a collection of postcards of famous monuments—its local color and its industrious vitality.”167 Rather than concentrating on the historical monuments of the city, the film depicted the modern realities of trade and transportation, including the Fiera Campionaria di Milano and the tram system, as essential to the construction of this collective framework. Italian life was to be understood as grounded within networks. Writing in 1941, Michelangelo Antonioni would celebrate this representation of reality in the pages of Aria d’Italia, suggesting that the film allowed for a form of collective appropriation: “A film that is delicately ours.”168 And yet, the nature of such inclusive collectivity remains ambiguous and unaddressed in Antonioni’s text, written at a time of increasing political upheaval after Italy’s entry into World War II.

The relations of film sets and diverse territorial demarcations would only be further complicated in the following years. Following Italy’s armistice with the Allies in September 1943, German troops occupied Rome and converted Cinecittà into a base for Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. Much of the equipment in the studios was sequestered by the occupying forces. However, the Minister of Popular Culture of the newly created German puppet state of the Italian Social Republic managed to move a portion of it to Venice, where he set up a new film studio, Cinevillaggio, in the Giardini of the Biennale in 1944.169 That same year, Cinecittà became a refugee camp, as Noa Steimatsky has explored. Over the next three years, the studios would shelter around three thousand displaced people—Italians from the former colonies, those affected by bombing, and international refugees.170 This time, the use of the furniture items in the studios was captured only in a documentary (Figure 3.26).

Figure 3.26. Frame from the documentary film Umanità (dir. Jack Salvatori, 1946), featuring Cinecittà as a refugee camp. Footage supplied by Istituto Luce Cinecittà Historical Archive.

The film revealed the tensions at stake in the furnishing of the Italian interior as a cohesive reality, rendering visible the fundamental disjunctions between objects, spaces, inhabitants, and locations. For more than a decade, the modernist stylization of furnishing and the edited condition of films (understood as “a refuge”) had served as one of the multiple realities projecting an imaginary cohesion that was otherwise absent in Italy. While film interiors challenged the stability and enclosure promoted for the country by the regime, they mediated networks that—along with fascism—helped Italians to respond to the fragmentated condition of modern experience by including them in the simultaneities that were crafted for the nation.

Four

Furnishing the Empire

“Nomad” Interiors and Carceral Habitations

“Anyone sensitive to the spiritual climate of our times cannot fail to grasp how the horizons of life have expanded in recent years, enabling us to see things unimaginable to previous generations,” opined Carlo Enrico Rava in 1940.1 On the surface, it is hard to reconcile Rava’s celebration of “expanded horizons” with the fascist regime’s redoubled pursuit of enclosure, cohesion, and stability in the late 1930s—a pursuit that architects supported through their efforts to define an “Italian” way of living and their growing engagement with the racist politics of the period.2 After the proclamation of the Italian Empire in 1936—an empire secured by the brutal conquest of Ethiopia—the regime enacted increasingly exclusionary policies, from cultural censorship and commercial autarchy to racial laws.3 At the same time, the nation’s borders remained porous to networks linked to modernization, to transnational cultural developments, and to the circulation of goods, people, and information. Rava understood that these transformations characteristic of modernity linked Italian life to “a sense of existence based on adventure.”4 Modern architecture was regarded as “an ally” in that pursuit, one that he felt would open “the ways of modern living to perspectives previously unthought of and utterly seductive.”5 Mussolini had reconciled the identitarian impetus of fascism with this characterization of modernity by lauding the “Latin” race as characterized by “the taste for adventure.”6

As discussed in previous chapters, in the decade or more preceding Rava’s statement, architects had been consistently concerned with the identitarian definition of the “ways of living” of Italians by seeking to articulate the distinctive character of the “Italian home” while also responding to its modernization. Rava was part of this endeavor, designing furnishings and interiors for both affordable and bourgeois homes throughout this period.7 And, as was true for his peers, his works used a modernist vocabulary that was itself subject to transnational cultural processes and technical knowledge extending beyond the peninsula. But the expanded horizons and new ways of living that Rava invoked were not engendered by modernity alone; they were also the product of the regime’s colonial ambitions. Even more, the shaping of those horizons was the result of the alliance between modernity and colonialism.8

The colonies became a growing source of work for Italian architects, among them Rava, whose father, Maurizio Rava, was general secretary of the colonies in 1929, vice governor of Tripolitania in 1930, and governor of Somalia in 1931 (Figure 4.1). Rava was key to the development of a critical discourse on colonial architecture, both through his built work in Africa, designed in collaboration with Sebastiano Larco, and through a series of articles he published in Domus and Rassegna Italiana in the 1930s.9 Colonization simultaneously exposed Italians to the diverse realities of the occupied African territories, in what was regarded as an aspect of the modern “adventure.” Combining the architect’s preoccupation with the identity and modernization of Italian households and their work in the colonies, Rava’s aforementioned arguments addressed a series of objects designed for colonial habitation that he included in the Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale (Exhibition of colonial equipment) at the VII Milan Triennale in 1940. The exhibition featured beds, kitchens, armchairs, and other domestic furnishings meant to facilitate the life of the colonizers and the so-called “ways of living” of Italians in the expanding territories of their empire. Located in an institution that, since 1923, had been key to shaping the Italian house and its furnishing, the Triennale exhibition highlighted the tension between the pursuit of a stable identity of Italian domestic architecture and the expansionism of Italy’s colonial “adventure.”

Figure 4.1. Maurizio Rava and Carlo Enrico Rava en route to Port Said, circa 1930. Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Maria Cristina Rava Marzano.

Figure Description

The image includes at the bottom a handwritten text, in Italian, which reads: "Life on Board."

In the decades leading up to this exhibition, various types of artifacts, including furniture, had not only mediated the identity negotiations of Italians but had also played a crucial role in the image that Italy developed of its colonies. Central to shaping that image were geographical surveys of the colonies and the accompanying ethnographic expeditions, which seized and collected furnishings and decorative objects from diverse African regions. Exhibitions of these items would help shape, for Italians, the image of the peoples whose land they colonized and could be seen as essential to the project of colonization, part and parcel of what Edward Said would call “the struggle over geography” that linked “soldiers and cannons” to “ideas,” “forms,” “images and imaginings.”10 In contrast to the displays of Italian interiors, and their role in shaping the self-image of Italians and that of the nation linked to its modernization, the indigenous furnishings and dwellings circulating in these shows were displayed to create a picture of stagnant African cultures. And although exhibitions of this kind had been staged from the early days of Italy’s colonial enterprise, they would become a priority for the fascist regime, culminating in the Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare (Triennial exhibition of Italian overseas lands), held in Naples in 1940, the same year as the exhibition Rava curated in Milan.

In both these exhibitions as well as in the others that preceded them, the Italians’ conceptualization of African objects unfolded in conversation with the arguments and designs aimed at developing a characteristic Italian interior. In these shows, design operated as the “mark of modernity,” as Arindam Dutta has argued, that was an essential feature of colonial relations.11 While the definition of modern design was one of the arenas in which the affective and cognitive nature of “hegemony” was negotiated within Italy (using Antonio Gramsci’s term), it was also a strategy to achieve the hegemony of Italy in the colonies—one of the ways that cultural artifacts, such as furnishings, were linked to the action of “soldiers and cannons” proposed by Said.12 Extending Charles Rice’s understanding of the “emergence” of the interior as a feature of modernity, we might consider furnishing as a technique of colonization, itself an instrument and an outcome of modernity.13

The analysis of the decorative arts and furnishings indigenous to the occupied territories and the modernist designs developed for Italian interiors have traditionally remained separate areas of study.14 In bringing them together and discussing their relationship, this chapter does not seek to explore the aesthetic influences of objects from the colonized territories on the metropole (or the so-called “affinity of the tribal and the modern”) so frequently celebrated in the scholarship devoted to art and design.15 Nor does it address a possible reverse flow of influence or what anthropologist Nicholas Thomas regards as the “symmetry between indigenous appropriations of European artifacts and the colonial collecting of indigenous goods,” as a significant line of inquiry unveiling the “entangled” nature of design artifacts.16 While Italian furniture, arts, and crafts were featured at events such as the Tripoli Trade Fair, the main clientele and audience for the designs and displays I regard in this chapter were Italians—just as Mia Fuller has argued that “the Italians, not the colonized, were central to Italians’ colonial perceptions and plans,” and the primary target of their architecture.17 This chapter considers how the conceptualization, design, circulation, and display of furnishings helped to shape Italy’s national identity in the context of the country’s pursuit of empire.18

I particularly focus on objects circulating back and forth between colony and metropole, as key mediators and enactments of these identity negotiations.19 Consequently, and along with Stephanie Malia Hom and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, I discuss the self-definition of Italians as fundamentally tied to modern forms of mobility including colonization (what Rava defines as modernity’s characteristic “adventure”).20 The identity negotiations of Italians as subjects of their own nation cannot be disentangled from their identity as colonizers, all the more so as their imperial projects unfolded throughout the fascist period. Updating the famous Risorgimento dictum “We have made Italy; now we have to make the Italians,” journalist Giorgio Pini argued “We have made the empire; now we have to make the imperialists.”21 While architecture has long been regarded as a key instrument in the Italian quest to define its empire, this chapter asks: how did furnishings equip the Italians as imperialists and intervene in the social and territorial relationships of the empire?

Furnishing against Disarticulation

Italy was slow to establish itself as a colonial power, just as it had been slow to constitute itself as a nation, but in the late nineteenth century it joined other European nations in the scramble for Africa. After some erratic campaigns with mixed results, Italy’s colonial ambitions were cemented by the conquest of Tripoli in 1911, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s unification. That same year, the Turin World’s Fair, billed as a “testimony of love for the fatherland and for the living faith in the future destinies of Italy,” included a major exhibition on the country’s colonies.22 Occupying more than one thousand square meters of the Padiglione degli italiani all’estero (Pavilion of Italians abroad), the Mostre coloniali (Colonial shows) were, as we have already discussed, aimed to shape a “colonial consciousness.”23 They were structured in three main parts. The first featured a plethora of graphic materials, including publications, maps, correspondence, photographs, and paintings. Next came an exhibition on Eritrea, showing the raw materials and other goods extracted from the colony alongside an ethnographic display of domestic utensils, tools, decorative items, and clothing from diverse African regions. The last part was a more focused, “scientific rather than commercial,” presentation of the Somali territories.24

In addition to these displays, there was a reconstruction of an Eritrean “village”: six round structures (which the exhibition’s “general report” identified as agdò dwellings), a larger shed serving as a Christian church, and a little cabin (Figure 4.2). Like many other colonial shows in Europe around this time, it also included human beings: seven men and just one woman. Smaller than the reconstructions at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London or the famous Cairo Street at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, this village purported to “provide the public with an idea of the small local industries that its inhabitants engage in” and link the region’s indigenous communities to the artifacts—vases and fabrics, decorative and utilitarian objects—displayed elsewhere in the exhibition.25 The items were presented not just as samples of the region’s so-called “embryonic industries,” but as marketable commodities, exportable to Italy. For example, an Eritrean textile known as marghef, and commonly used as a cloak, when removed from its original context was deemed a suitable material for Italian curtains.26 One obvious element was missing from the reconstruction: as the exhibition report noted, it represented “neither the construction systems for colonial habitation nor the quotidian life of our own nationals in Eritrea.”27 One might argue that the illusory contextualization of the objects on display, by omitting the presence of the Italian colonizers, merely displaced the “excision” that characteristically defined ethnographic exhibitions.28 With this omission, these representations built on the strategies of “realist mystification” that Linda Nochlin has regarded as essential to the Orientalist imagination. In fact, just as she argues for Orientalist paintings, this exhibition “depend[ed] for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence.”29

Figure 4.2. Drawing of the Eritrean Village at the Colonial shows, International Exhibition of Industry and Work, Turin, 1911. L’Esposizione di Torino: Giornale ufficiale illustrato dell’Esposizione internazionale delle industrie e del lavoro 19 (April 1911).

While the role of Italians was not portrayed in the Eritrean village, the reconstruction of this village and the presentation of its artifacts counterposed the agenda of progress of the colonial power and the architectures by which it sought to assert its identity as a nation. And if, as explored in chapter 1, the main pavilions were defined by an overarching pursuit of harmony, the Eritreans’ buildings were characterized as disjointed, and their temporary inhabitants were declared “the strangest mixture of disparate people, such as to give full reason to the alleged derivation of the word Abyssinia from the Arab ′Habesc’, which means mixed [mescolanza].”30 At the same time as the Turin World’s Fair sought to assert the identity of Italy as a unified nation, its colonial shows presented the Eritrean individuals as gathered in disparate tribes, which were evidenced by the social and cultural mix of the people on display and the diversity of objects in the ethnographic exhibition.31 In contrast to the cohesive national people, the colonized individuals were denied a history and the possibilities afforded by a unified social and political representation.

The next major presentation of the colonies of Italy was the 1928 National Exposition, held on the same site in Turin.32 In the six years since the fascists had come to power, the country had embarked on aggressive colonial campaigns, seeking to assert greater territorial control through repressive operations in both Libya and Somalia. Colonialism was now inextricably tied to the promotion of nationalism, as Maurizio Rava acknowledged when he linked “the reconstruction of Italy” after World War I to “the need for Empire.”33 The image of the new National Exposition reflected this shifting context. Rather than privilege the baroque, as the previous World’s Fair had done in its pursuit of harmony, the architecture this time was presented as “modern, fresh, young, and festive.”34 The modernist language of the representative pavilions sought to assert a renewed national identity, offering a different argument for how, “within the uncertainty in the directives of national and local art, it [had] been possible to determine the coordinated sympathy of tastes and tendencies of many artists—highlighting the homogeneity of architectural inspiration.”35 The modernist style of the exhibition was not yet discussed in relation to the pursuit of “adventure,” to which Rava would later appeal, but was rather embraced as a way of countering eclecticism and participating in the consolidation of the nation’s identity. Rava’s own work was noted in the appraisal of the exhibition by a critic who stated that “[t]he constructions of this white ephemeral city [were] largely inspired by the rational architecture exemplified in the recent exhibition in Rome and by Gruppo 7.”36 However, Gruppo 7’s links to other European trends were also discussed in the context of the exhibition, addressing the contested relationship between modernism and national identity that permeated all throughout the fascist period.37

Two other modernist architects, Giuseppe Pagano and Ettore Pittini, designed a new Mostra coloniale (Colonial show), which featured a porticoed plaza with small shops where, according to an Italian reporter, visitors could be “seduced by the attraction of exotic merchandise,” such as ceramics and metalwork from various African regions (Figure 4.3).38 By this time, the commercial value of African applied and decorative arts had been boosted by modern trade fairs in cities in both Italy and in the colonies, from Milan to Tripoli.39 Far from facilitating symmetrical exchange, these market platforms reinforced colonial relations. Crucial to this process were institutions such as the fascist Government Office of Indigenous Applied Arts, founded in 1925. This agency was concerned both with the commercial valorization of so-called “Arab crafts” and with “the lack of uninterrupted and linearly developed traditions,” which it saw as the cause of a perceived decline in quality.40 In its understanding, the growing influence of Italian “art” had turned these “crafts” into mere imitations of imported modern objects.41 Italians were similarly dismissive of East African decorative arts. Rather than embodying a true “Abyssinian conception,” the arts of Eritrea, for example, were seen as derivative of foreign pieces from Egypt, India, and the Byzantine empire, among other sources.42 Such an attitude denied indigenous arts a recognizable lineage and dismissed the role of their authors in any historical process.

Figure 4.3. Giuseppe Pagano and Ettore Pittini, perspective of the pavilions of the Colonial show at the National Exposition, 1928. Architettura e Arti Decorative VII, 2.8 (April 1928).

In addition to evaluating African furniture and decorative arts as “exotic merchandise,” the 1928 National Exposition, like its predecessor in 1911, presented them within ethnographic reconstructions of their context. Grouped around the prominent cube-shaped structure that contained the ethnographic displays were reproductions of so-called “villages” in various colonial regions, this time not only from Eritrea but also from Somalia, Tripolitania, and Cyrenaica, set among specimens of indigenous flora and fauna, including leopards and gazelles.43 The reconstructions featured detailed interiors and were occupied by individuals from the regions that these structures set to represent, just as in previous shows (Figure 4.4). The whole show reflected the increasing sophistication of ethnographic studies over the course of the fascist period with the different housing types, including caves, tents, huts, and masonry structures, now being documented in detail, and their regional variations enumerated in exhaustive taxonomies. Each type of space was also analyzed in terms of its materials, construction techniques, and spatial organization, often in accordance with the methods of the German ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel, whose concept of “living space” (Lebensraum) was used to justify the territorial expansion of Imperial Germany and, later, the Third Reich.44

Figure 4.4. The Eritrean Exhibition, interior of one of the constructions with a group of goldsmiths, Colonial show at the National Exposition, 1928. L’Italia Coloniale V.7 (July 1928).

Furnishings were one of the objects included in these studies, even if their value was often minimized. In research published some years later, Florentine anthropologist Lidio Cipriani, for example, would note the “strong uniformity” and “minimal” presence of domestic objects in East African dwellings, seeing them as limited to the “strictly necessary tools.”45 Nonetheless, these furnishings featured prominently in the detailed drawings of housing typologies in Italian ethnographic accounts of the period, supporting the analysis of diverse modes of life and social organization. The drawings in Cipriani’s volume, for example, depict furniture and other artifacts with particular care, revealing ways of using and inhabiting space that standard architectural floor plans did not make evident to Italian eyes. Beds, trays, vases, and plates are among the objects represented along with animals, whose proximity to human habitation is emphasized (Figure 4.5). The illustrations in a 1936 article by Graziella Pavari provide a similarly detailed taxonomy of housing types. Her drawings emphasize the differences between the abstract forms of architecture, with their circular outline represented in plan, and the recognizable forms of different furnishings, represented as simple axonometric drawings placed within, but seemingly disconnected from, their built surroundings (Figure 4.6).46

Figure 4.5. Lidio Cipriani, floor plans of a “Somali mondùll” (left) and a “Sidamo hive dwelling” (right). Abitazioni indigene dell’Africa Orientale Italiana, 1940. Courtesy of Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi.

Figure 4.6. Graziella Pavari, “Dwelling of the Baria and Cunama.” “L’abitazione umana nell’A.O,” L’Universo (May 1936). From types of Istituto Geografico Militare (License n. 7178 of 04.10.2023).

Figure Description

On the left, the Somali mondùll includes two areas separated by a partition within a circular floorplan, including two beds, footstools, ceramic vases, mortar, grinder. Outside, a hallway leads to a kitchen area. On the right, the Sidamo hive dwelling includes four long areas separated by three partitions jutting out from one wall within a circular floorplan. The three smaller rooms are devoted to livestock and the larger room has beds and different vases, a pestle, a grinder, footstools, and a hearth.

Figure Description

Furnishings depicted in perspective are included in the floorplan, along with identifying numbers. The largest structure is identified as a bedroom inclusive of beds, vases, and a hearth, while the two small ones are identified as a barn and a stable for goats, inclusive of a bed. In the courtyard, there is a canopy.

By codifying their subject matter, these studies sought to contribute to the control of the colonized populations and redress the destabilization brought about by colonization. Particularly significant in this codifying pursuit was what Mary Louise Pratt has called the description of “manners-and-customs”—as materialized by furnishings—which aspired to a “stable,” albeit incomplete, “fixing of subjects and systems of differences.”47 And while “fixing” was unquestionably essential to the pursuit of these studies, the differences codified in the analysis of furnishings and architectures were viewed as a result of exposure to different influences, rather than rooted genealogies.48 Africa, as a whole, was regarded as a “continent with little articulation,” whose cultures resisted homogenization.49 Rather than testifying to continual development, the built environment was seen to present “diverse phases of human evolution, stasis, and regression,” characterized by shifting patterns of migration that brought in their wake influences from across and beyond the continent.50

While ethnographic studies are generally criticized for being too ready to “localize” culture, here it was the lack of a consistent relationship between indigenous cultures and their particular locations that the authors of these studies regarded with disdain.51 This detachment was particularly captured in the dislocation of these furnishings from their context in ethnographic drawings, where the axonometric representation seemingly reduced drawings of furniture to abstract symbols. Dismissing the relevance that contemporary scholars have granted to diverse forms of mobility in different African cultures, these studies tied the lack of linear genealogies to the alleged inferiority of these cultures, thereby reinforcing the racism that underpinned the project of colonization.52 The different forms of exchange and mobility that defined these local cultures would, paradoxically, be translated into a form of confinement, as they removed what was conceived as the basis for the possibility of progress.

The role that objects played in supporting contemporaneous racial constructs in the colonies accompanied how furnishings were mobilized back in the metropole. In the former, race came to consolidate a space of otherness that helped to define Italy from the outside; in the latter, race was invoked in the process of shaping the conception of the “new man” who was the characteristic citizen of fascism.53 And, at the same time as ethnographers were entrenching racial differences by referring to the disarticulated condition of African dwellings, architects were helping to distill the identity of those “new men” by articulating and regenerating the domestic interiors of the Italian nation, working to counter the heterogeneity of regional styles and the perceived backwardness of the architecture of the southern and rural regions.54 In fact, the representational strategies in these studies and shows presenting the disaggregation and uprooting of the colonized peoples—inhabitants of a “continent with little articulation”—helped Italy frame its own efforts to articulate itself as a nation.55

The exhibition in Turin made these connections obvious: only a few meters away from the ethnographic reconstruction of African dwellings was the Casa degli Architetti, designed by a team that included Pagano and Pittini, the same two architects responsible for the buildings of the Colonial show. Presented as a showcase of Italy’s progress in domestic architecture, it symbolized the commitment to creating “organically unified” interiors that would bring together the country’s diverse populations: the modern interior as a means of turning Italy into a modern, regenerated nation.56 Meanwhile, the disjunctive arrangements of furniture in African dwellings were regarded as symptomatic of the cultural and ethnic mixtures of various tribes, and as mediators of customs confined to an atemporal past.57

The furnishings of modernist interiors, we could then argue, operated as one of the mechanisms of “ideological integration” required to consolidate power relations.58 And this consolidation took the form of different but connected struggles—between northern urban bourgeois elites and disenfranchised rural populations on the one hand, and between those same elites leading the national project and the peoples subjected to colonization on the other. The conceptualization of African furniture as either “exotic merchandise” or “necessary tools” served as a foil to the artistic definition of Italy’s national furnishings, or what Timothy Mitchell calls a “constitutive outside” in his assessment of the relationship between modernity and imperialism.59 Despite their mutually constitutive nature, these two definitions were not explicitly related in contemporary arguments. They were, however, something that Carlo Rava was forced to address in his Exhibition of colonial equipment and his quest to furnish a space for Italians not in Italy but in the colonies.

The Boundaries of Civility

Furnishing spaces for Italians in the colonies was a topic that had attracted little attention before Rava’s exhibition. There were few products specifically aimed at these territories, and little in the way of disciplinary debate. For the most part, the interiors in manuals of colonial architecture replicated generic principles of modernist design without addressing the specificity of the colonies.60 Similarly, articles on colonial furnishing in professional and popular magazines tended to reiterate the knowledge and trends circulating in the metropole: a couple of projects for high-end interiors in the colonies designed by Elena Fondra and published in Domus, for example, recalled bourgeois apartments in Italian cities, and admitted the difficulty of adapting to the “local environment.”61 The same was true of the department store chain La Rinascente, which sought to develop new markets in Libya and East Africa throughout the 1930s as its established markets were increasingly hit by sanctions imposed by the League of Nations. The company opened a UPIM (fixed-price store) in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, in 1938, but rather than developing new products to meet the needs of an expanding customer base, its focus was on the export of Italian merchandise.62

La Rinascente’s incursions into the colonies merit particular attention, given the company’s ambition to contribute to the furnishing of Italian households throughout the fascist period. In 1937, a few years before Rava’s show, a delegation of the store’s directors, among them Umberto Brustio and Ferdinando Borletti, traveled to East Africa, visiting Asmara and other major commercial centers, as well as the recently conquered Addis Ababa. Like many Italians before them, they were fascinated by the hectic pace of life in Addis Ababa and the vitality of its commercial networks. As Emanuel Admassu has noted, “the open fields of the Arada market provided remarkable spaces for exchange, stabilizing an empire that has always been on the move. The marketplace moved freely, drawing from the long history of day markets that have been dispersed throughout the country.”63 Throughout the Italian occupation, the market would remain an extraordinarily cosmopolitan point of encounter for merchants and products arriving from Asia, North America, Europe, and diverse regions of Africa.64

According to the account published in the department store’s magazine, the travelers visited various commercial establishments in addition to traditional markets, finding some shops “extremely modern and reminiscent of those seen in the centers of Milan and Rome [and] others that belong to the old colonial style, so to speak, [but] are equally well supplied” (Figure 4.7).65 In their account, it was the Italians who had introduced individual shops into the colonial cities and transformed open-air markets and bazaars into enclosed structures similar to those found in their native cities.66 Contrary to the general trend to segregate colonial and indigenous life, the spaces of commerce within the colonies were seemingly understood as a major point of encounter for Italians and the locals, the idea being to maintain “the animation of indigenous markets” and to draw the colonizers “toward a commercial zone in which those goods that interest them would be gathered in big, modern, and well illuminated stores.”67 An urban plan for Addis Ababa, devised by architects Gio Ponti, Giuseppe Vaccaro, and Enrico Del Debbio, in collaboration with engineers Cesare Valle and Ignazio Guidi, divides and structures the city along strict racial lines; Gamela Stream was the Italian center, Kurtume Stream the indigenous quarter. The commercial center was placed in the area in between, designed to “serve the Italians from one side and the indigenous population from the other” (Figure 4.8).68 And yet, even this expected encounter maintained existing hierarchies: Diana Garvin has carefully analyzed how the different transformations of the market under colonial rule reveal the ways “the regime used architectural interventions like shifting site and gridding layout to divide Ethiopians and Italians by skin tone, constructing race through commercial space.”69 The products available in these markets might have subverted the various forms of spatial enclosure that defined identities in colonial cities, but just as circulation in the market was segregated, so these same products became key agents in defining forms of inclusion and exclusion.

Figure 4.7. Indigenous market and new market structure in Asmara, 1937. La Famiglia Rinascente-Upim (November 1937). Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives. Courtesy of La Rinascente.

Figure 4.8. Gio Ponti, Giuseppe Vaccaro, Enrico Del Debbio, Cesare Valle, Ignazio Guidi, Regulating Plan for the city of Addis Ababa, 1936. Courtesy Archivio Storico Cesare Valle.

Figure Description

The page includes text in Italian that identifies the two images: “Peasants in the indigenous market of Asmara" for the first, and "The new cereals market of Asmara” for the second.

Figure Description

The center is labeled with text, in Italian, which reads: "New Center." There are lines connecting this to other circled areas also labeled in Italian. The plan is signed by “Guidi-Valle” and includes text that reads: "The guiding and fundamental criterion of the plan is the clear separation between indigenous and Italian life. The Curtumi and Gamele streams, with recessed courses and flanked by thick vegetation, constitute the natural divisions. To the left of the Gamele is the Italian center; to the right of the Curtumi is the indigenous neighborhood. In the area delimited by the two streams, the shopping center, which serves the Italians from one side and the indigenous population from the other."

In fact, the ambit of these products went beyond the economic aims of La Rinascente and other companies, forming part of the “civilizing” mission of colonial powers. Marxist teachings present commodities very precisely as an effective form of “artillery” for the colonial army, one that enables the colonizers to achieve their aim of drawing “all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization” and, more specifically, that enables the bourgeoisie of the metropole to create in the colonial territories “a world after its own image.”70 Developing this proposition, anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen has studied the encounter of local individuals with the domestic objects brought by the colonizers, with their embedded ideals of gender, race, and class, as well as the ways in which these objects were inscribed within local practices and concepts, contributing to “the spread of capitalism [that] is reshaping the world’s political economy.”71 Significantly, in the case of La Rinascente, this project was an extension of the department store’s own self-proclaimed mission to infuse Italian households with a sense of culture (civiltà)—one that reflected the hegemony of the bourgeoisie.72 Its aim here seems to have been less to “civilize” the subjugated individuals and more to keep Italians living abroad within the boundaries of “civility.”73

This aim was of a piece with how La Rinascente framed products from the colonies in the metropole. The exhibition of Libyan craftsmanship held in its Piazza Colonna store in Rome in 1938 showcased a great “range of colors and a variety of forms that had never been seen before in such a comprehensive way,” allowing the visitor to be transported “from the height of modern civilization” (as represented by the Rinascente emporium) “into the picturesque African continent” (Figure 4.9).74 This sense of contrast is staged in Rava’s own designs for bourgeois interiors in Italy, where objects collected in Africa—completely decontextualized and used as decorative motifs—serve as a foil for the modernist furnishings (Figure 4.10). The role that furnishings played in constructing race and shaping a racist outlook throughout the fascist period played out simultaneously (and interdependently) in the colonies and in Italy, where the construction of both “Italianness” and modernism was increasingly made to depend on eliminating the presence of “otherness” within Italy itself, with the racist turn of the regime in the late 1930s.75

Figure 4.9. Libyan crafts show, La Rinascente, Roma, 1938. La Famiglia Rinascente-Upim, Rassenga di Vita e di Lavoro nei Grandi Magazzini (January 1938). Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives. Courtesy of La Rinascente.

Figure 4.10. Carlo Enrico Rava, apartment, Milan, 1933. Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Maria Cristina Rava Marzano.

Ultimately, furnishings were not only thought to organize the houses of the colonies just as they did in Italy, but were conceptualized to intervene in the structuring of the empire’s populations and its territories, which La Rinascente’s magazine described in a process of increasing articulation: “One can say that a new Italy [. . .] is being formed there. There are now soldiers, pioneers, scholars, and the first traders who are creating a provisional and still incomplete network of circulation—one that is already precious: rationally organized economic frames will soon follow, providing the Empire with the progress and success that are in the mind and spirit of its founder: Il DUCE.”76 Furnishings provided a way of unfolding the project of fascist colonialism as they secured the boundaries of “civility” while expanding through the empire’s “incomplete networks.”

Territorial Negotiations and the Architectures of the “Man of the World”

Rava’s Exhibition of colonial equipment at the VI Milan Triennale brought to the fore the tension between Italian furnishings and the territories that Italians aimed to occupy, with their associated identity negotiations. Since 1923, the Triennale had been a key institution in a project that sought both to define a “national” style of furnishing that went beyond regional traditions and to modernize furniture production. The exhibition brought a new dimension to this project, addressing the definition of the Italian “home” within an expanded territorial frame that rejected “any domestically constrained politics” (politica del piede di casa).77 The expression went back to the Risorgimento and was first used by Giuseppe Colombo in 1889 to refer to the politics of national economy. It took on negative connotations during the fascist era, when both Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile used it to refer to political strategies opposed to Italy’s territorial expansionism: “For fascism, the tendency toward empire, that is, to the expansion of the nation, is a manifestation of vitality; its opposite, il piede di casa, is a sign of decadence.”78 Paradoxically, then, in Rava’s case the rejection of “domestically constrained politics” was to be expressed through the transnational dissemination of domestic objects like beds, kitchens, and armchairs. And yet, he clearly stated the need to define specific strategies for those objects in the colonies, and criticized proposals such as those by Fondra in those terms—arguing that, in her projects, it was just some hunting trophies on the walls that were supposed to grant domestic interiors “a colonial touch.”79

On entering the show at the Palazzo dell’Arte in 1940, visitors encountered a rather enigmatic element: a display of plates and vessels from various occupied African territories set on a large black mirrored glass table pierced by floor-to-ceiling poles. Hanging from these poles, and connected by the cables stabilizing the structure, were six information panels—wooden boards that depicted ambiguously defined territories with images of the exhibited objects collaged onto them (Figure 4.11). The irregular outlines of these boards seemingly corresponded to the conception of the colonies as shapeless regions. And yet, the Italian territories had been the subject of extensive mapping and surveys and, in some cases, physical borders were actually built by Italians to delimit them (Figure 4.12).80 The difficulty of fixing the limits of the empire seems to have lain more in the imagination of Italians, with the desert landscapes artificially crossed by some of the colonial boundaries evidently much harder to grasp than the clear enclosure of the Italian peninsula by the sea.81

Figure 4.11. Carlo Enrico Rava, entrance to the Exhibition of colonial equipment at the VII Milan Triennale, 1940. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

Figure 4.12. Carlo Enrico Rava, photograph of a trip to East Africa, “The Border,” circa 1930. Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Maria Cristina Rava Marzano.

Figure Description

The image includes handwritten texts in Italian. Above the photograph: “The border.” Below the photograph: “The gate of the Ethiopian Empire, in the border wall between the Italian Dolo and the Abyssinian Dolo.”

Despite the regime’s propaganda, the image of the colonial territories remained rather vague in the minds of most Italians. Rava highlighted the lack of precise knowledge even among those working in the area, mocking one of his peers who, “not having enough data,” ventured that “from a certain perspective, Tripoli might be compared to Palermo and Harar to San Remo.” Another architect had apparently referred to the “absence of any form of local art” in “tropical and sub-tropical Somalia”—a false description, as Rava noted, of not only the art but also the equatorial climate of the country.82 In architectural discourse, as well as in practice, the empire was generally treated as an unformed, homogeneous space, to be regulated by abstract geometries regardless of territorial specificities. These territories were also treated with a perverse lack of accuracy by the Italian army when it deployed chemical weapons in its conquest of Ethiopia: the indiscriminate attacks, even on civilian populations, destabilized and diffused the definition of the target, which was no longer a human body, but the environment around it.83

Unlike many of his compatriots, Rava had a fairly extensive knowledge of the colonies. His exhibition at the Triennale was not an isolated proposition, but part of a lifelong project. Rava traveled extensively in the Italian colonies during his father’s time as a colonial administrator between 1929 and 1931 and again later in the 1930s. He documented his trips in photo albums and in his book Viaggio a Tunin (1932), which was republished in 1936 under a new title, Ai margini del Sahara (Figure 4.13).84 Quoting the French novelist Henri Fauconnier, “No country can be disappointing if you explore its depths: satiety is a tourist disease,” he presented his travels as a quest for knowledge, emphasizing that his account—even if it did not constitute a technical description of the territory—was not a typical guidebook for tourists.85 These trips were made soon after Rava’s collaborations with Gruppo 7, at a time when he and Sebastiano Larco were beginning to take on projects in the colonies away from the rest of the group. Before Rava turned to the role of furnishing in defining Italian colonial life, his attention was clearly focused, both in these projects and through his writings, on the scale of architecture—a scale I will now discuss before turning back to furniture.

Figure 4.13. Carlo Enrico Rava, page of his personal photo album of a trip to East Africa, “Eritrea,” circa 1930. Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Maria Cristina Rava Marzano.

Figure Description

Photographs are accompanied by handwritten captions identifying different places in Massawa. The page includes handwritten Italian text at the top which reads: “Eritrea: Photos from Massawa."

Rava’s concern with different territorial imaginations had already been evident in his student projects, including one for a “Church in the Orient,” a generic assembly of diverse non-Western references quite typical of the Orientalist manner of the time.86 More complex was the 1927 competition entry he developed with Larco for the Pavilion for the Colonies at the Fiera Campionaria in Milan. Their project, which was eventually realized, was characterized by simple cubic and cylindrical volumes with large buttresses. While, in the eyes of Italians, it evoked the vernacular architecture of the occupied territories of northern Africa, the pavilion was also unquestionably related to a modernist sensibility unfolding in parallel with colonization (Figure 4.14). The jury assessment noted how the façades were “inspired by elements of Arab minor architecture, more technical than decorative elements [. . .] then developed with full modern clarity and sophistication.”87 The reference to “minor” architecture had been deployed by jury member Marcello Piacentini from the beginning of the decade, as a means of grounding a collective project for modern Italian architecture. And this exploration of vernacular traditions would take on many different forms, and was often deployed to define distinctive local identities, at times along racial lines.88 Within these different explorations, the project by Larco and Rava is significant in that it appears to have appropriated the minor architecture of the colonies, rather than that of the Italian peninsula, in pursuit of a modern colonial architecture.89 Nonetheless, Piacentini considered their pavilion as characteristically “colonial without being Arab or Turkish.”90 In this sense, the “colonial” designation indicated a cultural space in its own right, different from both the metropole and the colonized context.

Figure 4.14. Carlo Enrico Rava and Sebastiano Larco, perspectives for the Pavilion for the Colonies at the Fiera Campionaria, 1927 (above) and Hotel Scavi di Leptis Magna, 1928 (below). Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Maria Cristina Rava Marzano.

Many projects followed soon after: a hotel at Homs, near the Leptis Magna archaeological site, in 1928; the competition for the Piazza della Cattedrale di Tripoli, a church in Suani-ben-Adem, and the triumphal arch for the promenade in Tripoli in 1931; the Casa del Fascio a Vittorio d’Africa in Somalia in 1933; the Eritrea–Somalia Pavilion for the Tripoli Trade Fair and the Twin-Towered Arch and Albergo Croce del Sud at Mogadishu in 1935. All of these works situated the definition of the architecture in the colonies within a larger concern with the relation of modern architecture to Italian identity and nationalist ideology.91 In addressing this concern, Rava’s work increasingly departed from the European lineage of rationalism that he and his colleagues in Gruppo 7 had initially embraced.92 As a matter of fact, as the political discourse became increasingly radicalized, he would call for a “national” version of modern architecture reflecting “distinctive national characteristics of culture and race.”93

The role of modern architecture in the colonies was a contested one. Some politicians insisted that the different character of the colonies ought to be preserved and decried the imposition of modern buildings as having resulted in “ugly constructions of a European nature.”94 Others, including Rava’s own father, did not dismiss modernism so readily, since they saw in the vernacular architectures of Libya values akin to those pursued by modern architects. At the same time, he dismissed the “arbitrary” attempts to mimic local styles that resulted in works with “little authenticity.”95 Rather than a process of assimilation or mimetic adaptation, he advocated for an architecture that was simultaneously “colonial, but European”: at once other and the same.96 These sentiments were relayed in a 1929 text that was signed by Maurizio Rava but was in fact written by his son, Carlo Enrico, and included in a 1935 collection of his writings.97 Throughout those years, Rava’s work, among that of many others, would engage with this idiosyncratic conception of “colonial” architecture, which sought to negotiate first the European lineage of modernism, and then its national characterization, within their new context.

Rava’s early writings on “colonial” architecture dedicated substantial attention to the features of what he (just as Piacentini) called the “minor architecture” of the colonized territories, with particular attention to Libya.98 His observations were unquestionably informed by his modernist bias, which led him to single out vernacular styles characterized by simple forms and surfaces.99 With this selective approach, he simultaneously dismissed other architectures that were not to his taste, including the more ornate styles that he dubbed “medieval-Moorish” or “reminiscences of Turkish and Persian architecture.”100 Rava also drew attention to the patio and the veranda as effective means of responding to the climate of the region, anticipating some of the explorations of domestic architecture for the colonies that Luigi Piccinato published in Domus in 1936.101 And while he emphasized the value of these features in the architectures of North Africa, he was careful to present them as part of the Italian patrimony rather than as foreign to it: the patio and the veranda were, in Rava’s view, more than a response to the climate, for they were also “intimately ours [Italian], as they refer back to the domus of classical Rome.”102 Indeed, Rava increasingly invoked a “Latin spirit” and a “Mediterranean spirit” as essential characterizations of Italian modern architecture that would unite it with the minor architecture in the colonized territories, and thus helped justify the connections between “colonial” architecture and the local context.103 To quote Silvia Danesi, Rava used the Mediterranean as a “unifying category with which to reconcile nationalism and foreign culture” in the context of fascism.104

Significantly, Rava explored this spirit to extend to territories beyond Italy and its colonies to encompass other architectures that conformed to his preferences: the works of Irving Gill, Rudolph M. Schindler, Richard Neutra, and Luis Barragán in North America were linked, in his understanding, to “the Italian character” through the “southern” sensibility of the Spanish colonial tradition and thus aligned with his own project for colonial architecture.105 Even Germany supplied some works that were absorbed into his increasingly loose definition of “the Mediterranean and Latin character of the best modern architecture.”106 In this understanding, colonial architecture was both grounded on Italian sources and linked to the transnational expansion of modernism across the world.

Throughout these different discussions, Rava submitted colonial architecture to the complex identity negotiations at stake between colonizer and colonized. Diana Fuss, in her reading of French West Indian political philosopher Frantz Fanon, defines these negotiations as characterized by a number of irresolvable conflicts: “It [. . .] becomes necessary for the colonizer to subject the colonial other to a double command: be like me, don’t be like me; be mimetically identical, be totally other.”107 In the case of colonial buildings, this double command meant that architecture had to conform to critical categories established for the metropole, and at the same time to provide a space of difference. Rava highlighted this need for difference in his early writings: the colonial visitor would “certainly never stroll [. . .] on the Lungomare Volpi,” he wrote, “as they can find equally or more beautiful promenades on the Italian or the French Riviera without going to the trouble of crossing the sea.”108 The appeal to the foreign visitor lay instead in the “exotic and colonial atmosphere” of the Italian colonies, which he found “reminiscent of what others have been able to create, with miracles of attention and artifice, in the most celebrated tourist resorts—nowadays very ‘in’—of California and the Antilles.”109 It should not go unnoticed that Rava selected references from touristic locations in sites of coloniality and indigenous dispossession as models through which to test the necessary appeal to visitors of colonial architecture. Later, he would insist on the need for difference in colonial architecture: “Do not try to tell me that we should impose in the colonies the architecture of the homeland as a sign of domination,” he wrote, referring to how the British in India had adopted the bungalow, conceived as a colonial production rather than an architecture exported from the metropole, as “the perfect organism for the life of the whites in the colonies.”110

Critics such as Edoardo Persico took aim at Rava’s emphases, including his abandoning of a European characterization of modernism toward the pursuit for a “Mediterranean spirit” as a central condition of modernism in his writings on the architecture of the colonies.111 Rava, in response, unapologetically defended the “right of the artist to contradict himself.”112 Others accused him of providing “a chronicle of a mundane tourist,” with his references extending to Palm Springs and Miami Beach. Rava countered by celebrating the expansive reach of his quest: “I did not know that participation in the profession of architecture implied a prohibition against being a man of the world.”113 In Rava’s shifting conception, the “colonial” condition of architecture was increasingly linked to its simultaneous capacity to embody Italian values and to enable the colonizer to move seamlessly like a cosmopolitan traveler.114 This understanding of “colonial” architecture tallied with Rava’s approach to the Exhibition of colonial equipment in Milan. Yet here the emphasis was not on negotiating the identity of the expanding colonized territories as much as on defining the colonizer as an agent of expansion.

Nomad Equipment

Rava’s turn to furnishing in addressing his agenda should not be taken for granted, since there was no clear consensus on the appropriate scale of intervention in the colonies. Many institutions were aligned with Rava’s quest for a “perfect organism” modeled after the bungalow. One example was the Istituto Nazionale Case Impiegati dello Stato (INCIS, National institute of housing for state workers), created in 1924, which sponsored designs by Alberto Alpago-Novello, Ottavio Cabiati, Ignazio Guidi, and Florestano Di Fausto, among others.115 Some programs focused in particular on East Africa, with a remit that Piacentini described as the development of “distribution and construction characteristics for a single type of building” in those colonies.116 Other initiatives promoted the rationalization of construction, with prefabricated systems that facilitated rapid colonization. Examples included Pagano’s prototype design for housing built with prefabricated concrete panels.117 In some of his writings, Rava was critical of this kind of partial solution and, referring in particular to the work of INCIS, he proposed that architecture should be integrated into a cohesive plan that took account of “the whole territory of the Empire.”118 Many had followed that impetus and sought totalizing forms of control over the colonial territories. The first attempt to devise a comprehensive plan at the territorial scale was the Ordinamento Fondiario della Colonia Eritrea (Organization of land in the Eritrean colony) of 1909, although this was ultimately implemented as a series of local plans.119 However, this approach took hold after the occupation of Addis Ababa and the proclamation of the empire, with a number of strategies seeking to systematically control the Ethiopian territory, among them Piacentini’s proposal to develop a general regulatory plan.120

Rava saw furnishing as coordinated with these larger forms of control. For him, the “apparently more modest expressions” of domestic objects contributed to the “indissoluble unity of the [colonial] problem,” framed with reference to unitary and totalizing projects such as those of Le Corbusier in Algeria.121 And yet, he never discussed the articulation of these diverse realms of intervention, either in the exhibition or in a number of articles that he published in Domus from 1939 to 1942. But their connections with the “colonial problem” was central to the pursuit of the show.

The Exhibition of colonial equipment at the Milan Triennale opened in April 1940, just two months before Italy entered World War II.122 The prospect of war cast a shadow over the entire Triennale, which was directed by Giuseppe Bianchini with an executive committee including Marcello Piacentini, Gio Ponti, Raffaele Calzini, and Pietro Chiesa with Carlo Felice as secretary. Though the catalogue acknowledged the changed circumstances (“The VII Triennale opens its doors amid the current political, economic, and social crisis in Europe”), the curators nonetheless framed the event as an exercise in continuity. As before, the overall aim was to promote the contribution of the decorative arts, furnishing, and architecture to the definition of Italian identity and to stimulate national production and consumption. Some, however, detected a changing paradigm in furnishing and architecture related to the political crisis. Critic Carla Zanini, for example, saw signs of “the end of an era” at the Triennale, noting the inferior level of many of the contributions and their “withdrawal into already outdated stances.”123 By contrast, she praised Franco Albini’s project for a “Day Room in a Villa” for its capacity to “becom[e] an organic totality,” using the same parameters that had been in place in the discourse of furnishing throughout the fascist period.

Rava’s exhibition was set apart from the interests of this discourse. Although it featured chairs, tables, and beds, the term mobilized by Rava was not arredamento, furnishing, but rather attrezzatura, which translates as equipment, outfitting, or gear—with the title advancing a framework for their evaluation. While the term “equipment” was popular in modernist discourse at the time,124 it held particular meaning in the discussions concerning furnishing in Italy: if arredamento conveys a desire to define a cohesive space or provide it with a unified identity, attrezzatura encapsulates the alternative pursuit of preparing for an activity or adapting to an environment, here understood as foreign. The term attrezzatura additionally overrides the domestic character of arredamento.125 Instead of defining a space, these furnishings equipped and identified the colonizers now turned into imperialists. Its technical emphasis might be aligned with what Daniel R. Headrick has called the “tools of empire,” such as quinine, the railway, and, following Anthony King, the architecture of the bungalow, which Rava himself highlighted.126

Rather than being included in the main furnishing section, Rava’s exhibition formed part of a trio of separate shows that addressed what Domus called the “problems of our life.”127 “The work environment” and the “Criteria of today’s home” were the themes of the other two. Though the categorization of works was at times rather arbitrary, these shows also emphasized technical issues rather than aesthetic concerns, even if the modernist aesthetics of some of the pieces were extremely sophisticated, including those by the curator Piero Bottoni and Renato Camus, Enrico Griffini, Cesare and Maurizio Mazzocchi, Giuseppe Mazzoleni, Giulio Minoletti, Giancarlo Palanti, and, again, Franco Albini.

Likewise, despite the technical emphasis of attrezzatura, Rava did not neglect the aesthetic qualities of the works. In the texts that accompanied the show, he highlighted the modernist preference for “purity of lines and formal equilibrium,”128 rejecting “mannerist exoticism [. . .] which is entirely superficial and false” and dismissing “decorative objects, which are perfectly useless in the African cities.”129 Rava wanted these furnishings to represent “as much as possible universal values,” and while this “universality” rested on the canonical modernist alignment of formal abstraction, serial production, and functionality, other connotations arose in the context of the colonies, where some were excluded from the pursuit of universality.130 In fact, Rava made clear that this colonial equipment helped to define the “hierarchical scale that forms the necessary basis of the colonial structure, as well as to maintain the privileges [. . .] and prestige of the dominant race in relation to the indigenous people.”131 These pieces should not simply be modern, they also needed to serve the project of colonization—just as Rava had demanded of architecture. These furnishings expanded the understanding of modernization as a project that embraced “universality” while giving form to the hierarchies of colonization.

The design of the exhibition rooms provides an insight into the nature of these hierarchies. The spaces were conceived to provide a neutral (Rava wrote “clear”) backdrop for the objects on display. Their basic organization reflected the modernist impetus for a “fresh and linear architecture,” akin to a display of Italian furnishings or interiors.132 But overlaid onto this base were brightly colored palm-green and yellow walls, exuberant plants, and sand-covered floors to recreate colonial settings (Figure 4.15). Far from “clarifying,” such environments mystified the tension between the exhibited objects and the territories they occupied. As in a colonial landscape painting, the vegetation had what David Bunn has called “a framing effect,” which was not merely spatial but concerned “questions of epistemology and ideology.”133 And what the vegetation framed and naturalized here was not so much indigenous life (as in colonial museography) as the colonial adventure. The foreign presence of the colonizer was expressed as a “trope of unobstructed passage through the colonial environment,” in which, to quote Bunn again, the colonial subject was “embodied as a mobile [. . .] presence.”134 Rather than seeking to furnish cohesive ensembles and stable interiors, the equipment on display embraced a life “in movement,” which Rava saw as typical of the experience of colonization.135

Figure 4.15. Carlo Enrico Rava, Exhibition of colonial equipment at the VII Milan Triennale, 1940. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

Conceptualized in this way, the designs in the show not only participated in the networks of objects moving back and forth between the colonies and the metropole, they also embraced movement as central to their characterization. Rava himself highlighted their capacity to follow the so-called “‘nomadism’ of life in the caravan.”136 Specific design features supported this idea: a dressing table, for example, could be folded up into a suitcase, while a larger chest could expand into a kitchen (Figure 4.16). Other pieces came in kit form: the minimal use of screws and some sophisticated joints made them easy to assemble or disassemble and transport (Figure 4.17).137 Other designs addressed the issue of portability through the use of plastic materials, which were both light and required minimal maintenance.138 Finally, there were pieces intended to serve more than one function, such as the “triple-use furniture”—a combined closet and table that could be packed in a closed case and placed in a bedroom, dining room, or living room.

Figure 4.16. Salvo d’Angelo, kitchen (above) and boudoir (center and below), Exhibition of colonial equipment at the VII Milan Triennale, 1940. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

Figure 4.17. Mario dal Fabbro, drawing of a bed that can be disassembled and construction detail of the assembly system, 1940. Domus 157 (January 1941). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

A block of typed text, in Italian, reads: “Bed that can be disassembled for the colonies, in acacia or oak wood with wedge joints (independent mosquito net) and folding tray table (designs by Mario dal Fabbro).”

The authors of these pieces included major figures in the discourse on colonial architecture as well as those occupied with the design of domestic interiors within Italy, among them Luigi Piccinato, Cesare Valle, Gherardo Bosio, Salvo D’Angelo, Enrico Del Debbio, Umberto Giglio, Ignazio Guidi, Paolo Malchiodi, Plinio Marconi, Giovanni Pellegrini, and Guglielmo Ulrich. Similar concerns with mobility were evident beyond the exhibition, as shown by the furniture projects published in design magazines such as Casabella.139 Portable items were also common in other colonial contexts and in military settings more broadly. In some cases, they were coordinated with prefabricated and transportable houses, which were similarly understood as equipment, with a focus on their ability to provide protection from the climate and disease.140 Rava highlighted similar objects developed for different contexts, linking the furnishings he presented in the show to tables, chairs, and other pieces designed for California and Hawaii, among other places.141 Building on the connection that he had established in his earlier discussions on architecture, he drew a parallel between colonization and other modern forms of circulation, such as tourism.142 Indeed, just as Brian McLaren has argued for the infrastructure built for colonial tourism, these furnishings were meant for the “western traveler to experience the colonial context in a manner that was consistent with the expectations and standards of the metropole.”143 More specifically, the pieces served as an armor of civilization for the colonizer and as a representation of “Italianness” within foreignness.

Rava’s engagement with the expanding geographies of the modern world was not uncontested in a time of heightened nationalism, so he took care to explicitly state his commitment to maintaining racial hierarchies, as a 1939 article titled “Architecture of the Italian Race” makes clear.144 In fact, if these furnishings contributed to the mobilization of metropolitan elites (a pursuit that concerned colonialism and tourism alike), then they did so by turning these elites into imperialists in a process that favored social and racial segregation over the assimilation of foreigners. While fascism elsewhere invoked rootedness, here furniture became a key medium for defining Italian imperialists as those with access to travel, as opposed to the indigenous individuals, who were denied the freedom to move.145

These hierarchies extended to the expected performance of these pieces in the global economy, since Rava linked their literal mobility to their ability to circulate internationally and conquer ever-expanding markets.146 In fact, the principles employed in furnishing the colonies were assumed for pieces that would be suitable back in the metropole (just as other countries introduced paradigms first rehearsed in war equipment within everyday objects), particularly, in Italy, in another form of territorial appropriation linked to vacations in the countryside and for seaside tourism.147 Colonized individuals were not envisioned as customers for these pieces, but as the workforce for their production.148 The circulation of Italian design pieces in the market was to be sustained by the territorial and racial distribution of labor. Here modernist furniture design displayed its simultaneously expansive and segregating nature.

The Exhibition of colonial equipment distinguished the so-called “universal” furniture objects that defined the space for Italians abroad from what Rava defined as the indigenous “culture of the bazaar”—a culture that had already been frozen and fragmented at previous exhibitions and the discourses that they came to represent.149 Some of the photographs of the Milan exhibition reveal how this difference was captured in the forms of display themselves, in the contrast between the mobile furniture—the freestanding chairs, chests, and beds—and the murals depicting African stools, vases, and other decoration that formed a backdrop to the displays. And although they are depicted as if displayed on shelves, these objects and furnishings are in fact painted, fixed to the walls (Figure 4.18). One forever stabilized, the other able to move anywhere, the pairing helped valorize mobility as a property of colonial modernity that was, by design, exclusive to the imperialist.150

Figure 4.18. Carlo Enrico Rava, Exhibition of colonial equipment at the VII Milan Triennale, 1940. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

What is more, the Italian colonizers were not only allowed to travel with this purposefully designed furniture, but were expected to do so. In fact, while Italy had promoted strategies of settlement as a form of colonization, this was increasingly seen as problematic for fear that Italians would eventually come to fuse with the local population—with the threat of miscegenation being exacerbated at the time.151 And the appeal to the “nomadism” of the colonizers cannot be separated from the Italian abhorrence of indigenous mobility, and especially the “great nomadism” of the Bedouin in Libya.152 In Cyrenaica, the eastern part of Italian Libya, the colonizers constructed physical borders and concentration camps to immobilize the indigenous individuals.153 More broadly, the “carceral space” of the colonized, to use Achille Mbembe’s term, was the flip side to the “expansion of life’s horizons” for the colonizers.154

The pieces that Rava included in the Exhibition of colonial equipment differed from those shaping the project of furnishing in previous exhibitions, since they disregarded the pursuit of localization that modernist aesthetics had enabled in response to the critical destabilizations of modernity. Here, modernism was put to work to naturalize movement as a characteristic feature of the modern colonial period. Indeed, while the interiors defined by these modernist furniture items could be regarded as “an extraterritorial zone in which the installation of italianità was located,” as Sean Anderson’s groundbreaking analysis of domesticity in Asmara proposes, they were not a confined reality rooted back in Italy.155 Instead, they contributed to the construction of an identity for Italy as a modern nation, which incorporated colonization among other forms of expansion and circulation. The design of these interiors gave form to modern forms of citizenship that embraced this mobility, while concurrently helping define an outside space that was limited to “bare life.”156

Epilogue: Carceral Habitations

While Rava’s show celebrated movement as a characteristic of colonization, the parallel confinement of African populations was captured at the Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare in Naples, which opened one month later in May 1940. Conceived as an attempt to showcase “the contributions [. . .] that our marvelous Latin race has bestowed to all the peoples overseas [. . .] from the cities of Caesar to the Roma del Littorio,” its “geographic” section contained pavilions for each of Italy’s colonies, arranged in a landscape that featured vegetation native to various African regions and, in certain areas, live animals including elephants and leopards.157 As in previous exhibitions, the section dedicated to East Africa included an ethnographic village with a complete array of architecture from the region and, once again, it included indigenous people. This time, however, their presence led to more explicit forms of violence.

Problems occurred right from the outset, when the company in charge of transporting the prospective inhabitants of the village alluded to the possibility of “dangers and serious disturbances” at a time of heightened racial tensions.158 When they finally arrived in Naples, the East Africans spent their days in the re-created dwellings and their nights sleeping in basic army barracks on the edge of the site. But it would get worse when the exhibition ended prematurely—curtailed, like the Milan Triennale, by Italy’s entry into World War II in June 1940—and they were barred from returning home. Detained on the exhibition premises, they remained under surveillance and were allowed to leave the camp only twice a week, always in the company of guards.159 Brought in to perform their symbolic incarceration under the logic of colonization, they ended up sequestered in their own display (Figure 4.19).

Figure 4.19. Federico Patellani, East African individuals in their living quarters near the Mostra d’Oltremare, Naples, 1941. Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea copyright Archivio Federico Patellani—Regione Lombardia / Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milano-Cinisello Balsamo.

These individuals did not remain passive but made their discontent known in repeated petitions to the Ministry of Italian Africa. Some asked for compensation for their enforced absence from their families and land.160 Others felt “disgraced for being detained.”161 Collectively, they felt deceived: when they had left their homes, they had been assured they would be able to return in six months.162 There were complaints, too, about the condition of the barracks, which offered inadequate protection against cold temperatures and Allied attacks. The group’s many needs included warm clothing to help them survive the winter—something that La Rinascente supplied, in an unusual reversal of their interest in furnishing and clothing the colonies.163 The members of the group received a monthly stipend, but they were also asked to take on other jobs. Some played extras in Harlem (dir. Carmine Gallone, 1943), which was released in theaters in 1943.164 Filmed at Cinecittà, the movie featured the adventures of an Italian architect who had emigrated to New York City, culminating in a boxing match in Madison Square Garden where he triumphs over his Black opponent. While Mussolini did not entirely approve of the film, Cinecittà’s director at the time, Luigi Freddi, defended it as both “anti-American and anti-Black.” Once again, the representation of these African individuals had been put to work against their own identities.165

After two years in Naples, the group was moved to a former concentration camp in Treia, Macerata.166 The poor conditions of the camp are evident from the multiple reports that speak of necessary upgrades. One in particular describes the cost of the furniture needed to make the barracks habitable.167 Another refers to beds as the only items necessary for the imprisoned individuals.168 Beds were one of the few objects that ethnographers had been able to identify in the interiors they analyzed in the colonies, and now they became the solitary piece of furniture provided for this displaced group. Their identity erased, the Africans were eventually reduced to lists of numbers circulating among various official agencies. Those lists included the number of individuals still alive, the deceased, the newborn, and those who had managed to escape the camp. There were more numbers accounting for their monthly expenses (as well as the expenses of their furnishings).169 Some of the surviving members of the group exercised their political agency by joining the Italian resistance in the final years of World War II, questioning the confinement of previously defined identities.170

While the furniture objects exhibited in previous shows had addressed the radical destabilizations of the modern world by assigning “fixed places” to nations and populations (as Zeynep Çelik and Leila Kinney have argued), the exhibitions in 1940 negotiated these destabilizations and established colonial hierarchies by determining who was allowed to move and who was to remain fixed.171 If the colonial world, as Frantz Fanon put it, was a “compartmentalized world,” the relationship between its parts was not symmetrical.172 And just as architecture was one of the privileged means for sustaining that compartmentalization, so furniture became a tool that granted the privilege of movement and “adventure.” Its value becomes particularly relevant in light of the understanding of mobility as a “scarce and unequally distributed commodity,” to follow Zygmunt Bauman.173 In this context, modernist design demonstrates its value as a form of power within the characteristically deterritorialized contexts that resulted from modernization.

Yet how was the movement of colonizers supposed to enhance or challenge their definition as subjects of their own nation? And would the image of the colonies be transformed by the circulation of these very subjects? The violent “adventures” of the modern period left many questions unresolved. However, what I hope this chapter has made clear is that the identity negotiations and hierarchies at stake in these questions were addressed through design, in the furnishings of the empire’s myriad habitations.

Five

The Mobile Objects of Tourism

Mediterranean Occupations

A leisurely scene features on the cover of the July 1941 issue of Lo Stile nella casa e nell’arredamento, a brand-new editorial project by Gio Ponti devoted to “style in the house and its furnishing.”1 Two loungers, nautical blue with white piping, are placed on a terrace with matching blue and white tiles decorated with maritime motifs (flags, fish, fishing nets). A pair of sunglasses and three oranges sit on the side table next to them. The loungers are diagonally cropped in the frame, structuring a balanced composition (Plate 9). The restful and harmonious image might surprise the reader since, that summer, Italy was at war on several fronts. After invading Albania in 1939, Mussolini had declared war on France and Great Britain on June 10, 1940, following the German occupation of Paris. By 1941, the Italian army was mainly engaged in Africa, battling troops from the British Empire.

An article by Ponti tied the scene on the cover to these significant developments. Titled “Let’s Create a National Consciousness on Mediterranean Architecture,” it outlines a campaign that would run parallel to the military one, enlisting architecture in a mission in which the coasts of Italy, “blessed by the sun,” would work in the service of “national interests.”2 Ponti acknowledged that the task at hand was not an easy one: “The Mediterranean is large and its shores along the coasts of Morocco, Spain, France, Sardinia, Sicily, Italy, the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic, Greece, Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria have many different histories, civilizations, and climates, so a peremptory definition of Mediterranean architecture that is not subject to adjustments in arrangements and style cannot be pursued.”3 With this statement, Ponti seemingly anticipates Fernand Braudel’s acknowledgment of the “many voices” of the Mediterranean—its condition as a platform for diverse histories and cultural encounters—or even the seas’ “inconclusive suspension,” to borrow the term postcolonial historian Iain Chambers has used to describe the Mediterranean’s challenge to national boundaries and identities.4 And yet it was the mobilization of Mediterranean architecture to support the Italian nation both culturally and economically, in spite of this diversity, that concerned Ponti.

Heralded by the furnishings featured on the cover was a plethora of images of the Villa Marchesano, a vacation house that Ponti had designed in Bordighera, a small beach resort between Monaco and San Remo popular with the Milanese bourgeoisie. Some of the photographs were black and white, but many were lavishly printed in color, despite the economic constraints imposed by the war.5 The furniture on the cover stood in for both the territory of the Mediterranean and the environments built for summer vacations. In fact, Ponti’s interest in Mediterranean architecture, which he shared with other modernist architects at the time, was primarily (and quite distinctively) linked to temporary seasonal occupations. He would develop this focus through a number of projects, initiatives, and arguments, many of them published first in Domus and later in Lo Stile, and particularly in the summer issues of the magazines. To a large extent, the work was driven by the need to grapple with the rise of mass tourism, which had led, in Ponti’s view, to “idiotic” interventions lacking economic or cultural interest, and now threatened the coastal landscape.6

The character of tourism underwent a major transformation during the fascist years and had become an economic engine that peaked in 1937, before being curtailed by compounding international crises. After the significant damage inflicted by World War I on this profitable industry, different voices sought to negotiate the relationship between tourism, state control, and war on the eve of a new world conflict. Some tourist administrators recognized the need to wait out the war; in a piece published around the same time as Ponti’s article, one argued that “a flourishing tourist industry, it hardly needs saying, is a matter for good times.”7 Others looked for ways for Italy to maintain this source of revenue during these difficult times, preferring to frame tourism as a pursuit set apart from ideology and state control.8 Yet others discussed whether tourism itself could be deemed a technology of war and colonization.9 How, then, should we read Ponti’s search for a Mediterranean architecture and the furnishing of summer vacations in relation to these different positions—to the imbrication of tourism, fascist politics, and the war?10

Throughout the fascist period, Ponti designed several vacation homes, starting with the one built for the 1927 Monza Biennale. This program was one of his preferred types for experimentation in Domus in the early 1930s. But it would become a more central concern from 1936 on, framed within an engagement with tourism as a modernist pursuit—“an art of today” akin to furnishing or architecture.11 This chapter will consider the alliance between a number of furnishings and architectures with the expansion of tourism throughout the fascist era as well as their politics, looking in particular at projects that were developed for the coast and took the Mediterranean as a central referent in their conceptualization.

While other architectural historians have addressed the different valences of the Mediterranean in architecture discourse, my focus is the Mediterranean as a physical territory which was then being occupied by new objects, structures, and populations.12 In Italy, the interest in Mediterranean architecture was often aligned with a reevaluation of rural vernacular architectures in the 1930s (and has typically been discussed as part of this phenomenon). And yet vacation houses were often targeted at urbanites, imagined as a mix of an idealized middle class and social elites, and disregarded the rural inhabitants from whom they appropriated aesthetic and technical traits. As a matter of fact, these traveling urbanites moved along the reverse path taken by rural people who, from the period of Italian unification, had been leaving the countryside and migrating toward the northern urban centers. The so-called “Mediterranean architecture” of tourism was thus in a fraught but productive tension with the re-evaluation of vernacular architecture and the efforts of the fascist regime to engage its rural territory and participate in its modernization.

In what follows, I situate the attention to the Mediterranean in architecture discourse and address buildings meant for summer vacations, along with the transient subjects who occupied them and the objects that furnished them. Unlike in previous chapters, architecture—itself understood as a mobile object within the logics of tourism—will be a central subject of speculation, before I turn to furnishing. Rather than mobile, one could regard these objects as “portable,” following Alina Payne’s discussion of the difference: portability, unlike mobility, insists on the agency of those in charge of transporting these artifacts and their role in shaping specific contexts through their movement.13 And while exploring how different objects negotiated the territorial tensions characteristic of the period and its ideologies, I will also consider the mobility of political positions throughout the war, for which the sea provided a privileged medium.

The Territories of Tourism

Diverse experiences of travel unfolded throughout the fascist period, not all of them directed toward exclusive summer retreats like Ponti’s house in Bordighera. By this time, the Italian peninsula had been a major destination for foreign travelers for more than two centuries, beginning with the rise of the Grand Tour. Many visitors had been historically drawn by the country’s rich artistic patrimony, while some would, from the nineteenth century on, use Italy’s coast as a winter retreat and its mountains as a summer resort.14 And while a destination inclusive of diverse heritage and landscapes, the Italian peninsula was perceived as “remarkably cohesive in character and culture” by these foreign visitors even before the country’s unification, as Stephanie Malia Hom has suggested.15 Tourism was thus one of the ways in which the Italian nation came into being—if only initially in the imaginations of well-heeled foreigners.

Throughout the Risorgimento, the country also became increasingly available for domestic travelers, and not just the wealthy elites who frequented the same spas and resorts as international tourists. The whole country became a tourist destination for a larger swath of domestic travelers, thanks in part to significant organizations such as the Touring Club Italiano (TCI). Founded in Milan in 1894 by Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, the TCI was one of a number of northern cultural institutions that sought to contribute to the project of national unification, even while ostensibly maintaining “political neutrality.”16 If the general goal, since the Risorgimento, had been to “make Italians,” now the physical fabric of the country itself was enlisted in these efforts: through tourism “Italy will make Italians,” Bertarelli wrote as early as 1901.17 The TCI tours, which began with a gathering of fifty-seven cyclists and grew to reach masses of travelers, were conceived as a key element in raising the national consciousness. So, too, were the guides that they published, which dispensed with the need to consult foreign publications such as the Baedeker’s or Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers. The TCI framed the country’s territory as a picture in which Italians were simultaneously spectators and actors for one another: “Each form of national activity, individual and collective, will feel like a picture of Italian life that we are about to draw for all Italian tourists; it will be a mosaic to which each person can—indeed must—contribute his own tile.”18

The Italian state would intervene more decisively in the development of national tourism in the wake of World War I (which severely damaged the infrastructure of this growing industry) with its first tourist agency, the Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche (ENIT, Italian agency for touristic industries). Initially founded as a public/private enterprise, it was appropriated by the fascist regime, and its remit would be further politicized with the creation of first the Commissariato per il Turismo in 1931 and then the Direzione Generale per il Turismo in 1934, as part of the “national battle for tourism” declared by Mussolini in 1929.19 Throughout this period, many liberal organizations continued to operate with a degree of autonomy, even if some, among them the Touring Club Italiano, would ultimately align with the fascist program, as signaled by the 1937 changing of its name to Consociazione Turistica Italiana.20

Leisure travel in the country continued to expand during these years. No longer an exclusive activity, it was now increasingly taken up by the middle classes and even low-income workers. A key factor in this expansion was the recognition of workers’ rights, including an eight-hour working day and paid vacations, during the Biennio Rosso (“two red years,” 1919–1920).21 The fascist regime would build on that foundation with a further regulation of the weekend break in 1934, which allowed for shorter excursions.22 And yet, differences remained in the forms of travel. While trips to the beach or the mountains became available to the masses, most people could only afford one short break a year, while wealthier Italians continued to enjoy long seasonal retreats.

The fascist regime sponsored new forms of organized leisure activities for diverse sections of the population, including workers, which were promoted by an array of state agencies such as the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), Opera Nazionale Combattenti (ONC), and Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (GUF).23 Here, the regime used domestic tourism both as a means to engage the population in the nationalization of culture and as part of a comprehensive strategy for the management of leisure. Free time could be usefully filled with excursions to enjoy the historical patrimony of the country and its folklore, activities mixing sports and recreation with paramilitary exercises, or summer camps—so-called colonie (colonies)—often in seaside locations.24 The colonie contributed significantly to fulfilling the cultural and social dimensions of fascist tourism by providing young Italians, many of them children of Italian internal migrants, with a sense of the wider boundaries of the national territory, and expanding the therapeutic benefits of nature for those who were sick or poor.25

With its different scales and targets, the expansion of tourism was essential to the territorial imaginations and identity negotiations of the regime. And while both official and private endeavors operated in multiple directions across the territory, a great flow of tourists and vacationers moved from the expanding cities to the countryside or the sea as a way both to enjoy the country’s heritage and to cure the maladies associated with urban life.26 The TCI’s magazine, for example, promoted camping as “the instant remedy for that contracted and fatiguing form of human life that is city-dwelling.”27 This tendency had already manifested earlier in the century in the construction of comprehensive new developments that worked as an extension of the city for the summer season. Such was the case of Milano Marittima, near Rimini, which was built according to the principles of the garden city as an enclave connected with Milan by new transportation networks.28 Building on this earlier trend, tourism supported the anti-urban agenda of the regime even while often serving the very urban bourgeoisie that Mussolini allegedly derided.29

In this mobilization of the population, Mussolini sought to associate his own persona with key tourist destinations in the Italian territory, famously climbing up mountains or jumping into the sea for a swim (Figure 5.1). A LUCE newsreel from 1937 shows people vacationing in Riccione, just south of Rimini, while another one features the incredibly busy beach, attesting to the popularity of both this specific location and seaside holidays in general.30 Holidaymakers walk along the shore in fashionable swimsuits, past children playing in the sand. Some venture into the waves in small rowing boats and sailboats, others sunbathe on their towels or in beach chairs, following the new fashion of tanning (Figure 5.2). The landscapes of the country, and their attributed benefits, were resignified as destinations for, and shapers of, the fascist citizen modeled in the image of Mussolini.

Figure 5.1. Benito Mussolini swims in Riccione, 1934. Footage supplied by Istituto Luce Cinecittà Historical Archive.

Figure 5.2. Frames from the newsreel “The quiet holidays of the swimmers at the beach in the coast of Romagna,” Giornale Luce, 1936. Footage supplied by Istituto Luce Cinecittà Historical Archive.

Tourists’ engagement with Italy’s diverse landscapes accompanied the regime’s efforts to “ruralize the country.” Consequently, this engagement was as complex as the regime’s stance toward rural Italy. As Dario Gaggio has recently argued, the regime “simultaneously extoll[ed rural] authenticity” in order to cement different national myths, “and argu[ed] for the necessity of its redemption” as part and parcel of its commitment toward the modernization of the country, including its agriculture, and as a key component of autarky (which included self-sufficiency in wheat production).31

The most transformative expressions of the regime’s rural agenda were its land reclamation projects, or bonifiche, which built on the efforts of previous liberal governments.32 Some of these projects were directed by organizations of landowners, others by the regime itself, as was the case with the draining and filling of the Pontine Marshes south of Rome. This land was then famously repopulated with several new towns including Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, Aprilia, and Pomezia.33 Along with these projects, there was a bonifica umana, or reclaiming of the rural population, which set out to remold the inhabitants of the Italian countryside.34 And running in parallel with these processes of internal colonization was a more subtle, if equally pervasive, transformation of rural landscapes, small villages, and folklore for their consumption by tourists. In the words of Medina Lasansky, the countryside was a “carefully edited [. . .] stage for defining and developing identity politics” in the service of the regime.35

Just as the whole of Italy was mobilized in service of tourism, so, too, were its overseas colonies. Since tourism was imagined as an agent of territorial reclamation, it was asked to contribute to the absorption or interiorization of foreign territories into the emerging empire. State agencies such as the Ente Turistico ed Alberghiero della Libia (ETAL, National association of Libyan tourism and hotels) worked to promote tourism as an integral part of the colonization, and modernization, of the region.36 Indeed, tourism was proclaimed a “civilizing and modernizing force” in its own right.37

These diverse forms of tourism ultimately resulted in the mobilization of millions of Italians, who traveled throughout the territory in trains, private cars, and even boats—a new appropriation of the country that ran in parallel to the regime’s land reclamation projects. And while vacations had historically remained quite distinct from other forms of travel, such as religious pilgrimages, during the fascist period all of these leisure trips to the seaside, mountains, or spas became increasingly enmeshed with tours to exhibitions, to local festivities, or to structures built by the regime.38 As Victoria de Grazia reports, all of these forms of tourism were politicized to such an extent that it was sometimes difficult to determine whether an excursion “was a political rally or simply an outing.”39 The whole country was transformed into the stage for the big Italian play that Bertarelli had imagined, now mobilized in service of fascist narratives.

“Let’s Look Again at Italy!”

Architecture played an important part in this appropriation of the country. One significant aspect of this contribution was the reevaluation, by architects, of the vernacular heritage and the landscapes of Italy in relation to the fascist narratives of commitment to the land. This engagement was not an obvious or uncontested one. Ostensibly, it seemed to question the embrace of classical architecture as a national style, which was thought to cement its alignment with imperial Rome. It also seemed to go against the work of modernist architects, supported by the regime in keeping with its emphasis on the country’s modernization. And yet, vernacular, classicist, and modernist trends were not invariably at odds with each other, but established complex, instrumental, and shifting interrelations throughout the fascist period.40

Two of the most notable figures to engage with Italian vernacular traditions were Gustavo Giovannoni and Marcello Piacentini—the former with the eyes of a preservationist, and the latter more clearly embracing it as a source for modern Italian architecture.41 As early as 1921, Piacentini acknowledged the role that vernacular sources could play in the creation of a distinctive national identity and, with the rise of fascism, he framed this pursuit as a political quest, defining this identity along racial lines: “We have seen what the differences are between the various national schools and what are the new laws common to all. We must persuade ourselves of this and find in our past, and even more in our homes, the fundamental and permanent principles of our race.”42

This broad proposition permeated different architectural camps and was at the core of diverse polemics, including many of those discussed in previous chapters. The Strapaese group, for example, framed its defense of vernacular traditions in opposition to the urban and metropolitan emphases of the work of Novecento artists and architects—a proposition that found broader political traction in a turn to the land “to find the profound spirit of centuries-old and Mediterranean traditions.”43 The group sought to reconcile the fascist program of modernization with Mussolini’s narratives around a mythical and material engagement with the land: “Why would we identify our modernity with an anonymous modernism, our universality with an aesthetic internationalism, our history with complex moral and aesthetic phenomena grounded in the materialism and mechanistic, ultimately Marxist, positivism that has produced architectural rationalism?”44 Mussolini himself performed a nimble balancing act between these different forces, simultaneously embracing the Strapaese movement while expressing affinity for the program of Novecento, as I have already discussed.45

At the other end of the architectural spectrum, many rationalists did not see their work as incompatible with vernacular architectures, and were in fact inspired by Piacentini’s valorization of an “architectonic prose, of little personal content, but collective, anonymous, [which] must be revived against the sterile attempts of the architectonic fashions of recent decades.”46 While Piacentini’s own work during this period gravitated toward the country’s classicist heritage, others looked to ground modern architecture in Italian vernacular traditions. Among them was Tuscan architect Giovanni Michelucci, an architect close to the rationalists whose interest in vernacular sources focused on one particular type characteristic of his native region, the Tuscan farmhouse or casa colonica.47 His appropriation of this type was accompanied by an instrumental transformation of some of its features in response to modern trends, most significantly replacing the traditional pitched roof with a flat roof—reducing the form to an idealized abstract white volume (even though case coloniche were often colored).48 Michelucci also decontextualized the type from its original purpose, organization, and specific context, which combined areas for farming equipment and animals at ground level with domestic spaces for the tenant farmers above, and proposed it as a broader model for modern architecture throughout the nation. His work constitutes an example of what Michelangelo Sabatino has called the “emergence of an Italian ‘casa colonica’ that was both national and regional” (Figure 5.3).49

Figure 5.3. Spread from Giovanni Michelucci, “Sources of Modern Architecture,” featuring the relationship between a casa calonica and a modern house. Domus 56 (August 1932). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Figure Description

The spread includes typed text, in Italian, which reads: “Sources of Modern Italian Architecture.”

This move to instrumentalize vernacular architecture within modernism was given significant impetus by the articles that Giuseppe Pagano wrote for Casabella and the Rural Architecture show that he co-curated with Guarniero Daniel for the VI Milan Triennale in 1936.50 In both the texts and the show, extensive photographic documentation of vernacular buildings throughout Italy was presented as a reference bank of aesthetic and technical sources for modern architecture (Figure 5.4). These appropriations of vernacular architectures were fundamentally committed to the regime’s narratives in a symbolic way, and simultaneously gave form to some state-sponsored projects specifically intended to consolidate the regime’s rural program. Pagano, in fact, proposed rural architecture not only as a generic model for modern architects, but a specific one for the new rural constructions that accompanied the “impressive works of land reclamation (l’opera grandiose della bonifica) undertaken by the regime.”51 And just as with the appropriations of traditional architectures by modernist architects, the projects accompanying land reclamation endeavors resulted in what Mia Fuller has called “de-traditionalizations [. . .] disguised as ‘returns’ to ‘tradition.’”52

Figure 5.4. Photographs of case coloniche featured by Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel in their study of Italian rural architecture. Architettura Rurale Italiana, Quaderni della Triennale (Milano: Ulricho Hoepli Editore, 1936). Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

In providing a representation for a mythical relation to the land and the revalorization of its rural landscapes, the appropriation of the country’s vernacular architecture was also instrumental to the regime in its support of the expanding national touristic consciousness. It was no coincidence that Ponti enlisted Pagano’s aid when he set himself the task of creating an “Invitation to Tourism” in 1936, in which he called on his fellow Italians to develop a new outlook on their country (“Let’s look again at Italy!”).53 Significantly reframing Pagano’s photographic engagement with the built heritage of the country, Ponti linked this mandate to the possibilities of new media (“Let’s rephotograph Italy”). For Ponti, the choice of Pagano was not an obvious one, given their increasingly divergent approaches to modernism and distinct editorial projects in Domus and Casabella. And yet, both men were committed to finding an alternative to the monumental rhetoric of the regime while at the same time advancing its politics.54 In fact, rather than focusing on ancient monuments and ruins in considering architecture’s engagement with the country’s touristic consciousness, he wanted people to appreciate a heritage that he deemed “alive and beautiful: our Italy!”55

Pagano responded to Ponti’s call with a series of images that combined rural landscapes and villages (such as those in the 1936 show and publication) with watery reflections and arrays of beach umbrellas appealing to the imaginations of tourists. The focus of his study of rural architecture was expanded and overlaid with the perspective of a “contemporary tourist,” a man of broadened horizons for whom everything is a “source of amazement, of attention, of marvel” (Figure 5.5).56 Pagano placed himself in an ambiguous position, as both an expert engaged in reframing the built and natural heritage of the country and as just one of a growing number of tourists equipped, he imagined, “with a Rolleiflex or a Leica.” And while the experience of tourism was now available to increasing numbers of Italians, Pagano adopted a perspective closer to his own: that of an independent traveler seeking to escape the constraints of metropolitan life.57 More specifically, his gaze was directed not only from urban centers toward rural areas, but from northern to southern regions. This clear orientation was emphasized in his call for tourists to embrace “the exciting feeling of the ‘South’ with its palm trees, its white-walled houses, its outdoor life”—a formula that mixed some of the architectural features that most attracted modernist architects with the images and experiences that appealed to tourists.58

Figure 5.5. Giuseppe Pagano, photographs of diverse Italian landscapes featured in “An invite to tourism.” Domus 104 (August 1936).

Significantly, Pagano linked the rush of aesthetic experiences triggered by tourism with the territorial expansions pursued through warfare, writing that in 1914 “I experienced my first tourist emotions when I walked away from the prisoner-of-war camp on the borders of Bohemia: roads, houses, woods, and silent rivers, and noisy cities. Today you sleep in a bed, tomorrow in a wheat field; today you are face to face with a thunderstorm, tomorrow with a blazing dawn.”59 Here, Pagano frames modern tourism as an exceptional and violent encounter with the territory—similar to Rava’s relation of the “expansion of life horizons” ushered in by modernity to the country’s colonial expansion.60 Indeed, Pagano’s orientation toward the South linked the experience of tourism to the colonial impetus of the country’s civilizing mission.

Reflecting both Pagano’s interest in rural architectures and Ponti’s interest in Italian tourism, Domus presented a series of projects for small houses—model outposts from which to explore the “alive and beautiful” country that tourism was to reframe. The first of these, authored by Pagano, was presented as inspired by vernacular architectures but, lacking specific typological or technical references to a particular regional heritage, it was supposedly “adapted to the contemporary taste” (Figure 5.6).61 The house was presented with thoroughly detailed documentation including plans and sections, construction details, and even a budget of up to 120,000 lire. The project was presented by Ponti as an example of the “pride in modesty” that characterized Pagano’s interest in rural architecture, even if the budget would have been astronomically out of the reach of a family of rural workers and the house lacked any specific typological or technical reference to a particular rural model.62 As Pagano saw it, rural architectures also embodied “rather than stylistic trickery, an absolute honesty corresponding to the needs of rural life, simple and yet arduous,” yet this house seemed to address a less than arduous way of life, being more clearly conceived as a weekend retreat for urbanites, and specifically a small family with children and attendant domestic service.63 In fact, modernist architects mirrored the attitudes of the regime, which never matched its attention to the rural areas with an interest in the values or lifestyles of rural populations.64 Even more, the interest in vernacular architecture, disengaged from rural inhabitants, was mobilized for a reclamation of the territory that was enacted in parallel to the regime’s bonifica by well-off tourists.65

Figure 5.6. Giuseppe Pagano, sketch of a rural house. Domus 108 (December 1936).

The Mediterranean of Tourism

The Mediterranean was a privileged area of speculation in architects’ engagements with the diverse territories and architectures of Italy. An early manifestation of this engagement, unfolding in parallel with Giovannoni’s and Piacentini’s valorization of vernacular building traditions, was the Futurists’ fascination with the architectural heritage of the Amalfi coast and Capri, which preceded the centrality of the island in many modernist architects’ imaginations.66 Futurist architect and scenographer Virgilio Marchi, notably, published a number of projects inspired by the complex fabric of buildings on the island (Figure 5.7).67 Although an attention to heritage seemed to run counter to the group’s radical modernist stance and its calls for rupture, the Futurists justified it by an understanding of the island’s architectures as a challenge to classical order.68

Figure 5.7. Book cover of Virgilio Marchi, Architettura Futurista, 1924. Copyright Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli Bologna.

Figure Description

The image includes a title, in Italian, which reads, "Futurist Architecture." Text additionally identifies the author as “Virgilio Marchi” and “Franco Campitelli, Editor—Foligno.”

And yet the Mediterranean was also a central referent for those who sought to root the country’s national culture in classical past and its Latin heritage (linked to its classicità and its latinità), including both Novecento architects and even the rationalists, such as the members of Gruppo 7.69 These links manifested in formal and typological references such as the patio house, which some saw as a Roman typology particularly associated with Pompeii, and others as a vernacular architecture distributed more widely along the Italian coast, and formed the basis of modern reinterpretations in both camps (Plate 10). Among the most prominent voices embracing the Mediterranean as a way of grounding international modernist trends were Carlo Enrico Rava, with his appeal to the “Mediterranean spirit” of Italian modern architecture, and Luigi Figini, with his framing of a “Mediterranean polemic.”70 Each deployed this characterization in different ways, Figini being more aligned with the Corbusian formalism that defined the stricter rationalists, and Rava more directly inspired by the minor architectures that he suggested as a means of defusing the rigidity of that very program.71 For both men, this territorial reference helped to articulate a distinctly Italian version of modern architecture that accorded with the nationalist politics of the period—an emphasis that Enrico Perressuti captured in his challenge to modernist trends that “lacked the life, lacked the language, lacked the singing of the Mediterranean.”72

Beyond its role as a referent, the Mediterranean also provided the actual context for many projects developed by diverse modernist groups. At the V Milano Triennale of 1933, for example, proposals for holiday homes by BBPR with Piero Portaluppi, Giuseppe Terragni with the Como Group, and Enrico Griffini, Piero Bottoni, and Eugenio Faludi, pursued what Ponti celebrated as an engagement with “the sun, air, water, light, and movement” as well as “hygiene, travel, running, sports, mountain climbing, sailing, driving, and with contemporary lighter clothing.” In this case, the Mediterranean was linked to new attitudes toward leisure and the health of the population that were promoted by fascism and which materialized in the design of outposts to “receive a solar education to enliven our skin and our muscles” (Figure 5.8).73

Figure 5.8. Enrico Griffini, Piero Bottoni, and Eugenio Faludi, Holiday House by the Sea, V Milan Triennale, 1933. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

In the same way that the Mediterranean helped attune modern architecture in Italy to the ideological demands of the regime, it was also central to the articulation of an agenda for the architecture of Italy’s colonies, and in particular its “fourth shore,” as the occupied territories of Libya were called. This role was developed both through his writings and through built works such as the hotel at Leptis Magna on the Libyan coast, designed with Sebastiano Larco in 1929, which was contemporaneously praised “for being completely integrated in the Mediterranean landscape.”74 This stylistic continuity guaranteed a reassuringly familiar context for Italians traveling beyond the peninsula and was also understood through an expansionist lens, enacting what Rava presented as the desire “to reaffirm, in the colonies, the stylistic dominion of Imperial Rome.”75 Luigi Piccinato’s Colonial House at the V Milan Triennale brought together different tendencies of the period, linking the patio house as a Mediterranean and classical typology with a modern interpretation of the architectural traditions of the Italian colonies.

Throughout, the Mediterranean was treated as a malleable reality that could be mobilized for different political programs. And yet as the emphases of fascism changed throughout the 1930s, the alliances between architecture and politics mediated by the sea could no longer be taken for granted. Indeed, as Mussolini’s Italy became more closely aligned with the Nazi regime and its pursuit of racial purity, the complex context provided by the Mediterranean became a more contested referent for Italian architects.76 But it was at this moment that Ponti expanded this engagement, not only through his design projects but also through his editorial work, first in Domus and then in Lo Stile—an example of the broader role of the media in “the mythographic construction” of the Mediterranean that other scholars have addressed.77 While Domus provided a platform for both Rava’s and Figini’s arguments regarding the Mediterranean character of modern architecture earlier in the decade, Ponti’s focus toward the end of the 1930s increasingly addressed the Mediterranean in relation to tourism.

The Mediterranean coast was, in fact, the context for the second in the series of houses that Ponti presented as models for engaging with the Italian territory, following his “Invitation to Tourism.” This time, Ponti turned to the Neapolitan architect Luigi Cosenza and the Moravian-born Jewish architect Bernard Rudofsky as the authors of this project.78 If Ponti had trusted Pagano’s expertise to provide his readers with an initial perspective of the country’s rural territories, Rudofsky would help him develop an approach to the Mediterranean beyond this specific project.79 Educated at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, Rudofsky had trained as a young architect in Berlin before traveling in 1932 to Italy, where he would live, moving from Capri to Naples, Procida, and then Positano before feeling compelled to emigrate in 1938 following the regime’s increasingly antisemitic stances, including the racial laws.80

Capri, Rudofsky’s first destination, had been a magnet not just for tourists but for European artists and architects since the mid-nineteenth century, with its unique coastal landscapes and its sculptural villages adapted to the abrupt topography.81 Edwin Cerio, writer, engineer, and mayor of Capri from 1920 to 1923, would play a crucial role in raising the profile of the island and drawing attention to its built and natural heritage.82 Tourism was central to his concerns, as he sought to respond to the increasing number of holiday villas and hotels built without consideration for the island’s distinctive character. The houses that he designed himself, by contrast, drew on local formal and technical traditions, incorporating vaulted roofs and unornamented volumes (Figure 5.9).83 Other experts emphasized the positive contribution that visitors had made to the island’s built heritage, among them landscape designer Maria Teresa Parpagliolo, daughter of Luigi Parpagliolo, a collaborator of Cerio and vice-director of the Commission of Antiquity and Fine Arts at the Ministry of Education.84 Writing in Domus, she argued that “the origin of many of our grandest classical villas [on the island] is to be found in the bourgeois habit of leaving the city in the warmest months to retreat [. . .] to more pleasant surroundings where the family enjoyed a simple life, full of rural occupations.”85 While linked to bourgeois travel, she found in this tradition the values that Pagano promoted in rural architectures and that modern architects sought to embrace in their challenge to the very bourgeoisie: “Not luxury, but comfort and well-being.”86

Figure 5.9. Edwin Cerio, perspective drawing of Il Rosaio, Anacapri, 1911. Giuseppe Capponi, “Architettura ed accademia a Capri—Il ‘Rosaio’ di Edwin Cerio,” Architettura e Arti Decorative IX, 1.4 (December 1929).

Rudofsky’s and Cosenza’s house was designed for the Amalfi coast and was at the core of these debates. Published under the catch-all title of “A House for Positano and . . . Other Shores,” it was conceived as an “ideal” house for an “imaginary friend” and was documented in detail in order to make its realization more plausible for prospective clients.87 The structure was made up of a pair of two-story volumes, one rendered white and the other with exposed masonry, flanking a partially covered patio weaving together interior and exterior spaces. Though it lacked the specificity of Cerio’s engagement with local vernaculars, the house was integrated into the steep landscapes of the region and drew generically on Mediterranean architectures in order to contribute to the reimagining of the vocabulary of modernism (Figure 5.10). And yet, also significant to its contextualization was the budget that accompanied the project, which reached to 35,000 lire, including the purchase of the site. While smaller than that designed by Pagano, this was still a substantial amount for local inhabitants, and the relatively low portion of the budget assigned to the land (3,000 lire) suggests a sharper disjunction between the architecture and its context. It presents the project, which was supposed to celebrate its location, as a bolt-hole for city-dwellers: “An honest dwelling for the pure and blessed evasion of urban concerns.”88 The southern Italian coasts offered more than a formal repertoire for modernist architects: they were also a source of affordable investment opportunities for urban populations and a complementary setting to unleash from the pressures of modernization.

Figure 5.10. Bernard Rudofsky and Luigi Cosenza, collage of Villa in Positano, 1937. Domus 109 (January 1937). Copyright 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bildrecht, Vienna.

Cosenza and Rudofsky designed another house for the Amalfi coast, this time in Posillipo, just outside Naples.89 With its white abstract volumes and large open terraces, the building’s sequence of interior and exterior spaces was carefully adapted to the steep coastal topography, just like in their model project. A series of photographs underscored the house’s abstract presence in the landscape in continuity with the romanticized vision of the Italian coastal heritage; its white-rendered surfaces were populated with figures all dressed in white. The interiors, in turn, were offset by the patterned upholstery of the furniture pieces and a selection of finishes that emphasized texture and materiality—with matching people in similarly patterned clothing (Figure 5.11).

Figure 5.11. Bernard Rudofsky and Luigi Cosenza, Villa in Posillipo, 1937. Domus 120 (December 1937). Copyright 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bildrecht, Vienna.

Reflecting on the project’s relation to its context, Ponti lamented that this “most beautiful example of a modern villa” could not be seen as “evidence” of a larger architectural scene in the region: “The profession of the architect, the ‘task’ (compito) of the architect, is not yet known in Naples, even if there are exceptional men such as [Marcello] Canino and an architecture school directed by [Alberto] Calza Bini in which Canino and, I think, Ceas both teach.”90 Even if acknowledging architects such as Calza Bini (a modernist architect close to Piacentini and to the regime’s structures) and the architecture faculty in Naples (founded in 1927 as the oldest in the country), Ponti’s understanding that the region lacked an architectural scene is significant given that it categorically differentiated the remarkable built patrimony of the region from the products of the modern architecture profession. Consequently, rather than seeking to enhance the local knowledge that engendered this patrimony, this statement presented it as a model for modern (and northern) architects to draw on, with a displacement of expertise and agency characteristic of modern coloniality, whereby the assumption of hegemony over knowledge accompanies the spatial appropriation of territory.91

Following the publication of these projects, Rudofsky would become a significant contributor to Domus, helping to shape the imaginary of the Mediterranean.92 Using the photo essay as one of his main tools, just as Pagano had done for rural architecture, he published articles on the islands of Procida in Italy and Santorini in Greece (Figure 5.12).93 And, similar to Pagano, his photographs privileged the description of a formal repertoire, accompanied by brief reflections on technologies and typologies but consistently detached from their social milieu.94 Rudofsky, in fact, highlighted the effective appropriation of these architectures, describing “Mediterranean architecture as a precursor of modern architecture” and, by extension, “modern architecture as Mediterranean.”95 And for him, magazines had an important role to play in shaping the “delicious image of these ingenious constructions” and cultivating “the dream of an ambitious client” for these simple architectures.96

Figure 5.12. Bernard Rudofsky, photograph of Procida included in “The discovery of an island,” Domus 123 (March 1938). Copyright 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bildrecht, Vienna.

Rudofsky would develop one more project in this context, a house in Procida for his wife, Berta Doctor. This time, the design was not so clearly linked to the coastal landscape, but was rather placed in an unspecified location in the island’s interior. Defined around a central patio, the project differently drew on the more generic model of the Pompeian patio house or domus (Plate 11).97 In some respects, the typology resonated with Ponti’s earlier speculative projects for vacation houses, which sought a “typical” solution suitable for reproduction. In a similar fashion, Rudofsky’s courtyard house was only generically related to its site and remained, as Felicity Scott has argued, “ideally suited to a non-site-specific repetition.”98 However, Ponti’s variations of the patio house, with their free elaboration of the domus typology and language of classical architecture, were part of a drive to define a new (Italian) “tradition” that could ideologically ground the modernist ethos of fascism in the local context.99 By contrast, Rudofsky’s project, with its ambivalent relation to its location, was seemingly less concerned with this ideological grounding. Indeed, while Rudofsky’s description of the project outlined daily activities and use patterns in relation to classical Rome, it was in pursuit of “a new way of living” that he presented as a challenge to social prejudices and architectural norms.100 And while it outlined a new form of sensuality particularly focused on the contact with the material ground—articulated through domestic devices, furniture items, and the use of materials and textures—it was framed in dialogue with his understanding of transience as a condition of the ways of life that he deemed characteristic of modernity.101

Rudofsky, in fact, used the pages of Domus to unfold a critical approach to transience as it was fueled both by new means of communication and by contemporary war technologies. In his view, the city was doomed to become a “historical curiosity,” and the “sedentary man” would soon give way to “a mode of life in continuous movement.”102 Rudofsky himself seemed to be in continuous movement. His personal experience informed his framing of Procida as a place where “artists will find new sensations, architects revelations, the gourmet the best produce of the season, and lovers a refuge”—a landscape made available for the temporary consumption of transient populations.103 Paradoxically, these were some of the last reflections he published in Italy before leaving the country, going first to Geneva and then to Latin America. And while Rudofsky’s embrace of transience departed from the mobilization of the Mediterranean as a grounding reference for modern architecture in the service of the regime’s identity politics and explicitly framed against the exploitative outlook of tourists (“tourists, cruisers, snobs, will do well to forget the name of Procida”)104—it was embedded within the logics of the developing tourist industry in Italy and its architectures.

“Italian Problems of Dwelling by the Sea”

The tensions between the Mediterranean as a context for identity negotiations and its appropriation in service of tourism underlay Ponti’s work on architectures for vacation in the last years of the fascist era, as Italy advanced toward the war. A manifesto-like text published in Domus in 1940, “Italian Problems of Dwelling by the Sea,” brought these tensions to the fore by appropriating the seaside for summer enjoyment and disregarding the needs of local populations, even while its architectures were framed as a problem of “integration.”105 The architectural solution to this problem, in Ponti’s mind, was none other than the model of the casa colonica, which he thought could be made to adapt in a “natural” way to the coastal territories, “since they are a pure and simple manifestation of the natural fact of habitation.”106 Framed as “an architects’ campaign to save our shores from the assaults of silly and pretentious architecture,” the works that Ponti designed and promoted were nonetheless involved in the exploitation of Italy’s coast and the well-established territorial hierarchies of Italian nationalism.107

Ponti’s main built contribution to this coastal project during this period was the house in Bordighera. Combining diverse references borrowed from Mediterranean architecture, it was an evolution of the patio house previously rehearsed in his series of model vacation houses. While a U-shaped floorplan can be traced in all of Ponti’s development sketches, the traditional courtyard was ultimately replaced by a central living area with smaller rooms, open terraces, and porticos arranged around it. Large doors and windows facing the sea connect the house with the landscape, creating paths and crossed visuals that Ponti carefully studied in his drawings (Figures 5.13 and 5.14).

Figure 5.13. Gio Ponti, floor plan of Villa Marchesano, Bordighera, 1938. Domus 138 (June 1939). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 5.14. Gio Ponti, Villa Marchesano, Bordighera, 1938. Domus 138 (June 1939). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure Description

Arrows are accompanied by text, in Italian, which reads: "View towards the sea."

Though the project was later published in Lo Stile as part of his 1941 call for a “National Consciousness on Mediterranean Architecture,” Ponti first presented this house two years earlier in Domus, alongside two speculative projects also concerned with summer vacations: “A small ideal house” and “A proposal for a house by the sea.”108 The projects were contextualized in a generic Mediterranean landscape (“between palm trees and pines, or olive trees”) and presented as transposable to various locations. Ponti envisaged them in Versilia, Dalmatia, Elba, or along the points of the Gulf of Naples that had been explored by Rudofsky: “Capri? Procida? Ischia? Positano?”109 The more significant project, the “small ideal house,” brings together three different volumes arranged around a front patio, with a series of paths and visual connections weaving again the different spaces into the landscape. Both in the floor plans and in a sequence of perspectival views, the thick white walls defining the architecture are seemingly represented as if preceding the project, halfway between a neo-vernacular architecture and a natural formation (Figure 5.15). As Ponti would put it, the aim was to suggest an architecture pre-existing in the landscape: “The house [. . .] should be [built] in a way that seems to have always been there; it should be like a natural element in the landscape.”110

Figure 5.15. Gio Ponti, floor plan of the Small Ideal House, 1939. Domus 138 (June 1939). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

This naturalized architectural framework contrasted with a distinct emphasis on the interior finishes and occupation of the projects. In Bordighera, as in the Rudofsky and Cosenza project, the whiteness and abstraction of this architectural framework were offset by the colorful diversity of the interiors, with ceramic tile floors and colorful patterned furnishings. While the house was notably presented as “born from an inspiration of the place,” its colorful furnishings seemed to suggest something different.111 In fact, while they matched the colorfulness of diverse vernacular costumes and textiles in Italy, they lacked any recognizable ornamental reference to those. Similar strategies are applied to the representation of the “ideal house,” with perspectives of the interior characterized by the use of bright colors and printed types and symbols, highlighting the artificiality of this loaded visual landscape in contrast to the natural environment and the architectural framework on the one hand, and vernacular cultural motifs on the other. The people we see roaming the interiors similarly wear colorful clothes that match the patterns of the furniture and ornamentation rather than their natural surroundings or the local folklore of any particular location—seemingly set apart from the rural populations that Mussolini defined as being “desperately attached to their native land” (Plate 12).112

Similar drawings were included by Ponti in an issue devoted to “Summer” in the publication Aria d’Italia—a short-lived culture magazine edited by French-born art historian and collector Daria Guarnati, who became one of his interlocutors after she relocated to Milan.113 These drawings depicted a number of beach scenes rather than interiors, but they similarly show people dressed in colorful costumes with diverse symbols and markings matching their furnishings and belongings.114 They seem disconnected from the natural landscape, with the letterings used to ornament the costumes enhancing this detachment given the high levels of illiteracy in rural Italy at the time and the connection between illiteracy and land inequity that was characteristic of the country.115 Far from engaging the “ruralization” of the country, these transient figures seemingly impose their presence on the landscape, with these drawings suggesting that the naturalization and nationalization of Mediterranean architecture was to facilitate temporary territorial appropriations (Plate 13).

National Hotel Architectures

These buildings and design speculations unfolded alongside Ponti’s more explicit embrace of the state’s efforts to intervene in the tourist industry. Ponti devoted attention to the regime’s development of summer camps or colonie, with their radical modernist aesthetics and experimental typologies supporting the state’s nationalization of children.116 In Ponti’s view, these architectures were frequently “imperfect and detrimental” to the landscape, rather than being “happily part of [it].”117 In fact, Ponti’s pursuit of “integration” not only applied to small vacation houses but was also apparent in his designs for collective infrastructures, including hotels, joining others that had questioned new hotels as impinging on the landscape, developed in such a way that “neither the landscape nor the population knows how to adapt [to them].”118

A large number of new hotels were built throughout the period, and Ponti saw them as a necessary component of a systematic national plan for the development of tourism.119 In this, he aligned himself with the regime’s goals with the creation, in 1939, of the Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche ed Alberghiere (ENITEA, National agency for the tourist and hotel industries).120 The agency, which only remained active until 1941, oversaw the construction and management of hotels, provided consulting assistance for hotel owners and managers, and acquired and managed other facilities of particular interest—those that inspired “political or national pride.”121 Hotel architecture at the time varied greatly from region to region of the country, as it often incorporated construction techniques, spatial features, or aesthetic motifs from local domestic vernaculars, even if these were applied to larger-scale typologies that were unknown to many of these regions. Supporting this contextualization, ENITEA sought to sponsor proposals that would be “in tune with the environment from which the building should emerge, with only minimal innovations in matters of lighting and lifts.”122 Ponti saw himself as a key ally of this new institution and its outlook and wanted publications like the one he managed to play a “propagandistic” role, supporting the regime’s quest to define a national hotel architecture.123 Beyond Ponti, a whole section of the 1940 VII Milan Triennale was devoted to hotels and showcased the contribution that architects could make to this aspect of the regime’s touristic agenda.

Some of Ponti’s own projects aligned with this pursuit for contextualization, which was clear for example in his Albergo Paradiso del Cevedale in Val Martello (1935), whose exterior appearance was grounded in generic models of regional alpine architecture. This approach was often combined with a pursuit of diversity and individualization in hotel rooms, which mediated the larger scale of the infrastructure with the bourgeois emphasis on individuality.124 In Val Martello, the definition of interiors used diverse colored patterns that simultaneously mediated the scale of the room with that of the hotel infrastructure while negotiating the temporary nature of the tourist stays with the contextualization of the building within the surrounding environment, just as in his houses for seaside vacations (Figures 5.16 and 5.17).125 Different strategies for hotel rooms in different projects included the use of terraces as individual outdoor landscapes, as in the hotel Ponti designed with Guglielmo Ulrich for the Lido in Venice (1937), or the customizable furnishings developed for a hotel on the coast close to Rome (1942) that he envisioned would be developed by ENITEA.126

Figure 5.16. Gio Ponti, Albergo Paradiso del Cevedale, Val Martello, 1935, exterior and interior photographs. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 5.17. Gio Ponti, color studies for the Albergo Paradiso del Cevedale, 1935. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure Description

Handwritten text in Italian reads: “Four colors for the tourists. Solid Colors.”

Ponti’s most significant hotel project during this period, however, was not developed in direct collaboration with the regime but in partnership with Rudofsky, before the latter’s departure from Italy: the Albergo di San Michele. Here, a number of small different units were dispersed throughout the landscape around a larger central structure. Each was emphatically grounded in the surrounding landscape, with connections that were materially consolidated through the continuity of the paving extending outward and rock formations penetrating the interior. Conceived for a site between Capri and Anacapri, the project was described as uniquely linked to the island: “The question of hotels in Capri is how to locate in Capri a hotel that is a new attraction for Capri, and which is extremely, even exclusively, Caprese.”127 The use of vernacular vaulted ceilings, even if manifesting only in the interior of the units, provided further evidence of this formal contextualization, even if the external volumes were defined as generic cubic forms, in line with the modernization and nationalization of vernacular Mediterranean typologies characteristic of other contemporaneous projects (Figures 5.18 and 5.19). As a matter of fact, while the project allegedly explored an “exclusively Caprese” architecture, both its strategy and its formal features were mirrored in another hotel project for Cap d’Antibes that Ponti proposed in 1938. The drawings of both projects continue to represent the occupation of the project as detached from its architecture, building on the emphasis of previous explorations. Though the architecture is integrated into the landscape, furnishings are shown as autonomous elements—their detachment emphasized by the lack of perspectival cohesion producing more distance than “integration” (Plate 14).128 But Ponti’s specific approach to the hotel’s site was further manifested, in this case, in the rigorous geographical precision with which the landscape setting is represented. Indeed, the project could be seen as a pendant to the practice of geography, as a form of territorial control: an outpost from which to oversee the territory that tourism was to exploit. Reinforcing this understanding, Ponti presented the figure of the hotel owner as “a noble man who governs the region,” a facilitator for the transient territorial appropriations (Plate 15).129

Figure 5.18. Gio Ponti and Bernard Rudofsky, general perspective of Albergo di San Michele, Capri, 1938. Lo Stile 8 (August 1941). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure 5.19. Gio Ponti and Bernard Rudofsky, floor plan and section of the Black Wall Room, Albergo di San Michele, Capri, 1938. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Those logics of territorial appropriation enacted by tourism were especially apparent in the strategic plan for the touristic exploitation of Elba (the so-called “Capri del Nord”) developed by BBPR and presented at the 1940 Triennale alongside the exhibition on hotel infrastructures.130 The BBPR team produced a detailed study of the island encompassing its natural environment and its socioeconomic reality, both of which the plan sought to respect. Indeed, BBPR member Ernesto Nathan Rogers was critical of the “bourgeois” and “liberal” exploitation of Italian coastal sites and saw the strategic plan as a means to counter this exploitation by unfolding a series of coordinated operations under the auspices of the regime.131 And yet their project located Elba within an international network of tourist destinations inclusive of Capri and Ischia as well as other locations submitted to different forms of colonization, such as Pasqua, Bali, and Manila. It also presented the island’s heritage along other practices and entertainments embraced by colonists, ranging from dancing indigenous women to sports such as golf (Figure 5.20). In fact, if the island was offered up for “the civil enjoyment of all the beauties and pleasures of this, our Country,” as Ponti put it, this enjoyment was distributed in an unequal way.132 While Bertarelli had imagined tourism unfolding as a play in which all Italians were actors and spectators alike (in an idealized version of inclusive nationalism), the architectures of tourism seemingly made a distinction between those who would both manage the play and would be entertained—the masters of “this, our Country”—and those who had to perform in order for the tourist play to work.

Figure 5.20. BBPR, Tourism plan for Elba Island, VII Milan Triennale, 1940. Copyright Triennale Milano—Archivi.

Furnishing Impermanence in the Italian Landscape

In spite of the development of some systematic proposals, most tourist developments continued to manifest throughout the war in the construction of small vacation homes that appealed to the aspirations of the middle classes and urban elites.133 Although Ponti saw the simplicity of these projects as a counter to the ostentations of the bourgeoisie, they nevertheless extended into other socioeconomic strata the forms of territorial exploitation of this very group. Forms inspired by the masses of compact villages were transformed into isolated houses for summer vacations in a particular version of architectural contextualization—one in which the landscape was interiorized for private enjoyment and transient occupation.134 And while these proposals offered an alternative to the construction of hotels, which were seen as more obtrusive in the landscape, they still had a major impact on the management of resources and the economies of host locations.

The enmeshing of vacation homes within the landscape in many of these developments was matched by a growing interest in the design of gardens and landscape architecture. Cerio’s studies of the architecture of Capri had already highlighted the importance of gardens, which along with houses “complete the work of nature, giving the landscape the peculiar imprint of the culture and taste of a people, the extent of its culture (civiltà), the expression of its character.”135 Landscape was, in these arguments, a strategy of localization, not only environmental but also cultural—associated with the community to which it gives expression. From the 1930s on, figures such as Maria Teresa Parpagliolo shaped the modern profession of landscape design in Italy and contributed to its dissemination with articles like those she included in Domus.136 Just like Italian architecture at the time, Parpagliolo’s work brought together different traditions, but she paid particular attention to rural practices and coastal locations, designing gardens in Capri that, according to Sonja Dümpelmann, acted as “prototypes for a regional Italian country garden, the ‘giardino rustico italiano.’”137 Incorporating local vegetation, these designs were aligned with the naturalization of coastal architectures that characterized Ponti’s projects.

In addition to Parpagliolo, Domus also promoted the work of young architects Carlo Pagani and Lina Bo as “specialists in matters of the garden.”138 The couple’s work in this field reflected the shifting emphases that Ponti sponsored in architecture, leaving behind the classical formal garden and defining an approach that accommodated native plants along with structures inspired by rural architecture. Significantly, this was accompanied by a new interest in what an article dedicated to the couple defined as “rustic” furnishings. In fact, beyond gardens Pagani and Bo would become significant contributors to Ponti’s project for coastal architectures and their furnishings throughout the war period. Pagani was born into a well-connected Milanese family in 1913, and studied under Ponti at the Milan Polytechnic before transferring to the architecture faculty in Rome for his final year.139 In turn Bo (who would be known as Lina Bo Bardi after her marriage to critic and gallerist Pietro Maria Bardi) was born in Rome in 1914 to a working-class family. She inherited her interest in the arts partly from her father, Enrico, and initially studied fine arts before enrolling in the architecture faculty in Rome, where she was a student of Piacentini.140 It was here that she met Pagani, who graduated one year ahead of her. After completing their studies, the pair would relocate to Milan, Pagani working directly with Ponti for Domus and Bo collaborating as a freelancer with her projects and illustrations. Bo and Pagani also worked on their own projects in their shared studio, often aligning with Ponti’s own endeavors: their “House by the Sea in Sicily,” for example, was published in Domus alongside Ponti’s manifesto text “Italian Problems of Dwelling by the Sea.”141 With its clearly outlined patio house typology and its ambition to “become landscape” (as the architects put it), the project brought together many of the emphases articulated in the magazine. Nevertheless, its constructed Mediterranean landscape evoked diverse geographies beyond Italian myths, including “African flowers” as much as local olive trees, maintaining a certain territorial and political ambiguity vis-à-vis other elements in Domus that were more clearly aligned with the nationalist impetus of the regime (Figure 5.21). “Dwelling by the sea” increasingly became an area of contested politics involving multiple voices across different areas of expertise and different generations.

Figure 5.21. Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, garden designs, 1940. Domus 156 (December 1940). Copyright Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

Furnishing of gardens and vacation architectures became increasingly central to the pursuits of these different actors, with pieces characterized by the use of light materials, hard-wearing finishes, and ease of transportation.142 The furniture brand Casa e Giardino (distributed by La Rinascente from the mid-1930s on) was targeted at this new market: Ponti’s famous chair, Sedia a volute, with its doodle backrest, featured in the brand’s first collection.143 Domus briefly sported a new subtitle, L’arte nella casa e nel giardino (Art in the house and the garden), that acknowledged the relevance of this shift in its approach to furnishing.144 The pieces associated with this new trend incorporated features and materials linked to popular crafts and different regional traditions, even if these were frequently reworked and decontextualized, as shown by examples such as Ponti’s Fireside chair for Casa e Giardino, with its woven rush seat framed by extremely large, seemingly distorted, traditional backrest (Figure 5.22).145

Figure 5.22. Gio Ponti, Fireside chair produced by Casa e Giardino, circa 1937 (contemporary reconstruction). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Different institutions such as the Federation of Italian Craftsmanship, the Crafts Market and Exhibition in Florence, and ENAPI pushed the shift toward local crafts and materials, a move that also reflected the regime’s autarkic regulations and the sanctions imposed on Italy by the League of Nations, both of which severely curtailed imports of materials.146 Not limited to rural or vacation settings, this emphasis on the local also filtered into the furnishing of urban interiors, often hybridized with diverse impetuses. Consider, for example, a storage unit designed by Franco Albini, made of cane but supported on an extremely light and abstract steel structure, or the Casa e Giardino furnishings in Ponti’s own Casa M in Milano, which included a wicker armchair and a cane low chair on wheels, in tune with the collection’s preference for light and movable pieces (Figure 5.23).147 And while many of these hybridizations had permeated modernist designs throughout the whole interwar period, they gained relevance as an expression of Mussolini’s increasingly more aggressive rejection of bourgeois values, including his reform of customs of 1938.148

Figure 5.23. Gio Ponti, Casa e Giardino furniture in Casa M, Milano, 1939. Domus 144 (December 1939). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Portability was an emphasis shared by garden furnishing and the equipment designed for colonial endeavors discussed in the previous chapter.149 Indeed, the pieces that Rava promoted around this time for the colonies were seen to embody an “anti-exotic character” that he also defined as “Mediterranean and, one could even say, ‘homegrown.’” These qualities, Rava argued, made them “extremely suitable, even in Italy,” for other territories of transience: “For rural life and weekend cottages, as well as for all types of homes in the countryside or even simple townhouses.”150 The focus of the discourse of furnishing shifted, in this new context, from the coordination of the various elements to the management of the characteristically mobile objects of tourism, recognizing the contingent definition and temporary nature of this territorial occupation.151

While Domus provided Ponti with a significant platform to develop this project, alongside his comprehensive program for the Italian house, he would leave the magazine at the end of 1940 in order to launch a new title, Lo Stile nella casa e nell’arredamento.152 Carlo Pagani served as editor in chief from May 1941 to 1943, gaining increasing prominence with this new editorial endeavor. Published without interruption throughout and after the war until 1947, when Ponti returned to Domus, the magazine made a clear attempt to appeal to audiences beyond architecture, with color illustrations playing a central role thanks to the spread of new technologies for color photography and printing.153 At the same time, it maintained the focus of Ponti’s original editorial project: interiors ranging from BBPR to Carlo Mollino, discussions of summer houses and vacation occupations, and Rava’s articles on furnishing for film were all published in Lo Stile. As construction tailed off following Italy’s entry into World War II, the pages showed more speculative projects and smaller-scale interventions, from furnishings to interior renovations. The continuity with Ponti’s previous editorial project was emphasized by the opening article in the very first issue of the magazine, which declared its interest in everything that touched on “the rapport, concrete and essential, true as history, between art and life.”154 The author, Giuseppe Bottai, was a journalist and minister in the National Fascist Party—hence his insistence that this rapport needed to be addressed “with an awareness of the inevitable participation of our individuality in a collective history, which all activities resolve in the unity of the spirit.”

The contributions of Bo and Pagani played an important role in defining Lo Stile’s approach to furniture and interiors and, more particularly, the way that it addressed vacation landscapes and their occupation. Their drawings and ideas, for example, illustrated “The Service of Stile: Advice on Arredamento,” and matched others that they developed for other journals such as fashion magazine Linda (later Bellezza) or the women’s publication Grazia, among others (Plate 16).155 Their increasingly personal style was characterized by a “freshness” (their word), evident in quick and colorful watercolors and sketches in primarily pastel tones.156 The young couple’s drawings and projects presented “typical” furnishing solutions for rural and coastal settings while increasingly relying on economical and effective ways of transforming architecture (due to the difficult conditions throughout the war). Mainly framed as simple and practical recommendations, their articles addressed “terraces in the city,” “summer linings,” “summer windows and balconies,” and “tents and cabins,” either at the beach or in the forest.157 Like previous explorations, many of these furnishings and temporary architectures learned from regional traditions and local crafts, including a particular emphasis on textiles (Plate 17). At the same time, some articles offered advice on “updating” old furniture “from the provinces”—as a significant material operation of appropriation matching the territorial expansion enabled by tourism (Figure 5.24).158 And building on Ponti’s collaboration with Casa e Giardino, Pagani’s and Bo’s speculative proposals chimed with the growing commercial interest in furnishing outdoor locations (Figure 5.25).159

Figure 5.24. Carlo Pagani and Lina Bo, strategies to update old furnishings (above) and types of protections for windows and balconies (below), 1941. Lo Stile 7 (July 1941). Copyright Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

Figure 5.25. “Furniture for the countryside and the sea.” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Shifting Territories and Politics

The entanglement of the architectures of tourism with diverse processes of expansion and appropriation became more contentious as the war advanced, a situation crystallized in a special issue of Lo Stile in August 1941 devoted to the Dalmatian coast, where Italy had recently annexed large swaths of territory. The neighboring territories of the Albanian coast, an Italian protectorate since 1939, were also a key target of efforts to boost Italian tourism, included within the remit of ENITEA.160 Tourism allowed Ponti to align the magazine’s activities with other agencies and the broader efforts of the state. A series of articles, some of them penned by Ponti’s daughter Lisa, tackled the theme, while the issue also included examples of small houses and independent interventions for tourism authored by Ponti and Pagani, as was usual in features on the Mediterranean. But this time Ponti also offered proposals for hotels (opportunistically aligning himself with the efforts of ENITEA).161 The model was the one he had developed for the Albergo di San Michele alongside Rudofsky—a project earlier defined as “exclusively Caprese” and now presented as “perhaps also ideal for Dalmatia,” in a continuation of his practice of decontextualization and nationalization.162

While Ponti remained committed to the regime right up to Mussolini’s arrest in 1943, the politics of others involved with Lo Stile remained ambiguous.163 As late as 1942, Pagani and Bo might have collaborated with Pier Giacomo Castiglione on the War Poster exhibition around the Duomo in Milan and designed the accompanying display celebrating shearing: the project effectively joined the abstraction of modernist aesthetics with the rural agenda of the regime in celebration of Mussolini’s war.164 From 1943, however, as political tensions increased, Pagani and Bo began to cut ties with Lo Stile. Pagani would be drafted to battle in Corsica, while Bo stayed in Milan. In spite of her rebellious attitude, she initially remained close to both Ponti and to her former professor Piacentini.165 Her last article for Lo Stile would be a review of a housing project by Piccinato: she praised the architecture’s “pure beauty” and “clear simplicity” but criticized the inhabitants’ “choice of furniture and decoration,” echoing Ponti’s earlier frustration with the masses who resisted the renewal of Italian households and their modernization.166 By then, however, political differences were putting a strain on their relationship. “My work with Ponti is morally almost unbearable [. . .] and his superficiality makes me sick,” she wrote to Pagani.167

Both Bo and Pagani returned to Domus in January 1944 at the invitation of its publisher Gianni Mazzocchi. They would use that platform to continue to address—and in the process reorient—the relationship between architecture and the land that we have discussed in this chapter. And yet, rather than supporting the myths of modernism and fascism, this relationship was now grounded in “[t]he realistic investigation of the modern world [which] has brought architecture to focus on the relations between ground, climate, environment, and life”—relations that, Bo argued, had found their ultimate expression in “the most spontaneous forms of architecture: rural architecture.”168 The person who had led the quest to center rural architecture in modernist and fascist imaginations, Giuseppe Pagano, had by this time already turned against the fascist cause, as did Pagani. The former was, in fact, imprisoned and tortured after trying to join the resistance; he would die of pneumonia in 1945 in a concentration camp.169 The politics of rural architecture would be completely realigned to support the postwar project of realism.170 And yet, for close to a decade, the mobilization of vernacular architectures and the engagement with the rural territories did not only support fascist myths and a consistent effort toward the modernization of the country and its populations but also accompanied a strategy of cultural and territorial appropriation.171

Epilogue: A Swim in the Mediterranean

Through coordinated modes of intervention at the scales of furnishing and architecture, the Mediterranean territories were offered up as a homogenous landscape for temporary enjoyment and diverse forms of exploitation. Architecture was rooted in the landscape and furnishing was used as a mode of territorial appropriation. The landscape of Italy was repeatedly conceptualized by Ponti as constructed through architecture: “Half of it built by God and half by us.”172 The deployment of the architectures of tourism as a strategy of national consolidation was thus aligned with a divine operation, justifying its mandate in a way that suggests its alliance with the logics of internal colonization.

And yet, while the Mediterranean was mobilized as a territorialization of the Italian landscape and its built heritage for an increasingly unsettled nation, it also offered a referent that resisted any kind of grounding or stabilization. As the war went on and the country grew weary of established territorial imaginations, Ponti would come to understand architecture’s engagement with tourism and the Mediterranean as “an infrastructure of navigation.”173 He would present the sea as a liquid landscape that brought the population together: “The future of Italy is at the sea,” he argued, insisting on the need to “maritimize” Italians.174 Returning to the therapeutic properties associated with original forms of tourism, he proposed: “Life by the beach is healthy, but it is less hygienic and therapeutic than it is maritime: in leaving the city we say ‘let’s go for a swim,’ which is not the same as saying: ‘let’s go to the sea’ and in no way equivalent to saying: ‘let’s go on the sea.’”175 The Mediterranean provided a vehicle for cleansing, for dissolving previous identities, as Italy moved toward the postwar period. As Ian Chambers claims, “[t]o be at sea is to be lost, and to be in such a state is to be vulnerable to encounters we do not necessarily control.”176 Chambers himself referred to the Mediterranean’s “inconclusive suspension” to appeal to its challenge to national boundaries and identities (Plate 18).177

As the war continued, Ponti and Lo Stile reflected on, and responded to, the anxieties of the time. In place of the vacation houses, seemingly detached from material needs, the provision of housing “for all” and the development of urbanism would become more prominent in the magazine.178 Rather than enjoying the leisure associated with vacations, or the “comfort” that Ponti had deemed an essential characteristic of the Italian house when he launched Domus in 1928, the Italian population was now required to make “sacrifices.”179 Adalberto Libera’s series of articles, “Anatomia per arredatore,” addressed more practically the normalization of interiors.180 But some challenged the new direction: writing in 1944 in Corriere, Ojetti argued that Ponti (his former protégé) was using Lo Stile “against all styles, to build a nightmare, cube after cube.”181

Along with an emphasis on the material pressures of reconstruction came an expansion in the territorial imaginations that were engaged and an interest in collective constructions beyond that of the nation, with articles appealing to a “universal civilità.”182 Ponti reimagined some of his ideal projects on the shores of the Pacific Ocean,183 while Lina Bo physically relocated to Brazil after her marriage to Bardi in 1946. A new relationship between furnishing and architecture, politics, and the spaces and territories of residence was to be articulated in the postwar period. And yet the alignments and shifts between the interwar alliances and their rearticulation remains a subject for further exploration.

Conclusion

On the cover of Lo Stile in August 1943 was a small map of Italy held in a person’s hand (Figure C.1). After entering World War II in 1940 on the side of Nazi Germany, the country had faced defeat on different fronts, including the final surrender of the First Italian Army in North Africa in May 1943. Not long before that Lo Stile cover appeared, Allied forces had invaded Sicily on July 10; they bombed Rome for the first time on July 19. Less than a week after that, Mussolini was placed under arrest following a vote of no confidence by the Grand Council of Fascism. “Architecture, Art, Literature, Furnishing, House” were the declared spheres of interest of Ponti’s magazine, but the cover went further, directly addressing the collapse of the regime and the fragility of the social and political constructions that had provided a sense of consistency for Italians throughout the fascist era. A small text on the cover read: “It is as if this, our Italy, were a fragile thing in our hand, and we would keep it as one of our precious possessions. Faced with immense material and moral devastation, Italy has nothing more than its civiltà to save its civiltà.”1 The shared culture and values that had supposedly brought Italians together and represented their life in common had become, at that point, a mere tautological construction—one that could only be maintained by a process of replication.

Figure C.1. Gio Ponti, cover of Lo Stile 32-33-34 (August–September–October 1943). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure Description

The cover includes typed text for the magazine title, which reads, in Italian: “The Style. Architecture, Art, Letters, Furnishing, House. Director Arch. Gio Ponti.” Handwritten text in Italian reads: "Our Italy."

Furnishing, which had previously performed as both an expression for the shared values of Italian civiltà and an agent for shaping them, was now left as an ungrounded entity. As a matter of fact, the constitution of a unified and enclosed Italy and the normalization of its populations had oriented the project of furnishing as a technology of modernism—one that was not only concerned with the contingent arrangement of objects within interiors but also with the relations between those very objects with images, subjects, and locations that were disrupted by the logics of modernity and the processes of modernization. Through strategies of syncretism, articulation, simultaneity, expansion, and appropriation, furnishing had provided new strategies for the management of those relations. And in linking those strategies to the idealized values of Italian civiltà, it became a medium to advance the processes of national regeneration that led the project of fascism. Italians had been conceived as both a civilized population and a civilizing agent, with their furniture imagined to be spreading throughout the territories of the nation and the empire. Furnishing had been proposed to advance Mussolini’s goal of completing the project of the Risorgimento, “to make Italians.” After the collapse of the regime, Ponti’s cover appears to reframe this national project. More than just its population, it was now Italy itself that needed to be made anew: “We have Italians, now we have to make Italy” could have been the new motto.

While he remained committed to fascism until the fall of Mussolini, Ponti was highly attuned to the ideological shifts in those convulsive years. In June 1943, just a month before Mussolini’s arrest, he published a “Housing Charter” (coauthored with Adalberto Libera and Giuseppe Vaccaro) that addressed the need for mass housing to respect the “dignity” (dignità) of the inhabitants while providing a “home for everybody, or rather for each one.”2 Significantly, prefabrication was embraced for its potential not only to meet contemporary needs but also to disrupt prevailing methods of industrial production, which remained “indifferent to taste, culture, and technique.”3 For the architects, both housing and its furnishing continued to be a means of disseminating values that they understood would “reach the community [. . .] in the form of beauty.”4

By the conclusion of the war some two years later, Italy was devastated, with large swaths of its urban population left homeless. Architects moved quickly to address the urgent need for reconstruction while seeking to distance themselves from their participation in the politics of Mussolini’s regime. In January 1945, in advance of the war’s resolution, the cover of Ponti’s Lo Stile (now subtitled “Magazine for Reconstruction and for the House of Tomorrow”) again featured a hand, but this time it held a simple house facade, a reference to the program “A home for everybody” (Casa per tutti) (Figure C.2).5 Seen together with the 1943 cover, this seemed to suggest the house was a new framework for shared values and a key medium to the rebuilding of society. And far from being marginalized in the postwar period—overshadowed by more pressing concerns—the furnishing of this house remained central to the architectural discourse in the pursuit of material reconstruction.6

Figure C.2. Gio Ponti, cover of Lo Stile 49 (January 1945). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure Description

The magazine title for both covers reads, in Italian: "Domus. The Art in the House." The first one corresponds to October 1930 and has the additional subtitle "Monthly magazine directed by architect Gio Ponti." The second one corresponds to February 1937.

Ponti continued to play a key role in the new period, while Rava’s former centrality in the discourse faded. But the task of furnishing expanded beyond their sphere of influence and in disparate directions. Two exhibitions anticipated the issues facing designers in the wake of fascism. The first was organized by the newly constituted Reunione Italiana per le Mostre di Arredamento (RIMA, the Italian association for furnishing exhibitions). Titled “A Better House Means a Better Life,” it opened in 1946 at the Triennale’s Palazzo dell’Arte—the building’s fascist origins offering no apparent obstacle to the renewal of its role of promoting furnishing for a regenerated Italy under a different political regime. (The country was governed, until 1947, by a coalition of the Christian-Democratic Party and left-wing parties including the Communist Party). Preceding the first postwar Triennale, which was organized by Piero Bottoni and titled “A Home for Everybody,” the RIMA exhibition seemed to put the reconceptualization of furnishing before that of its architectural framework, just as in the previous era. The show featured pieces and ensembles by architects who had been central during the fascist years, including Figini and Pollini, alongside designs by a cadre of younger up-and-coming figures such as Carlo Pagani, Lina Bo, Ignazio Gardella, and Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, among others. It captured a set of trends that would characterize the period of reconstruction, combining the pursuit of “economy [and] practicality” with “good taste.”7 These paradigms were expressed through simple forms and readily available materials such as wood, as well as popular techniques inspired by local crafts. And while many of the projects reflected emphases already apparent in the previous era, they were now part of a search for a “new moral and political significance,” as Dennis Doordan has proposed with reference to the field of architecture more broadly.8

The discourse around the show seemed to maintain the understanding of furnishing as a way of intervening in the values of Italians. And yet, despite their references to local practices, Ernesto Nathan Rogers (newly returned to Italy after his wartime internment in Switzerland) suggested in his Domus review of the exhibition that the pieces on display lacked any form of grounding.9 Instead, he proposed, they were framed by the experience of “wandering”—an emphasis that was different from the expansionism of the fascist era, and was expressed in their defining quality of “precariousness,” whereby the fleetingness of modern temporalities was extended to the experience of space. Rogers even discerned an appeal to a “world devoid of transcendence,” far removed from fascism’s myth of the land.10 In this sense, the furnishings anticipated how architecture itself would soon turn toward a sensibility that many associate with “neorealism.”11 In fact, Rogers’s analysis was characteristic of a new search for redemption in the postwar period, one that Maristella Casciato has described as “a collective epic of a people struggling toward imminent social rebirth.”12 But it simultaneously grappled with where to ground this rebirth, in the absence of the common framework hitherto provided by the nation. Was it possible to justify a shared ethical agenda in the pieces’ lack of transcendence?

The second exhibition opened some years later, in 1950, and not in Italy but in the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Titled “Italy at Work,” and curated by Meyric R. Rogers, the show was a joint initiative of the Italian government and the United States Economic Cooperation Administration, capturing the new political landscape created by the ousting of the Communist Party from the Italian government and the transatlantic alliances characteristic of the Cold War.13 “Italy at Work” displayed a number of pieces that, in the words of the curator, spoke of a “surge of creative activity” after the war.14 Furnishings were presented alongside diverse examples of the decorative arts, many of them produced by manufacturers that had come to prominence in the interwar period such as Richard Ginori and Fontana d’Arte. Also on show were products testifying to the increasing importance of the field of industrial design, such as a Lambretta scooter and a calculator designed for Olivetti by Marcelo Nizzoli, both building on work developed throughout the fascist era. Finally, the exhibition also presented manifestations of craft that were seemingly unmediated by modernity, from straw work to metalwork, and were instead more directly connected with local traditions. A final component of the show was a selected number of furnished interiors, including a dining room by Ponti, a living room by Carlo Mollino, and a terrace by Luigi Cosenza, which showcased different relations to the diverse expressions of craft and industry in the exhibition.

The diversity of works on display evidenced that, just like Italian life at the time, the definition of Italian design “was not without its apparent internal contradictions,” as Penny Sparke has argued.15 At stake in these diverse manifestations of culture was their relationship with fascist institutions, which had allegedly “warped [the Italian potential] out of shape by the restrictive interference of their political creed.”16 And also important was the relation of the pieces to a diversity of Italian regions, as signaled in the exhibition by a large-scale wall map of Italy dotted with dolls dressed in regional costumes (Figure C.3). Significantly, however, what the catalogue presented as “craft arts” were not products of this diversity but mirrored territorial hierarchies that have been consolidated since the Risorgimento: as the curator observed, “the omnipresent blight of poverty and lack of industrial resources [in southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia] have as yet been too powerful to permit a constructive reaction to the destructive forces of war.”17 How were designers to work through the diversity of manifestations of Italian design and their characteristic territorial hierarchies in the new political context?

In confronting these issues, architects did not merely need to address their previous complicity with the program of fascism but also needed to reevaluate the ethos of modernism that had assigned them the role of technical experts and cultural leaders in a process of social rebirth, with the dissemination of their designed furnishings linked to the diffusion of renewed values for the nation. Some called for a more cautious redefinition of this role: in a text for Domus, Pagani addressed the distance between architects’ projects and the diverse sensibilities of Italians, proposing that designers should adopt “a simple language, comprehensible to all, to allow more than a small group of the initiated to participate in the discussions that affect every one of us.”18 A young Giancarlo De Carlo, who had fought in the resistance with Albini and Pagano, invoked William Morris’s dream of an art “made by the people for the people, enjoyed by those who make it and those who use it.”19

Figure C.3. Installation view of “Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today,” The Art Institute of Chicago, March 15–May 13, 1951. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

Nonetheless, while embarking on a process of self-criticism regarding their alliances with the regime, most architects assumed they still had a role to play as ideological leaders. This was certainly the case for Ernesto Rogers, who on becoming editor of Domus in 1946 presented his program for “forming a taste, a technique, and a morale, all directed toward the same purpose—the building of a society.”20 For Rogers, the house would be a key artifact in this program, mediating both the project of reconstruction and the ideological redemption of Italians. He attempted to detach the house from bourgeois paradigms, but rather than opening it up to diverse conceptions of dwelling and habitation, he insisted on the role of the architect as an arbiter of culture: “A house is not a house if it does not contain a corner for reading poetry, an alcove, a bathtub, a kitchen. This is the house of man. And a man is no man if he does not possess such a house. [. . .] The house is a problem of limits. [. . .] But the definition of these limits is a problem of culture and this is precisely what the house is in the end.”21 In this way, the project of taste formation and the definition of the house remained central to the characteristically modernist program of “building a society,” as it was reformulated in the first years of the postwar period.22

As I have argued throughout the book, the interwar years had seen the alignment of modernism with the definition of exclusionary conceptions of the “Italian house” and an idiosyncratic civiltà as a framework for the “fascist citizen”—simultaneously shaping “modern” and “Italian” households while excluding many other forms of life as not “Italian,” not “modern,” not “civilized.” One might question whether modernism maintained elements of exclusion as it adapted to the new era, in spite of its embrace of democratic liberalism in its social vision. Roger’s identification of the need for houses for fifteen million people after the devastation of the war was one response to the urgent need to rebuild the country.23 But the definition of the “house” as a quest for a unified “culture,” with its attendant notion of man, can be read as an exclusionary project that was grounded on the pursuit of redemption characteristic of modernism and its alignment with the quest for civilization. Left outside Rogers’s definition of the house, left outside “culture,” were not only all those without a bathroom or a shower (some 90 percent of the population as a whole, or up to 97 percent in some areas of the South at the time).24 Outside it were left also those who countered the pursuit of representation and territorialization of populations that were critical for a project of “building of a society” within a national framework.

Alternatives to this pursuit were characteristically explored by Carlo Levi. While his work during the interwar period was defined by modernist aesthetics, he never sought to align these with Mussolini’s program. And his position became even more differentiated and diverged from modernist ideology during his years as a political exile in the impoverished southern region of Basilicata, from 1935 to 1936, when he directly experienced a context that was left outside the project of modernization and the civilizing quest that modernism had sought to cement. And rather than seeing it as a reality in need of redemption, Levi saw this context as the impetus for what Franco Baldasso has framed as “a new polity based on inclusion, autonomy, and self-government.”25 The disjointed interiors of the houses Levi encountered during his political exile, with their local crafts mixed with disparate references to Northern Africa and New York, might have been seen by many as a threat to Italy’s entrance into the train of history as a consistent culture—as I briefly discussed in this book’s introduction. These interiors, which resulted from the disjunctions characteristic of the modern world, were the ones in which modernist architects and designers had attempted to intervene in the pursuit of consistency, order, and cohesion that was characteristic of modernism’s quest for rebirth and was also instrumental to fascist politics. However, Levi proposed something altogether different, placing these habitations “outside [both] History and the State.”26 Rather than being rooted in the unquestioned force of tradition or an uncritical claim for universality, his proposition drew on both local alliances and cosmopolitanism.27

This proposition offers an alternative to what Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses as the “ideology of historicism” characteristic of modernism, which turns “historical time [into] a measure of cultural distance.”28 It also questions the exclusionary definition of modernity’s civilizing project, which as Walter Mignolo has argued relegates other cultures “to the past of world history and to their localities,” and also deprives them of their claim to universality—a claim modernity reserved for itself.29 Levi’s proposition was framed by a rejection of modernism’s revolutionary pursuit: “We have had a bit of architecture, we have had a bit of revolution,” he wrote in 1947, mocking Le Corbusier, “and the polemics of architecture seem to have lost their interest.”30

My goal with these concluding remarks is not to draft a history of postwar design in Italy, even if many have suggested there is a continuity with the design culture of the prewar period.31 Rather, I wish to open an inquiry on the politics of modernism and furnishing beyond fascism. My focus throughout has been not so much on the objects of furniture, as on furnishing as a characteristically modernist technology engaging in the control over everyday domestic environments, their transformation as a manifestation of progress, and the professionalization of the meaning-making practices associated to them in order to provide individuals and communities with a consistent representation and a place in history—with a unique civiltà. While that pursuit was aligned with the agenda of fascism, my question here is whether it made architects complicit in the exclusionary construction of definitions of citizenship and society beyond this era as well. Whenever modernism sought to give a new form to the project of “civilization” or “culture” in grappling with the effects of modernity, it consistently excluded other forms of life and expression regarded as unmodern and uncivilized—a division often deployed in the shaping of exclusionary societies, in the establishment of colonial hierarchies, in processes of racialization, and more broadly in the demarcation of citizenship beyond the fascist period.32 Can furnishing dismiss its modernist foundation? And, consequently, is it possible to detach it from those political entanglements?

With these questions, I want to join other historians who have interrogated the multiple ways in which design artifacts, along with the epistemes of the different design fields, might have their own forms of governing, rather than being considered simply as a representation of state politics.33 The furnishings I have analyzed were not monumental representations of the fascist regime, and rarely resulted from state initiatives, even if they often operated in ways that benefited the regime and its ideology. Given that architects’ dreams of transforming Italian households were far from realized, I have focused less on the effects of furnishing, and more on how architects articulated their understanding of its governing performance and engaged different institutions and media to expand their reach. In this task, I am less interested in highlighting the degree of complicity of individual architects with the fascist regime (for this complicity was shared across the board, even if some maintained a certain political ambiguity and others operated in alliance with decidedly anti-fascist figures). I am more concerned with how their conception of the field of furnishing aligned with other technologies of fascism. And while this book has followed the arguments that architects and designers used to construct this exclusionary definition of the “Italian house,” it is also important to note that their designs remained open to disarticulation and reappropriation—a subject for a significant exploration, even if it exceeds the ambit of this book. Just as furniture designs were made to operate politically through their circulation and inscription through practices of furnishing, so their politics could be transformed in their socialization.34

The corollaries of these concerns are not only key to the study of Italy and its architectures, and to rethink the role of the country in the design fields. They are also of value for related concerns beyond this particular region. The mobility that defines the contemporary world—in the forms of globalization, digital communication technologies, mass migration—is continuing to destabilize spaces of residence and architecture interiors, to dissolve traditional identities and uproot social relations. Equally, however, it is promoting different forms of identification and belonging—some finding their political expression in exclusionary nativism and neo-fascism, which is permeating everyday discourse when not directly embraced by governments around the world. Understanding the way these pursuits are mediated by design and architecture remains a key disciplinary question.35

In response to this context, is it necessary to do away with the project of furnishing altogether in order to reject the pursuit of a “figure” for what remains a “combination of [. . .] multiplicity”—a pursuit that Jean-Luc Nancy has proposed as characteristic of nationalism and that could very well define the field and practices of furnishing?36 Or is it possible to furnish the disaggregated diasporic interiors we inhabit not in pursuit of coherence, but of inclusion and connections within a politics that embraces multiplicity and celebrates coexistence—where one might not belong to something, but, following Paolo Virno, “belong as such”?37

Acknowledgments

Accounting for the networks of knowledge and support woven throughout this book is a daunting and humbling task: I owe gratitude to so many and I am indebted to the circumstances that have made my work possible. In the early stages of my research, the guidance and mentorship of various scholars were invaluable. Jeffrey Schnapp opened the doors of Italian design for me and offered a model of intellectual curiosity; Beatriz Colomina and Lucia Allais nurtured and sharpened my ideas from the outset with their critical subtlety; and Sylvia Lavin, Spyros Papapetros, Christine Boyer, Esther da Costa Meyer, Hal Foster, and the late Jean-Louis Cohen provided fundamental guidance on early rehearsals of my arguments. Along with them, Brigid Doherty, Rubén Gallo, and Anson Rabinbach at Princeton; Reinhold Martin at Columbia; and the late Svetlana Boym, Giuliana Bruno, K. Michael Hays, Sanford Kwinter, and Erika Naginski at Harvard offered a rigorous framework for my graduate research. I am extremely fortunate to have been advised and taught by such generous scholars during a formative period for the ideas that this book explores.

In advancing my research, I received the support of the Fulbright Commission, Fundación Caja Madrid, Princeton University, Barnard College, and Gobierno de España/AECID. The latter funded my pre-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome, and I was allowed to return at different moments during the completion of this book. I thank the Academy directors Maria Angeles Albert de León, Jose Antonio Bordallo Huidobro, Fernando Villalonga Campos, and all the staff for creating an inspiring and supporting environment. During my different research stays in Italy, I was welcomed and assisted by a large number of archivists and custodians of collections: Salvatore Licitra Ponti and Paolo Rosselli at the Gio Ponti Archives, Tommaso Tofanetti and Elvia Redaelli at the Triennale Archives, Lucia Miodini at the CSAC, Maria Teresa Sillano at the Università Bocconi, Ferruccio Luppi with his unique collection of interwar design and architecture publications, and the personnel of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Cineteca Nazionale, and ASMAE. A number of scholars guided my research in Italy, including Fulvio Irace, Maria Teresa Ferraboli, Imma Forino, Paolo Nicoloso, and Michele Ugolini. This book is a testament to the knowledge, generosity, and labor of all of them.

I presented fragments of my research at different conferences that were formative in shaping my arguments: the Probing the Interior conference at the Courtauld Institute, the EAHN biannual conference in Torino, the Media and Modernity colloquium at Princeton, the Council for European Studies Annual Conference in Chicago, the Graduate Student Design History conference at Parsons/Cooper Hewitt, the Design History Society conference in Basel, and the Italian Imprints conference at Penn State. I was gifted with sharing sessions and engaging in conversation at those events with Maristella Casciato, Marta Filipová, Diane Ghirardo, Samia Henni, Andrew Herscher, Maria González Pendás, Ayala Levin, Thomas Y. Levin, Ethan Robey, Lucetta Johnson, Daniel Sherer, and Rixt Woudstra, among many others. My arguments were also refined thanks to the exceptional editorial comments and advice of Denise Constanzo, Andrew Leach, Stephen Ross, Allys Moody, David Karmon, Pamela Karimi, and a host of anonymous reviewers in the process of publishing fragments of the book in Italian Imprints, Modernism/modernity, and JSAH, as well as in the review of this monograph. Outside formal platforms, I also benefited from the expert and incredibly generous feedback of colleagues who read portions of my work, including Pep Avilés, Angelo Caglioti, Maria González Pendás, Victoria de Grazia, Iván Lopez Munuera, Mary McLeod, Anna-Maria Meister, Paolo Nicoloso, Marina Otero Verzier, Alexandra Quantrill, Noam Shoked, and Federica Vannucci. It is impossible for me to imagine this book without the enlightening conversations with all of these colleagues.

During my time as a graduate student, my research benefited from the stimulating and demanding context built at Princeton by Cristobal Amunategui, Pep Avilés, Anthony Acciavatti, Joseph Bedford, Esther Choi, Britt Eversole, Daniela Fabricius, Curt Gambetta, Sergio Galaz, Vanessa Grossman, Margo Handwerker, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister, Masha Panteleyeva, Clelia Pozzi, Enrique Ramirez, Daria Ricchi, Federica Vannucchi, and Molly Wright Steenson. I have been gifted with wonderful colleagues as I moved to Morningside Heights as faculty: Kadambari Baxi, Karen Fairbanks, Ralph Ghoche, Anooradha Siddiqi, and Nick Smith at Barnard College, and Emanuel Admassu, Lucia Allais, Barry Bergdoll, Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Juan Herreros, Mario Gooden, Ziad Jamaleddine, Andrés Jaque, Ateya Khorakiwala, Laura Kurgan, Reinhold Martin, Mary McLeod, Jorge Otero Pailos, Felicity Scott, Enrique Walker, Mark Wasiuta, Mark Wigley, and Mabel Wilson at Columbia University all contributed to creating an incredibly nurturing environment for the completion of this book.

Shaping the pages of this volume also took considerable assistance: Daniel Barber, Joy Knoblauch, and Molly Wright Steenson provided generous guidance during the development of the book proposal. Pieter Martin and Anne Carter at the University of Minnesota Press carefully shepherded the manuscript since the first drafts through its production. Pamela Johnston and Catherine Osborne clarified my ideas during the copyediting process and Ann Sudmeier translated them into the object you now hold. Elise Jaffe and the late Jeffrey Brown have been unwavering supporters of my academic endeavors, many of which led to this book, including the project Cinecittà Occupata. Princeton University’s Barr Ferree Fund provided assistance with the costs of the book and image permissions. Our shared care for, and commitment to, books as a privileged conduit for arguments cannot be taken for granted.

This book is also uniquely indebted to the intellectual comradeship and generosity of Nora Akawi, Katy Barkan, Neeraj Bhatia, Nerea Calvillo, Francisco Diaz, David Gissen, Rutger Huiberts, Andrés Jaque, Evangelos Kotsioris, Marcelo López-Dinardi, Iván López Munuera, Anna-María Meister, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Alessandro Orsini, Marina Otero, Bart-Jan Polman, Alessandro Preda, Eduardo Rega, Luis Rojo, Nick Roseboro, Alberto Sánchez Sánchez, Agustin Schang, David Serlin, and Noam Shoked. I am also grateful to the incredible allies I have enjoyed in platforms that contributed to form the ideas advanced by this book: the After Belonging Agency (Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, and Marina Otero Verzier); my partners in Cinecittà Occupata (José Ahedo, Thomas Kelley, Hugo Kenzo, Cyrus Peñarroyo, Begoña Zubero) and the Monditalia team at OMA (Ippolito Pestellini and Fabrizia Vecchione, among others); and my colleagues at the Academy in Rome (Ana María Mogollón, Anibal Santaella, Enrique Martinez Lombó, Isabel Banal, Javier Rubín, Jesús Herrera, Joaquim Secall, Jorge Peligro, and Jorge Tomás, among others). They are all exceptional interlocutors and have built an intellectual family throughout the years.

Finally, this book is indebted to many who have been supportive companions throughout the last years from afar: Elena Barroso, Cruz Calleja, Alvaro Martín Fidalgo, Arantza Ozaeta, Marc Puig, and Daniel Sacristán. My parents Ines and José Ignacio, my sisters Begoña and Blanca, their partners Rafael and Marcus, my nephews Nico and Lucas, and my niece Ceci provided continuous encouragement, without which I would not be able to do my work. Closer to home, Blue has been the most loyal writing companion, and I owe most thanks to Albert Luong. This book exists thanks to him.

Notes

Introduction

1. Ugo Ojetti, “A Roma e a Torino: La patria e la sedia,” Corriere della Sera (July 7, 1911), 3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

2. Against all evidence, until the 1980s architecture histories either dismissed its relationship with politics or distinguished between a fascist architecture of classical lineage and a supposedly anti-fascist modernist tradition. Fundamental among those is Bruno Zevi, Storia dell’architettura moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1950). Many scholars have attempted to differentiate between the work of committed fascist architects and other architectures developed during the fascist period, including Marco de Michelis, “Fascist Architectures in Italy,” in Back from Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement, ed. Hubert-Jan Henket and Hilde Heynen (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 86–91. Others have countered those arguments to consider the wider implications of architects across factions with the politics of the regime. See Diane Y. Ghirardo, “Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist’s Role in Regime Building,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) 39, no. 2 (1980): 109–27; and Giorgio Ciucci, Gli architetti e il fascismo: Architettura e città 1922–1944 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989).

3. See Pietro Maria Bardi, “Architettura, Arte di Stato,” L’Ambrosiano, January 31, 1931, 40. Recent literature has brought increasing detail to the analysis of the diverse entanglements of modern architecture and fascism. See Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2007); Paolo Nicoloso, Mussolini architetto: Propaganda e paesaggio urbano nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2008); Michelangelo Sabatino, Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010); David Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism: Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy (Venice: Marsilio, 2012); Paolo Nicoloso, Architetture per un’identità italiana: Progetti e opere per fare gli italiani fascisti (Udine: P. Gaspari, 2012); Lucy Maulsby, Fascism, Architecture, and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 1922–43 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014); Sean Anderson, Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); and Brian McLaren, Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021).

4. Canonical genealogies of European modern architecture have typically considered interior and furniture design to be central to its development. See, for example, Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). In the last decades, a number of authors have explored the development of modern design as a separate area of scholarship. See, for example, Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). On the entanglements of architecture and the design disciplines in Italy beyond the particular period of concern of this book see Elena Dellapiana and Fiorella Bulegato, “From Architecture to Design and Back: The Architectural Roots of the Italian Design System, 1920–1980,” Res Mobilis 9, no. 10 (2020): 131–55.

5. With this goal, this book is in conversation with a body of scholarship that discusses the role of furnishing and domestic interiors in the identity negotiations and political transformations characteristic of the twentieth century. See, for example, Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Pamela Karimi, Domesticity and Consumer Culture in Iran: Interior Revolutions of the Modern Era (New York: Routledge, 2013); Dianne Suzette Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Kristina Wilson, Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); as well as Cammie McAtee and Fredie Floré, eds., The Politics of Furniture: Identity, Diplomacy and Persuasion in Post-War Interiors (New York: Routledge, 2017).

6. Discussions of this culture, with which this book is in conversation, include Annalisa Avon, “La casa all’italiana: Moderno, ragione e tradizione nell’organizzazione dello spazio domestico dal 1927 al 1930,” in La costruzione dell’utopia: Architetti e urbanisti nell’Italia fascista, ed. Giulio Ernesti (Roma: Edizioni del Lavoro, 1988), 4–66; Dennis P. Doordan, “Political Things: Design in Fascist Italy,” in Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, ed. Wendy Kaplan (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995), 225–55; Dennis P. Doordan, “In the Shadow of the Fasces: Political Design in Fascist Italy,” Design Issues 13, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 39–52; Marianne Lamonaca, “A ‘Return to Order’: Issues of the Vernacular and the Classical in Italian Inter-War Design,” in Kaplan, Designing Modernity, 194–221; Maristella Casciato, “The ‘Casa all’Italiana’ and the Idea of Modern Dwelling in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Architecture 5, no. 4 (2000): 335–53; David Rifkind, “Furnishing the Fascist Interior: Giuseppe Terragni, Mario Radice and the Casa del Fascio,” Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 10, no. 2 (2006): 157–70; and Simona Storchi, “‘La casa all’italiana’: Domus and the Ideology of the Domestic Interior in 1930s Italy,” in Beyond the Piazza: Public and Private Spaces in Modern Italian Culture, ed. Simona Storchi (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013): 57–72, among others.

7. Situated in this critical position, my exploration of furnishing is in dialogue with the critical transition traced in Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

8. Leonardo Benevolo, “The Beginning of Modern Research, 1930–1940,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972), 302.

9. The term arredamento comes from medieval Latin arredare, derived from the old German (ga)redan, meaning to arrange, to put in order, to take care. See Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana di Ottorino Pianigiani, http://www.etimo.it. The use of the term extends beyond the period that I discuss in this book but is characteristic of it.

10. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Ideological Development in the Thought and Imagery of Italian Design,” in Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, 360. Writing elsewhere, Argan defined arredamento as a characteristic practice of modernism. See Giulio Carlo Argan, “Il problema dell arredamento,” in Progetto e oggetto: Scritti sul design, ed. Claudio Gamba and Carlo Olmo (Milan: Medusa, 2003 [1956]), 93–103.

11. See Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London: Routledge, 2006), 5.

12. Frequently cited in architectural writings on interiors are Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s identification of the interior as the paradigmatic realm for the formation of the private individual and Sigmund Freud’s equation of the unconscious with a bourgeois interior. See Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1933]); Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002); and Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” [1917], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 295.

13. The first recorded use of the word in the English language dates back to 1490 in reference to the inside of the body: “the entraylles Interiores.” See “interior” in the Oxford English Dictionary, http://dictionary.oed.com. In English, the use of the term with its architectural and artistic connotations reaches back to the nineteenth century. The first text to formally address this definition was Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), contemporaneous to other famous volumes including, in France, Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, Recueil de décorations intérieurs (Paris: L’Aventurine, 1801). For a critical reading of Hope’s work leading the definition of the interior as an architectural and geopolitical unit, see Tim Ainsworth Anstey, “Economies of the Interior: Thomas Hope and Interior Decoration,” Grey Room 78 (2020): 124–45.

14. Centering this connection, my work makes a contribution to previous studies of the Italian design, including Vittorio Gregotti, Il disegno del prodotto industriale: Italia 1860–1980 (Milan: Electa, 1982); Maria Cristina Tonelli-Michail, Il design in Italia 1925/43 (Rome: Laterza, 1987); Penny Sparke, Design in Italy: 1870 to the Present (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988); Imma Forino, L’interno nell’interno: Una fenomenologia dell’arredamento (Florence: Alinea, 2001); Renato De Fusco, Made in Italy: Storia del design italiano (Rome: Laterza, 2010); Beppe Finessi, ed., Il design italiano oltre le crisi: Autarchia, Austerità, Autoproduzione (Milan: Corraini, 2014); Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan, eds., Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Elena Dellapiana, Il design e l’invenzione del Made in Italy (Turin: Einaudi, 2023).

15. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

16. Alice Kaplan has made a similar argument regarding the identification of medium and message in her assessment of radio’s role in the dissemination of fascist propaganda in France. Alice Yeager Kaplan, “Theoretical Voices,” in Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3–40. See these arguments contextualized in Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, “Introduction,” in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed. Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9.

17. In addressing this question, I am in dialogue with other design studies concerned with mediation, which Grace Lees-Maffei has summarized as the study of “the phenomena which exist between production and consumption, as being fundamentally important in inscribing meanings for objects.” See Grace Lees-Maffei, “Mediation,” in The Design History Reader, ed. Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 427.

18. Multiple scholars across fields have discussed the ways in which design objects perform in the world through diverse networks of dissemination, consumption, and exchange. Some foundational texts for these analyses include Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, eds., The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).

19. My contribution to the analysis of architecture culture throughout the fascist period concerns not only my specific focus on furnishing, but also my unique concern with the platforms within which such a culture was articulated. On architecture culture at the time see Cesare de Seta, La cultura architettonica in Italia tra le due guerre (Roma: Laterza, 1983); Silvia Danesi and Luciano Patetta, eds., Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo (Milan: Electa, 1988); Giulio Ernesti, ed., La Costruzione dell’utopia: Architetti e urbanisti nell’Italia fascista (Rome: Edizioni lavoro, 1988); and Fabrizio Brunetti, Architetti e fascismo (Florence: Alinea, 1993).

20. Ponti’s work has already been the subject of broad attention, while many times dislodged from the historical context in which it originated. As Volker M. Welter suggested in his review of Gio Ponti: A World of Design: “Apparently, Ponti lived and worked in a vacuum, as if his world was not ours.” See “Review of Gio Ponti: A World of Design,” JSAH 62, no. 1 (March 2003): 132–33. Most of the scholarship on Rava, in turn, has focused on his engagement with colonial architecture, while his significant participation in the field of furnishing (including objects for the colonies) and set design remains unaddressed. Rava himself complained in a letter to Ponti about the way in which his career had been segmented: “At times (precisely given the variety of fields I have been dedicated) I was the ‘Colonial Rava’ [. . .]; I was also the ‘Rava del cinema’ because I was working on film sets. And lastly, and above all, [. . .] I have been, and I am, for most people the ‘Decorator for Luxurious Customers.’” Letter from Rava to Ponti (May 18, 1944), CAT GP 024, Epistolario Gio Ponti (EGP), Gio Ponti Archives.

21. The demarcation of the domestic interior as the realm of women in the West has different lineages linked to the patriarchy, the separation of productive and reproductive labor, and the division between high and low arts, among others—all related to modernity in diverse ways. Significant contributions to the discussion of the entanglements between gender, domesticity, and modernism in the West can be found in Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992); Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996); and Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, eds. Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2005).

22. Benedetto Croce is significant among those defining the fascist period as a parenthesis in Italian history. See Fabio Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 8.

23. Camillo Benso di Cavour quoted in Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 4.

24. See Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 36.

25. Particularly significant are the writings of Giacomo Leopardi. See G. Leopardi, “Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani,” in Tutte le opere, ed. Walter Binni (Florence: Sansoni, 1969), 1: 966–83.

26. John Dickie, “Stereotypes of the Italian South, 1860–1900,” in The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited, ed. Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), 122.

27. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 145.

28. Gabriella Gribaudi, “Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as Seen by Insiders and Outsiders,” in Lumley and Morris, The New History of the Italian South, 101.

29. See Corrado Bonifazi, L’Italia delle migrazioni (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013). On the South in Italian modern history see Rosario Villari, ed., Il Sud nella storia d’Italia: Antologia della questione meridionale (Bari: Laterza, 1972); and Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998).

30. See Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1. Choate argues that these outward flows of Italians (and the diasporas they created) were as constitutive of Italy as the process of political unification (145–48).

31. Often attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio, this dictum was introduced by Secretary of Education Ferdinando Martini. See Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi, eds., Fare gli italiani: Scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 1:17.

32. Emilio Gentile has described the Italian nation as “an empty simulacrum” in Né stato né nazione: Italani senza meta (Bari: Laterza, 2001), 97. Stephanie Malia Hom has argued, “The Risorgimento made its form, but the contents of the Italian state remained unsettled and indeterminate”; see The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 9.

33. Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” [1926], in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings (1916–1935) (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 171–85.

34. See Gentile, La Grande Italia, 86.

35. See Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,” in The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, Fascism (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 41–76.

36. On the former see, for example, Christopher Wilk, “Introduction: What was Modernism?,” in Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A, 2006), 11–21. Paradigmatic among the latter is James C. Scott’s exploration of “high modernism” as “a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity”; see Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 90.

37. For a discussion of this conflictual condition in modernist and avant-garde practices see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

38. See Roger Griffin, “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism: A ‘Mazeway Resynthesis,’” Modernism/modernity 15, no. 1 (January 2008): 10–11. Several scholars have theorized cultural productions of the period along similar theoretical foundations. See, for example, Jeffrey Schnapp, “Between Fascism and Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca. Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Engineer,” Modernism/modernity 2, no. 3 (September 1995): 117–57; Jeffrey Schnapp, “The Mass Panorama,” Modernism/modernity 9, no. 2 (April 2002): 243–81; Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France, 1909–1939 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Ronald Bush, “Modernism, Fascism, and the Composition of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Modernism/modernity 2, no. 3 (September 1995): 69–87. On the alliance between modernism and fascism see also Mark Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, Modernity,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 148–69.

39. Griffin discusses fascism as a particular category of modernism that he calls “programmatic,” which would be characterized by a “revolutionary permutation driven by the quest for an alternative modernity” (“Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism,” 12).

40. See Walter L. Adamson, “Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922,” American Historical Review 95, no. 2 (April 1990): 359–90. On this alliance see also Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

41. For a significant exploration of the diverse agendas of architectural modernism see Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). Many have contributed to expand this exploration centering non-Western perspectives and the interrelations between different modernities, including William S. W. Lim and Jiat-Hwee Chang, eds., Non West Modernist Past: On Architecture and Modernities (Singapore: World Scientific Pub., 2012). On the “translations” of modernism across different modernities, see Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

42. See Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1976 [1968]), 79. Despina Stratigakos’s analysis of Hitler’s own domestic interiors has made a significant contribution to the entanglements of these spaces, previously overlooked in analyses of Nazi architecture; see Hitler at Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

43. Benjamin famously opposed the “aestheticization of political life” under fascism with the politicization of art by communism. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. Second Version” [1935/36], in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 42.

44. See Emanuela Scarpellini, L’Italia dei consumi: Dalla Belle Époque al nuovo millennio (Bari: Laterza, 2008); Ann Hallmore Caesar, “Women and the Public/Private Divide: The Salotto, Home and Theatre in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy,” in Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy 1860–1945, ed. Perry Willson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

45. See David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).

46. On the suppression of dialects see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Language and the Construction of National Identity in Fascist Italy,” European Legacy: Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas 2, no. 3 (1997): 433–38.

47. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.

48. See Giuseppe Pagano, “Potremo salvarci dalle false tradizioni e dalle ossessioni monumentali?,” Costruzioni Casabella 157 (January 1941): 2; and Gio Ponti, “Domus 122,” Domus 122 (February 1938): xxv.

49. See Edoardo Persico, “Punto e da capo per l’architettura,” Domus 83 (November 1934): 2–3; and Carlo Enrico Rava, introduction to Nove anni di architettura vissuta 1926 IV–1935 XIII (Rome: Cremonese Editore, 1935), 9.

50. See Raffaello Giolli, “La mostra dell’abitazione,” Casabella 106 (October 1936): 24.

51. Romy Golan, Flashback Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (New York: Zone Books, 2021), 15.

52. On the role of the Syndicate see Paolo Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini: Scuole e sindacato, architetti e massoni, professori e politici negli anni del regime (Milan: F. Angeli, 1999), 54–57, 86–197.

53. See Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 569–97.

54. Particularly significant was the case of Raffaello Giolli and Carlo Levi, who were privileged interlocutors for both Pagano and Persico.

55. With this attitude, I aim to join the impetus that Jean-Louis Cohen found in recent scholarship of fascism, which he argued has rejected the “representation of fascism as a unified, homogenous body”; see “Scholarship or Politics? Architectural History and the Risks of Autonomy,” JSAH 67, no. 3 (September 2008): 327.

56. Marla Stone, “The State as Patron: Making Official Culture in Fascist Italy,” in Affron and Antliff, Fascist Visions, 209, 207.

57. See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso (1929–1936) (Turin: Einaudi, 1974); Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Bari: Laterza, 1975); Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also Franco Monteleone, La radio italiana nel periodo fascista (Venice: Marsilio, 1976); Alexander J. De Grand, Bottai e la cultura fascista (Bari: Laterza, 1978); Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, La cultura fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).

58. My use of the term “stage” is in conversation with Timothy Mitchell’s discussion of the role of representation in the modern world in “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1–34.

59. The notion of soft power was first introduced by Joseph Nye in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004) and is fundamental to Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). It has been critically mobilized in design history by Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front, xi.

60. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 227.

61. Forgacs and Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society, 3.

62. Throughout the book, my understanding of the “bourgeoisie” accepts the limitations identified by Benedetto Croce, who argued that the term was very ambiguously defined, and could no longer remain as “juridical subject, neither an economic subject, nor an empirical social distinction, but a moral subject.” See “Di un equivoco concetto storico: La ‘Borghesia,’” La Critica. Rivista di Letteratura, Storia e Filosofia 26 (1928): 262.

63. On the regime’s anti-bourgeois program see Benito Mussolini, “Discorso inaugurale al secondo congresso dei Fasci (24 maggio 1920),” in Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1964), 14:469; and Benito Mussolini, “Al Consiglio Nazionale del P.N.F” (October 25, 1938) in Popolo d’Italia, October 26, 1938, in Opera Omnia, 29:185–96. Several authors have explored the alliance of fascism and the bourgeoisie, including Alessio Gagliardi, “The Entrepreneurial Bourgeoisie and Fascism,” in In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, ed. Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 109–29.

64. Robin Schuldenfrei has addressed similar contradictions in her mediations on the tension between modernism and luxury in the German context; see Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

65. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers: 2012), 326–43. See also Thomas R. Bates, “Gramsci and the Theory of Hegemony,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 2 (April–June, 1975): 351–66. I am inspired by scholarship of modernism discussing aspects of architecture taken as “common sense.” See, for example, Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

66. Sabatino, Pride in Modesty; Diane Y. Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

67. Emily Braun, “Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi’s Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese,” Modernism/modernity 2, no. 3 (September 1995): 88–109.

68. See Philip V. Cannistraro, “Mussolini’s Cultural Revolution: Fascist or Nationalist?,” Journal of Contemporary History 7, no. 3–4 (1972): 130.

69. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Hoare and Nowell Smith, 242.

70. The Dictionary of Untranslatables argues that, different to its French equivalent and more similar to the German “Kultur,” civiltà is “less oriented toward the future than toward a certain past considered as a model, exempt from hubris, it emphasized the improvement of humans as individuals and still more as social beings (whence the very important dimension of ‘civility,’ rather than mastery over nature, in the notion of civiltà).” See Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski; translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 141.

71. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni di carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 2:862–63, quoted in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 2.

72. See Iain Chambers, “Il sud, il subalterno e la sfida critica,” in Esercizi di potere: Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (Rome: Meltemi, 2006), 8.

73. See Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question.”

74. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Design, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 4.

75. Cinema operated as an exception to this stratification, and gained particular relevance in the dissemination of modernist furnishings, as I address in chapter 3.

76. On the Deutscher Werkbund see Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). On furniture production at the Bauhaus see Peter Hahn and Christian Wolsdorff, Bauhaus Furniture: A Legend Reviewed (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2002). An understudied parallel to this alignment of furnishing and totalitarian nationalism unfolded in Germany throughout the Third Reich. Though it infamously shattered the Bauhaus, the Nazi regime mobilized diverse modernist practices to its service. See John Heskett, “Modernism and Design in the Third Reich,” in A John Heskett Reader: Design, History, Economics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016 [1980]), 159–73.

77. On the different manifestations of the Werkbund see Lucius Burckhardt, ed., The Werkbund: History and Ideology 1907–1933 (Venice: Electa, 1977).

78. On the French scene, see Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor, eds., Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). For a broader exploration of the intersections between furnishing and power in diverse political regimes in France throughout the modern period, see Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

79. Renato Poggioli, “Review of Giovanni Battista Angioletti, L’Europea d’oggi,” Pan 2, no. 5 (May 1934): 145.

80. Emilio Gentile, “Impending Modernity: Fascism and the Ambivalent Image of the United States,” Journal of European History 28, no. 1 (1993): 7–29.

81. Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York: Straus and Company, 1947), 131–32.

82. See, for example, Arturo Gemini, “L’inaugurazione di un complesso abitativo costruito nel quartiere Tiburtino Terzo dal regime fascista,” Istituto Nazionale LUCE (1937).

83. My interest in identity building is in conversation with what Charles Davis calls “building character” in his critical analysis of the intersections between style theory, race as a category of identity, and the nation as an exclusionary demarcation of citizenship. See Charles L. Davis II, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

84. See Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” in Questions of Modernity, 16–17.

85. I am using the expression “production of locality” in relation to both Arjun Appadurai as well as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s work—both of whom use it in their different versions of globalization. Appadurai argues that “locality is ephemeral unless hard and regular work is undertaken to produce and maintain its materiality”; see “The Production of Locality,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 180–81. Negri and Hardt argue against the “primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities” and advance the need to address “precisely the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local.” See Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 45.

86. On these mutually constitutive relationships of identity projection and formation as they are ascribed in relation to the politics of location, see the foundational Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). See also Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage Publications, 1996).

87. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom, “Introduction,” in Italian Mobilities, ed. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom (London: Routledge, 2016), 2.

88. Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form. History and Ideology,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 330.

89. Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello, and Sarah Teasley, ed., Global Design History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 2. For significant contributions on how to advance the writing of national design histories with attention to these global realities see Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan, eds., Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (New York: Berghahn, 2016).

90. See, for example, Anty Pansera, “Il protodesign italiano: Le origini del disegno industriale,” in Gli Annitrenta. Arte e cultura in Italia (Milan: Mazzotta, 1982): 325–38; Sparke, Design in Italy, 41; and Catharine Rossi, Crafting Design in Italy: From Postwar to Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015): 5.

91. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Ricostruzione: Dall’oggetto d’uso alla citta,” Domus 215 (October 1946): 5. While used by Rogers, the origin of the term is diffuse and its use widespread.

92. Writing about art, Romy Golan has explored the presence of fascism in postwar Italy through the figures of the flashback and the eclipse (Flashback Eclipse).

1. The National Market of Furnishing

1. See Palmiro Togliatti, Lezioni sul fascismo (Rome: Editori Reuniti, 1970 [1935]), 14. Later literature has even denied fascism the status of an ideology. See Richard J. Golsan, “Introduction,” in Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), xi.

2. On syncretism see Griffin, “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism,” 14.

3. “Domus Nova” advertisement, Domus 15 (1929): 48–49.

4. La casa bella changed its subtitle in the fifth issue to Rivista per gli amatori de la casa bella (Magazine for those who love the beautiful house).

5. Guido Marangoni, “Verso la nuova casa italiana,” La casa bella 11 (November 1928): 9–10.

6. On Novecento furniture design see Lamonaca, “A ‘Return to Order’,” 194–221. On the Novecento in architecture see de Seta, La cultura architettonica in Italia tra le due guerre, 76–96; Giorgio Ciucci, “Italian Architecture during the Fascist Period: Classicism between Neoclassicism and Rationalism,” Harvard Architectural Review 6 (1987): 76–87; Dennis Doordan, Building Modern Italy: Italian Architecture 1914–1936 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), 29–44; Annegret Burg, Novecento Milanese: I novecentisti e il rinnovamento dell’architettura a Milano fra il 1920 e il 1940 (Milan: F. Motta, 1991); Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 165–225; and Rossana Bossaglia, Il Novecento Italiano (Milan: Charta, 1995).

7. With this emphasis, my inquiry aligns with others who have explored the role of exhibitions in shaping the politics of modern architecture in Italy, even if referring to different institutions and events, including Diane Ghirardo, “Exhibitions and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Architectural Education 45, no. 2 (February 1992): 67–75; and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,” in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 1–37. Relevant to this chapter due to the ideological affinities is also Michael Tymkiw’s recent study of the politics of exhibition design in Nazi Germany: Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

8. This framework of analysis builds on Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations no. 4 (Spring 1988): 73–102. My proposal to expand its logics from cultural institutions to commercial ones is informed by the analysis of the alliances between market and media operations in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

9. The city had already hosted major shows, including the 1884 General Italian Exhibition and the 1890 First Italian Exhibition on Architecture. See Mario Ceradini, L’architettura italiana alla prima esposizione d’architettura in Torino (Turin-Palermo: Carlo Clausen, 1903); and Mauro Volpiano, Torino 1890: La prima esposizione italiana di architettura (Turin: Celid, 1999). On Turin’s centrality in the Italian exhibition complex at the time see Cristina Della Coletta, World’s Fairs Italian Style: The Great Exhibitions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1860–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).

10. See Francesca Romana Fratini, Torino 1902: Polemiche in Italia sull’Arte Nuova (Turin: Martano, 1971), 55.

11. Carlo Olmo, “L’ingegneria contesa. La formazione del Museo industriale,” in Pier Luigi Bassignana, ed., Le esposizioni torinesi nei documenti dell’archivio Amma: 1829–1898 (Turin: Allemandi, 1992), 106.

12. See Giovanni Maria Lupo and Luisa Sassi, “La formazione politecnica e i quadri professionali per l’edilizia e la città, in Torino, fra Otto e Novecento,” in Storia urbana 61 (1992): 83–136.

13. See Alfredo Melani, cited in Valeria Garuzzo, L’esposizione del 1902 a Torino (Turin: Universale di Architettura, Testo & Immagine, 1999), 6.

14. See Annalisa B. Pesando and Daniela Prina, “To Educate Taste with the Hand and the Mind: Design Reform in Post-Unification Italy (1884–1908),” Journal of Design History 25, no. 1 (2012): 32–54.

15. Giovanni Sacheri, “Il programma dell’Esposizione,” L’ingegneria civile e le arti industriali 9 (1901): 131. The exhibition’s catalogue referred to its contents with different terminology, including “sets, details, and interiors” among others, but did not refer yet to the project of furnishing with the term arredamento. For “furnishing,” the exhibition used the terms mobili and ammobigliamento. See Esposizione internazionale d’arte decorativa moderna, I mobili alla prima Esposizione internazionale d’arte decorativa modern (Turin: Crudo & Lattuada, 1902).

16. Sacheri, “Il programma dell’Esposizione,” 131. Paradigmatic amongst the earliest denunciations of this perceived decay were those articulated by the members of the Arts and Crafts movement. See, for example, John Ruskin, The Opening of the Crystal Palace, Considered in Some of Its Relations to the Prospects of Art (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1854).

17. Sacheri, “Il programma dell’Esposizione,” 131.

18. On the Liberty style see Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 23–52; Mervyn Levy, Liberty Style: The Classic Years, 1898–1910 (New York: Rizzoli, 1986); and Paolo Portoghesi, “Art Nouveau in Italy,” in Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, 287–92.

19. Vittorio Pica, L’arte decorativa all’Esposizione di Torino (Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1903), 5. See also Manfredi Nicoletti, D’Aronco e l’architettura Liberty (Bari: Laterza, 1982).

20. Ugo Ojetti, “L’Arte Nuova a Torino,” Corriere della Sera, June 20–21, 1902, 3.

21. See Franco Borsi, L’architettura dell’unità d’Italia (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1966); and Rosanna Pavoni, ed., Reviving the Renaissance: The Use and Abuse of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Italian Art and Decoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Richard Etlin, “Turin 1902: The Search for a Modern Italian Architecture,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 13 (Summer 1989): 94–109.

22. See, for example, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, “The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste,” in The Crystal Palace Exhibition: Illustrated Catalogue (London, 1851), xxii.

23. Ugo Ojetti, “A Roma e a Torino: Arte Paesana e Arte Nazionale,” Corriere della Sera, July 29, 1911, 3.

24. “L’esposizione internazionale di Torino,” L’architettura italiana 6 (May 1911): 1.

25. E. Ferrettini, “Il carattere architettonico dell’Esposizione,” L’Esposizione di Torino: Giornale ufficiale illustrato dell’esposizione internazionale delle industrie e del lavoro 8 (August 1910): 116.

26. See Giuseppe Lavini, “L’architettura nazionale III,” L’architettura italiana 7, no. 4 (January 1912): 13.

27. See Ministero delle Colonie, Direzione Centrale degli Affari Coloniali, Ufficio di Studi Coloniali, Le mostre coloniali all’Esposizione internazionale di Torino del 1911: Relazione generale (Rome: Tipografia Nazionale di G. Bertero E.C., 1913), 5.

28. I will unpack these arguments in more detail in chapter 4.

29. See “1911: Le esposizioni e le feste commemorative,” Rivista Marittima, March 1911, 3–15.

30. Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 35.

31. Ojetti was significant among those voices; see “A Roma e a Torino,” 3. In the following years, Ojetti’s evaluation of the contribution of peasant art to the development of a national style was more ambiguous. See Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 49, 80.

32. Eduardo Cimbali, “Esiste l’idea di patria e di patriottismo?” (Rome, 1912), 21–22, cited in Gentile, La Grande Italia, 59.

33. Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 171–85.

34. Ojetti, “A Roma e a Torino,” 3.

35. Ojetti, “A Roma e a Torino,” 3. This statement resonates with Adolf Loos’s 1908 argument on the “amoral” condition of children and “the Papuan” in “Ornament and Crime,” in Programs and Manifestoes of 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 19. However, while for Loos this “amoral” condition was related with the drive to ornament (in tattoos, among other forms), in Ojetti the lack of values understood to manifest in the “anachronism” promoted by the Darmstadt Colony is alternatively related with “naked” forms.

36. Ojetti, “A Roma e a Torino,” 3.

37. Ojetti, “A Roma e a Torino,” 3. The fact that both collective progress and a realm of articulation at a national level (invoked here by the term civiltà, which I will unpack later in the chapter) would manifest in the interior contrasts with Loos’s own arguments, for he similarly detached architecture’s exterior image from the design of its interior, but asked for a kind of rigor of expression and articulation of collectivity on the exterior, while the interior would be a space of individual freedom (since “everyone should be his own decorator.”) See Adolf Loos, “Interiors in the Rotunda” [1898], in Spoken into the Void (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 23. According to Beatriz Colomina’s account, the interior was for Loos “the realm of [. . .] the unspeakable,” while, I argue, for Ojetti it was the space of shared language; see “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Colomina, 93. See also Beatriz Colomina, “Interior,” in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 233–81.

38. Letter from Guido Marangoni to Emilio Caldera, published in January 1918 in Milan’s Bolletino Municipale and later reprinted in Guido Marangoni, Le esposizioni biennali internazionali d’arte decorativa delle città di Milano e Monza: Relazione programma (Bergamo: Officine dell’Istituto Italiano D’arti Grafiche, 1923). See “Prima esposizione internazionale di arti decorative alla Villa Reale di Monza (1923),” Segn. 96/1 Class. 3.11. Sezione seconda (1871–1935), Archivio Storico Comune di Monza. By the time Marangoni wrote to Caldara, he had already acquired a certain public profile as superintendent of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, where he worked from 1916 to 1923.

39. Marangoni, Le esposizioni biennali, 9.

40. Nancy J. Troy develops the genealogy of this nationalist “war” well into the twentieth century and considers the work of Le Corbusier as illuminated by it; see “Le Corbusier, Nationalism and the Decorative Arts in France, 1900–1918,” Studies in the History of Art 29 (1991): 64–87.

41. Marangoni, Le esposizioni biennali, 20.

42. Marangoni, Le esposizioni biennali, 24–25.

43. Woodrow Wilson, “Fighting Is the Slow Way to Peace,” cited in de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 1.

44. See Luciano Cafagna, “La rivoluzione industriale in Italia 1830–1900,” in L’industrializzazione in Italia 1861–1900, ed. Giorgio Mori (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981), 91–105. On the way this concerned the design industries see Luca Cottini, The Art of Objects (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 13–18.

45. See Renato Giannetti and Michelangelo Vasta, Storia dell’impresa industriale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005).

46. See Massimo della Campa, Il modello Umanitaria (Raccolto Edizioni, 2003). The Società Umanitaria additionally involved itself in the development of workers’ housing. See Ornella Selvafolta, “La casa operaia a Milano 1860–1914,” Parametro 11 (January-February, 1980): 28–30.

47. See Vittorio Gregotti, “Mass Produced Italy,” in Modern Italy: Images of a National Identity—From Expansion to the Second World War, ed. Omar Calabrese (Milan: Electa, 1983), 333; and Maristella Casciato, “L’abitazione e gli spazi domestici,” in La famiglia italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi, ed. Piero Melograni (Bari: Laterza, 1988), 555–56.

48. Gregotti sees the First Exhibition of Decorative Arts of the region of Lombardy organized by the Società Umanitaria in 1919 as the precursor of the first Monza Biennale exhibition held in 1921 (“Mass Produced Italy,” 336).

49. See Ugo Ojetti, La Università delle Arti decorative in Monza: Discorso inaugurale (Milan: Coi Tipi della Scuola del Libro di Milano, 1922). Ojetti was involved in art education at the time and had led a contemporary commission considering the relation between the decorative arts and local culture. See Elena Dellapiana and Daniela N. Prina, “Craft, Industry and Art: ISIA (1922–1943) and the Roots of Italian Design Education,” in Lees-Maffei and Fallan, Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, 111.

50. Favoring the export of manufactured goods was fundamental to counterbalance the import of raw materials. See Sparke, Italian Design, 24.

51. Marangoni, Le esposizioni biennali, 6.

52. Gentile, La Grande Italia, 69.

53. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 5–6 [first published as The History of Manners in 1939.]

54. Ojetti was among the backers of the Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti in 1925. See Marta Nezzo, Ugo Ojetti: Critica, azione, ideologia (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2016). On the diverse forms of nationalism coexisting at the time in Italy see Gentile, La Grande Italia, 74–75. The absorption of the nationalist party into the fascist movement in 1923 linked both sensibilities more strongly, emphasizing the nationalist emphasis of fascism and expanding the diverse sensibilities included within fascism.

55. See the Program of the National Fascist Party (1921), cited in Gentile, La Grande Italia, 150.

56. Linking future and past, Cannistraro has argued that the fascist mission to “chang[e] men’s ideas and spirit”—a forward-looking project of regeneration—“could not be divorced from Italy’s historic foundations” (“Mussolini’s Cultural Revolution,” 118).

57. Zygmunt Bauman has used this term, for a different argument, in Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 73.

58. Guido Marangoni, Catalogo della seconda mostra internazionale delle arti decorative (Milan: Alpes, 1925), 24–25.

59. On different exhibition strategies for architecture developed at the time see Edward N. Kaufman, “The Architectural Museum from World’s Fair to Restoration Village,” Assemblage 9 (June 1989): 20–39.

60. Guido Marangoni, Catalogo della prima esposizione internazionale delle arti decorative (Milan: Casa Editrice D’arte Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1923), 56.

61. The Monza exhibitions had an international section consistently featuring Germany, Belgium, Hungary, and Russia, while the Nordic countries, Turkey, Morocco, Brazil, and many others were represented in some editions.

62. Guido Marangoni, La prima mostra internazionale delle arti decorative: Notizie, rilevi, risultati (Monza, 1932), 13. See Prima esposizione internazionale di arti decorative alla Villa Reale di Monza (1923), Segn. 96/1 Class. 3.11, Sezione seconda (1871–1935), Archivio Storico Comune di Monza.

63. Marangoni, Catalogo ella seconda mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 15, 24. For a contextualization of the interest in the traditional arts and crafts displayed in Monza within a larger set of institutions and events with similar concerns in Italy at the time, see Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 57–91.

64. See Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, 293–301.

65. Guido Marangoni, “Il mobile contemporaneo,” Le Arti Decorative 8 (August 1925): 11–13.

66. Marangoni, “Il mobile contemporaneo,” 11.

67. See “Il vasto compito d’una modesta esposizione,” Le Arti Decorative 6 (June 1925): 11–16.

68. Marangoni, La prima mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 65.

69. Marangoni, Catalogo della seconda mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 25. The arguments were echoed in Carlo Felice, “Da una Biennale di Monza all’altra,” Le Arti Decorative 4–5 (April–May 1925): 27.

70. Marangoni, La prima mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 65.

71. Marangoni, La prima mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 50.

72. Marangoni, La prima mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 50. For a more extensive consideration of the financing of the exhibitions see Anty Pansera and Mariateresa Chirico De Biasi, 1923–1930: Monza verso l’unità delle arti: Oggetti d’eccezione dalle esposizioni internazionale delle arti decorative (Milan: Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana, 2004), 138–40.

73. Marangoni, La prima mostra internazionale delle arti decorative, 50.

74. Ugo Ojetti, “Commenti: L’Esposizione di Monza ha riacceso la questione dello stile moderno,” Dedalo 4 (September 1923): 263.

75. Ojetti, “Commenti: L’Esposizione di Monza,” 263.

76. Raffaello Giolli, “Tra la scena e la vita,” La Sera 19 (October 1923). Both Ojetti and Giolli’s statements echo the way in which, going back to Camillo Boito, the house was understood as “a testing ground for the issues typically raised by the modern age.” See Dellapiana and Bulegato, “From Architecture to Design and Back,” 133.

77. Giolli himself worked out these arguments in his short-lived magazine 1927, Problemi d’arte attuale, to which I shall return in chapter 2.

78. Ojetti, “Commenti, L’Esposizione di Monza,” 264.

79. Raffaello Giolli, “Esposizioni: L’esposizione regionale lombarda d’arte decorativa,” Pagine d’Arte VII, no. 9 (September 1919): 78, cited in Ornella Selvafolta, “Milano anni venti. Arti decorative, esposizioni, cultura del progetto,” Archivio Storico Lombardo: Giornale della Società Storica Lombarda CXLVII (2021), 70.

80. In this understanding, I am interested in imagining alternatives in which exhibitions might have offered a platform for what Mabel Wilson describes as “multivalent interpretations of race and nation, progress and history” in Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 18.

81. See, for example, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Jean-Louis Cohen, “A Conversation with Jean-Louis Cohen,” October 89 (Summer 1999): 6.

82. Thordis Arrhenius, “Discourse,” in Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, ed. T. Arrhenius et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 16, building on Hubert Damish, “L’architecture, au musée?” [1992], translated as “A Very Special Kind of Museum,” in Skyline: The Narcissistic City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 49–67.

83. Ferdinando Reggiori, “La terza biennale delle arti decorative a Monza,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VII, 2.7 (March 1928): 312.

84. Other significant representations of the development of modern architecture in Italy in this exhibition included a small selection of models and drawings by the young rationalists Gruppo 7 and the construction of “Il Padiglione del Libro” by the futurist designer Fortunato Depero.

85. Sarfatti took a personal interest in Ponti’s work, which she sought to promote. See letter from Margherita Sarfatti to Gio Ponti, November 3, 1927, CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives.

86. The characterization of the Novecento, among other European practices, as a “return to order” is common within the Italian histories of the period. See for example Ciucci, Gli architetti e il fascismo, 62. The expression “return to order” (rappel a l’ordre) was originally used by French Cubist painter André Lhote. See Nathalie Reymond, “Le Rappel à l’ordre d’André Lhote,” in Le Retour à l’ordre dans les arts plastiques et l’architecture 1919–25, ed. Université de Saint-Etienne (Paris, 1975), 222; cited in Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 237.

87. See Cannistraro, “Mussolini’s Cultural Revolution,” 115–39; and Simona Storchi, “Margherita Sarfatti and Il Popolo d’Italia: National Classicism between Tradition and Modernity,” Modern Language Review 4 (October 2013): 1135–55.

88. Guido Maragoni, “Relazione-programma,” in Esposizioni biennali internazionali di arte decorativa delle città di Milano e Monza (Milan: La Tipografica, 1919), xx. For further analysis of these arguments see also Anty Pansera, Storia e cronaca della Triennale (Milan: Longanesi editore, 1978), 22.

89. See Laura Falconi, Gio Ponti: Interni, oggetti, disegni (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2004), 21–27. Ponti’s uncle Ettore Ponti was also on the administrative council of the Exhibition for Milanese Industry in 1881.

90. Falconi, Gio Ponti, 23–24; and Livia Frescobaldi Malenchini and Oliva Ruccellai, eds., Gio Ponti e la Richard-Ginori: Una corrispondenza inedita (Mantua: Corraini Edizioni, 2015). See also Elena Dellapiana, Il design della ceramica in Italia 1850–2000 (Milan: Electa, 2010), 83–109.

91. See Ugo Ojetti, “All’esposizione di Parigi. II. L’architettura,” Corriere della Sera (unknown date, December 1925). Kept at CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. Following Ojetti’s suggestion, Ponti additionally wrote the introduction to the section on ceramics in the Italian catalogue of the exhibition: Gio Ponti, “Le ceramiche,” in L’Italia all’esposizione internazionale delle arti decorative e industriali moderne (Paris-Milan, 1925). See letter from Ugo Ojetti to Gio Ponti, October 17, 1925, CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives.

92. Ojetti and Ponti had a close relationship and correspondence from 1923, when Ojetti invited the young architect to write in his magazine Dedalo. See letter from Ugo Ojetti to Gio Ponti (November 9, 1923), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. This relationship did not prevent Ponti from distancing himself from some of the critic’s polemical positions. In the first letter that Ponti addressed to Ojetti, he already insisted, contrary to Ojetti, on the relevance of mechanical developments in modern artistic practices: he replied to Ojetti using a typewriter, in an act that he considered a “representative and programmatic manifestation of the modern artist’s ‘persona.’” Letter from Gio Ponti to Ugo Ojetti (February 1925), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives.

93. See letter from Paola Ojetti to Gio Ponti, March 6, 1927, CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. Giulia Vimercati’s family ties might also have helped to facilitate this collaboration.

94. As Guido Zucconi has argued, the term architect “[a]t times [. . .] obscured the illegal practice of someone with a degree in architectural drawing: more often, it indicated an engineer who was momentarily involved in ‘artistic’ themes.” See La città contesa: Dagli ingegneri sanitari agli urbanisti (1885–1942) (Milan: Jaca, 1989), 114–15.

95. See Lorenzo De Stefani, Le scuole di architettura in Italia: Il dibattito dal 1860 al 1933 (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992).

96. In the absence of professional recognition, Ponti only received his architecture license in 1928, when a special commission was established for similar cases (Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini, 70–74).

97. See Gustavo Giovannoni, “Gli architetti e gli studi di architettura in Italia,” Rivista d’Italia XIX (1916): 161–96. See also Ciucci, Gli architetti e il fascismo, 7; and Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini, 13.

98. Mario Sironi, “Manifesto of Mural Painting,” Colonna 1 (December 1933), cited in Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 39.

99. Golan, Muralnomad, 39.

100. Payne, From Ornament to Object, 17.

101. Roberto Papini, “Le arti a Monza nel’27: I. Gli italiani,” Emporium (July 1927): 19.

102. T.B. [Tomaso Buzzi], “Camere da letto in legno verniciato,” Domus 4 (1928): 29.

103. Benito Mussolini, “Discorso di Mussolini per l’inaugurazione della prima mostra del Novecento Italiano,” Discorsi del 1926 (Milan: Alpes, 1927), 60, 63. See also Cannistraro, “Mussolini’s Cultural Revolution,” 123.

104. The mouthpieces of the Strapaese group were the magazines Il Selvaggio (1924–42) and L’Italiano (1926–42). In opposition to it, the Novecento sensibility was also aligned with what was known as “Stracittà,” and was particularly represented in the magazine Novecento: Cahiers d’Italie et d’Europe, edited by Massimo Bontempelli from 1926 to 1929. See Luciano Troisio, ed., Le Riviste di Strapaese e Stracittà: Il selvaggio, L’italiano, 900 (Treviso: Canova, 1975); Walter Adamson, “The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of Il Selvaggio,” Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995): 555–75. For the role of architecture in the culture of Strapaese see Michela Rosso, “Il Selvaggio 1926–1942: Architectural Polemics and Invective Imagery,” Architectural Histories 4 (May 2016), http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.203, and Fabrizio Brunetti, “La polemica di Strapaese,” Architetti e fascismo (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 1993), 217–37. See also the contemporaneous discussion of these two positions in G. Titta Rosa, “‘Strapaese’ e ‘Stracittà’,” Domus 7 (July 1928): 24.

105. Brunetti, Architetti e Fascismo, 219.

106. Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 91.

107. Margherita Sarfatti, “Arte fascismo e antiretorica” (1927), cited in Emily Braun, “Political Rhetoric and Poetic Irony: The Uses of Classicism in the Art of Fascist Italy,” in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico, and the New Classicism, 1910–1930, ed. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 356n42.

108. As I will discuss in chapter 5, the regime did appeal to rural populations and decisively intervened in rural areas, even if its commitment was never accompanied by an incorporation of rural values and was more decisively concerned with their modernization. De Grazia eloquently describes how the “ideological defense of rurality [. . .] masked the real subordination of the countryside to the urban industrial world” (The Culture of Consent, 99).

109. As discussed in the introduction, the relation between urban and rural areas of the country was a complex one since the Risorgimento and was linked to the tension between the North and the South, as analyzed by Antonio Gramsci in “The City-Countryside Relationship,” in Hoare and Nowell Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 90–101.

110. Sarfatti suggested that modern art, within which she located the Novecento, had a French origin, crediting these transnational networks. See Braun, “Political Rhetoric and Poetic Irony,” 347.

111. See Terry Kirk, The Architecture of Modern Italy: Volume 1, The Challenge of Tradition, 1750–1900 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).

112. De Seta, La cultura architettonica in Italia, 78.

113. Papini, “Le arti a Monza nel’27,” 19.

114. Reggiori, “La terza biennale delle arti decorative a Monza,” 317.

115. See C. Giordano, G. Piga, and G. Trovato, “Italy’s Industrial Great Depression: Fascist Wage and Price Policies,” Macroeconomic Dynamics 3 (April 2014): 689–720. Other companies made commercial furniture at significantly lower prices. See Marianne Lamonaca, “Tradition as Transformation: Gio Ponti’s Program for the Modern Italian Home, 1928–1933,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 1 (Fall–Winter, 1997/98): 61. See also Irene De Guttry and Maria Paola Maino, II mobile déco italiano (Rome: Laterza, 1984), 41–42.

116. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 1992 [1867]), 149.

117. Here, my goal is to address Lizabeth Cohen and Victoria de Grazia’s questions in their introduction to International Labor and Working-Class History 55 (Spring 1999): 2: “Does commodity fetishism have any significance in social analysis regarding specific classes of producers or consumers? How does the commodification or decommodification of goods and services bear on economic and social citizenship?”

118. On the Milanese retail sector during the period see Jonathan Morris, The Political Economy of Shopkeeping in Milan (1886–1922) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12–88.

119. “Album illustrato delle novità dei grandi magazzini. Alle Città d’Italia Fratelli Bocconi,” Anno II (October 1881). Cart. 9, f. III e CDR, Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

120. See Franco Amatori, Proprietà e direzione: La Rinascente, 1917–1969 (Milan: Franco Angeli Libri, 1989), 35–36; and Elena Papadia, La Rinascente (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011).

121. Letter from Gabriele D’Annunzio to his Milanese lawyer friend Leopoldo Barduzzi (August 24, 1917), Cart. 19, f. XXXV, Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

122. Giuseppe Cesare Borletti, “Discorso tenuto del Presidente della Società Sig. Senatore Borletti,” Piazza del Duomo (March 23, 1921), 1, Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

123. Letter from Senatore Borletti to Umberto Brustio (March 2, 1919), Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

124. Margherita G. Sarfatti, “Art and Fascism” (1928), in A Primer of Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 243–45.

125. D’Annunzio had already become a privileged chronicler of the Italian bourgeoisie in the late nineteenth century in his articles for La Tribuna, which have been gathered in Cronache romane, ed. Paola Sorge (Rome: Newton Compton editori, 1995). For a contextualization of his work see Paolo Alatri, Gabriele D’Annunzio (Turin: Utet, 1983), particularly chapter III, “Il vate nazionale.”

126. La Rinascente advertisement (ca. 1928).

127. The institution explicitly declared its ambition to intervene in questions of “domestic government.” See “Relazione del Consiglio di amministrazione all’assemblea generale ordinaria e straordinaria (30 maggio 1919),” 10, Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

128. “Discorso tenuto del Presidente della Società Sig. Senatore Borletti,” 5.

129. See de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 79. The relation between fascism and religion was consolidated throughout those years with the agreements between Pope Pius XI and Mussolini that resulted in the Conciliazione of 1929. See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il Fascista: L’organizzazione dello Stato Fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 1968), 432.

130. “Report of the administration council in the ordinary and extraordinary general assembly (May 30, 1919),” 10. On other genealogies of modernism countering, rather than supporting, bourgeois commodification see Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

131. Griffin, “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism,” 13, building on Peter Berger.

132. Borletti, “Inaugural Discourse by Senatore Borletti,” 5.

133. Emanuela Scarpellini, L’Italia dei consumi: Dalla Belle Époque al nuovo millennio (Bari: Laterza, 2008); David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, “Patterns of Consumption,” in Mass Culture and Italian Society, 27–62; Gian Franco Venè, Mille lire al mese: Vita quotidiana della famiglia nell’italia fascista (Milan: Mondadori, 1990).

134. Ugo Ojetti, “Lettera a Giovanni Ponti sul lusso necessario,” Pegaso (January 1933): 97–99.

135. Miriam Hansen points to the significant role played by the market in shaping collective imaginations, arguing that “with its professed goal of catering to as many people as possible, [the market] provided a better model for engaging the viewer’s imagination than the bureaucratically protected enclaves of high culture” (foreword to Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience, xxiv).

136. See Casciato, “The ‘Casa all’Italiana’ and the Idea of Modern Dwelling in Fascist Italy,” 349. According to Casciato, the scarcity of housing was connected to perceived challenges to the social order since the early twentieth century. Casciato has discussed the housing needs in Italian cities within a broader analysis of the evolution of housing in the country from the unification until the postwar period in “L’abitazione e gli spazi domestici,” in Melograni, La famiglia italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi, 525–87.

137. See “La crisi degli alloggi a Milano: Proposte per una soluzione,” cited in Mariuccia Salvati, L’inutile salotto: L’abitazione piccolo-borghese nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993), 85. The document concerned itself with lodging the 7,000 migrants who had arrived in the previous decade. See also Lando Bortolotti, Storia della politica edilizia in Italia: Proprietà, imprese edili e lavori pubblici dal primo dopoguerra ad oggi (1919–1970) (Rome: Editori Reuniti, 1978); Giancarlo Consonni and Graziella Tonon, “Casa e lavoro nell’area Milanese: Dalla fine dell’Ottocento al fascismo,” Classe 9, no. 14 (1977): 165–259; and Maurizio Boriani et al., La costruzione della Milano moderna: Casa e servizi in un secolo di storia cittadina (Milan: CLUP, 1988), 51–97.

138. Benito Mussolini, “Cifre e deduzione: Sfollare le città,” Il Popolo d’Italia, November 22, 1928. In his efforts to stabilize rural populations, Mussolini imposed the requirement for individuals to get permission from the administration to change their place of residence. See Anna Treves, Le migrazioni interne nell’Italia fascista: Politica e realtà demografica (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).

139. On the rejection of liberal urbanism throughout the period see Anna Treves, “La politica antiurbana del fascismo e un secolo di resistenza all’urbanizzazione industriale in Italia,” in Urbanistica fascista: Ricerche e saggi sulle città e il territorio e sulle politiche urbane in Italia tra la due guerre, ed. Alberto Mioni (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1980), 313–30.

140. “La crisi degli alloggi a Milano,” in Salvati, L’inutile salotto, 85.

141. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919), 68.

142. Beyond this particular case, the alignment of fascist ideology and commercial culture was not without its conflicts and negotiations, particularly as the pursuit of control of the regime coincided, as de Grazia has analyzed, with the inclusion of women in its nationalizing agenda. See Victoria de Grazia, “Nationalizing Women: The Competition between Fascist and Commercial Cultural Models in Mussolini’s Italy,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, eds. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 337–58.

143. Charles S. Maier has suggested that “in an era of [social] upheaval, it is continuity and stability that need explanation”; see Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3.

144. On the department store’s original building see “Una grande impresa industriale,” in L’Illustrazione Italiana, April 27, 1879, 270.

145. See Maulsby, Fascism, Architecture and the Claiming of Modern Milan, 16.

146. See V. Balzarotti Barbieri, “Nascita e sviluppo dei trasporti pubblici milanesi 1860–1900,” in Storia urbana 7 (1979): 47–79; and Papadia, La Rinascente, 24.

147. See Aldo De Maddalena, “Rilievi sull’esperienza demografica ed economica milanese dal 1861 al 1915,” in L’economia italiana dal 1861 al 1961 (Milan: Giuggfré, 1961), 79–107; Volker Hunecke, “Milano e la sua popolazione,” in Classe operaia e rivoluzione industriale a Milano 1859–1892 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982), 105–56.

148. See Marcello Piacentini, “Il concorso nazionale per lo studio di un progetto di piano regolatore e d’ampliamento per la città di Milano,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VII, 1.3–4 (November-December 1927): 132–62. Michel Foucault has argued that the exercise of power in modern regimes is not enacted through confinement but rather by enhancing circulation; see Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977 (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 51.

149. See Amatori, Proprietà e direzione, 52.

150. See Giuseppe Adami, “La Rinascente risorge: Più bella. Più grande. Più forte,” La Illustrazione Italiana, April 3, 1921, 398–400. See also N. Sacerdoti, “Il Palazzo sede della ‘Rinascente’ in Piazza del Duomo a Milano ricostruito dopo l’incendio del 24 diciembre 1918,” Il Monitore Tecnico, no. 7–8 (1921). Cart. 7. f. XVII e CDR, Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

151. See Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “Note intorno a un ‘grande magazzino.’ Ciò che si vede e ciò che non si vede,” Le Vie D’Italia: Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano 1 (January 1922): 705–13.

152. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 76.

153. Letter from Senatore Borletti to Umberto Brustio (March 2, 1919). Archivio Brustio—La Rinascente / Bocconi. Bocconi University Library and Archives.

154. In 1928, the company owned property worth over 88 million lire, which increased by 4 million lire in the next year even in the middle of the global economic crisis. See Amatori, Proprietà e direzione, 70 and 104–19.

155. See Massimo Moraglio, Storia delle prime autostrade italiane 1922–1943: Modernizzazione, affari e propaganda (Turin: Trauben, 2007).

156. Arthur Lazarus assimilated the systematic managerial forces mobilized for the organization of department stores to the centralization of state government. See Arthur Lazarus, Department Store Organization (New York: Dry Goods Economist, 1926), discussed in James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy: The Passing of the Rex (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 105. See also Hrant Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: Its Origin, Evolution and Economics (London: Newman, 1964), 7.

157. See Benedetto Barbieri, I consumi nel primo secolo dell’unità d’Italia 1861–1960 (Milan: Giuffrè, 1961).

158. “Small industry” (in Italian Piccola Industria) was defined in a law of May 19, 1922, as “that which is developed at home or in a workshop of small relevance considering the capitals mobilized, the technical resources or people employed.” See Gregotti, Il disegno del prodotto industriale, 170.

159. De Guttry and Maino, II mobile déco italiano, 216–17.

160. See Annalisa Avon, “La casa all’italiana,” in Storia dell’architettura italiana: Il primo Novecento, ed. Giorgio Ciucci and Giorgio Muratore (Milan: Electa, 2004), 165. Founded in 1925, the OND was brought under Fascist National Party control in 1927.

161. See Ferdinando Reggiori, “Il concorso nazionale per l’ammobigliamento e l’arredamento economico della casa popolare promosso dall’Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro e dall’Ente Nazionale Piccole Industrie,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VIII, 2.11 (July 1929) 481–99. See also “Esposizione di Milano del concorso nazionale per l’ammobiliamento economico indetto dall’Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro,” Domus 11 (November 1928): 36–37.

162. In 1931 the average size of an Italian family of workers was 2.98. See Stefano Musso, “La famiglia operaia,” in Melograni, La famiglia italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi, 82. The average Italian family was 4.2 members, with rural households up to 5 members on average. See Agopik Manoukian, “La famiglia dei contadini,” in Melograni, La famiglia italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi, 9.

163. Reggiori, “Il Concorso Nazionale,” 497–98.

164. “Esposizione di Milano del concorso nazionale per l’ammobiliamento economico indetto dall’Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro,” 36.

165. See de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 153.

166. Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 76.

167. Guido Marangoni, “Verso la duplice meta,” La casa bella 1 (January 1928): 9–10. La casa bella was published by Studio Editoriale Milanese and printed by Gustavo Modiano in Milan. Together with Marangoni, Arrigo Bonfiglioli was the magazine’s chief manager, and later became its director after Marangoni’s departure in 1930. Since 1926, Bonfiglioli had published the magazine Industria mobiliera italiana: Rivista tecnico mensile dell’industria, dell’artigianato e del commercio dei mobili, clearly aligned with Marangoni’s own interest in reviving the local furniture industry. See Chiara Baglione, Casabella 1928–2008 (Milan: Electa, 2008), 13–14.

168. In addition to the Biennale and La casa bella, his legacy included the lesser known Enciclopedia delle moderne arti decorative italiane, which he published between 1925 and 1928.

169. See letter from Ponti to Ojetti (October 5, 1926), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. Ponti’s own family financially supported the project. Gianni Mazzocchi, who initially worked on sales for the magazine, became Ponti’s partner in the project when in July 1929 he funded Editoriale Domus and became its director. See Luigi Spinelli, “Art in the Home,” in Domus, ed. Charlotte Fiell and Peter Fiell (Cologne: Taschen, 2006), 1:8–9; Fulvio Irace, Gio Ponti: La casa all’italiana (Milan: Electa, 1988), 13.

170. See Giovanni Semeria, La famiglia umana e cristiana (Milan: Marucelli, 1937), 94.

171. Gio Ponti, “La casa all’italiana,” Domus 1 (January 1928): 7. Translated in Fiell and Fiell, Domus, vol. 1.

172. Ponti, “La casa all’italiana,” 7. La casa all’italiana is not easily translated as “the Italian house” (which would be better translated as “la casa italiana”). It would more precisely mean “Italianness in the house,” and Maristella Casciato has suggested also “Italianness in dwelling.” See Casciato, “The ‘Casa all’Italiana’ and the Idea of Modern Dwelling in Fascist Italy,” 335. Raffaello Giolli had already used the expression “la casa italiana d’oggi” in his 1927 “Problemi d’arte attuale.”

173. Catalogo ufficiale della IV Esposizione triennale internazionale delle arti decorative ed industriali moderne (Milan: Ceschina, 1930), 19. See also Gio Ponti, “La Triennale di Monza,” Domus 29 (May 1930): 13.

174. Visita del Duce alla Mostra delle arti decorative di Monza—Nozze tra Galeazzo Ciano ed Edda Mussolini (1930 Aprile 23–1930 Giugno 10), Sezione seconda (1871–1935), Segn. 67/1 Class. 2.6, Archivio Storico Comune di Monza.

175. Catalogo ufficiale della IV Esposizione triennale internazionale delle arti decorative ed industriali moderne, 19.

176. Catalogo ufficiale della IV Esposizione triennale, 19.

177. Catalogo ufficiale della IV Esposizione triennale, 19. See also “Il concorso per l’esecuzione di oggetti artistici promosso dall’Ente Nazionale per le Piccole Industrie,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VIII, 1.4 (December 1928): 184–88.

178. See Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987 [1925]), 90.

179. See L’Italia all’esposizione internazionale delle arti decorative e industriali moderne (Paris-Milan, 1925), cited in Irace, Gio Ponti, 27. Ponti had been acquainted with Le Corbusier’s work since the Paris Expo, but they did not communicate until years later, when they began a sparse correspondence. One of the first letters addressed by Ponti to Le Corbusier contained a series of questions regarding lighting, to which Le Corbusier responded not with any particular piece of advice, but with the contact details of various lighting companies—thus revealing the transformation of the architect from the bearer of knowledge to the mediator of materials available in the market. See letter from Ponti to Le Corbusier (November 3, 1936) and letter from Le Corbusier to Ponti (December 3, 1936), Correspondence E2-19-140/142, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. The two architects were only four years apart in age.

180. Gio Ponti, “Lo stile nell’architettura e nell’arredamento. Verso funzioni nuove,” Domus 82 (October 1934): 3. See also Gio Ponti, “Arte e industria,” Domus 54 (June 1932): 323–24.

181. See Dellapiana and Prina, “Craft, Industry and Art,” 109–23; and Rossana Bossaglia, L’ISIA a Monza: Una scuola d’arte europea (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 1986). The Istituto Superiore di Industrie Artistiche operated until 1943.

182. Gio Ponti, “Occorre dare un mercato nazionale alla produzione moderna italiana,” Domus 48 (December 1931): 32.

183. Carlo Felice, “Occorre creare un mercato interno alla produzione moderna, occorre creare una produzione interna per questo mercato,” Domus 49 (January 1932): 36.

184. GANT stood for Giovani Architetti Novatori Torinesi, a name that insisted on the group’s youth and pursuit of innovation. The group included Pietro Betta, Maurizio De Rege, Mario Dezzutti, Gino Levi-Montalcini, Armando Melis de Villa, Arturo Midana, Sandro Molli, Domenico Morelli, Ettore Pittini, Paolo Perona, Mario Passanti, Giuseppe Pagano, Antonio Pogatschnig, Natale Reviglio, Gianni Ricci, and Giuseppe Rosso.

185. Plinio Marconi, “Commento alla Esposizioni di Torino,” 169. See also Roberto Papini, Sette padiglioni d’esposizione: Torino 1928 (Turin: Buratti, 1930).

186. Marconi, “Commento alla Esposizioni di Torino,” 179.

187. Gio Ponti, “La ‘Casa degli Architetti’ alla Esposizione di Torino,” Domus 9 (September 1928): 21, 22. See also “Alla Esposizione di Torino. ‘L’alloggio modello’,” La casa bella (September 1928): 25–28; and “Ancora su ‘L’alloggio modello’ di Torino,” La casa bella 10 (October 1928): 17–21.

188. Gio Ponti, “La Triennale alla Villa Reale di Monza,” Realtà: Rivista Rotariana (March 1, 1930): 236. See also Gio Ponti, “La ‘Casa delle vacanze’ alla Triennale di Monza,” Domus 33 (September 1930): 19.

189. Ponti, “La ‘Casa delle vacanze,’” 19.

190. See Ferdinando Reggiori, “La Triennale di Monza: IV Mostra internazionale delle arti decorative,” Architettura e Arti Decorative IX, 2.11 (July 1930): 494.

191. See Gio Ponti, “La ‘Casa Elettrica’ alla Triennale di Monza,” Domus 32 (August 1930): 26–34.

192. I address the relation between the culture of domestic economy and Italian architecture discourse in chapter 2.

193. See Alberto Sartoris, “Le ragioni dell’architettura detta ‘razionale’,” Domus 32 (August 1930): 35. Sartoris would become one of the main disseminators of European modern architecture in Italy, with his 1932 publication Gli elementi dell’architettura funzionale: Sintesi panoramica dell’ architettura moderna. He is credited for popularizing the concept of “rationalism” as the agenda for modern architecture in Italy.

194. See Gruppo 7, “Architettura I,” La Rassegna Italiana 19, no. 103 (December 1926): 849–54; “Architettura II: Gli stranieri,” La Rassegna Italiana 19, no. 105 (February 1927): 129–37; “Architettura III: Impreparazione, incomprensione, pregiudizi,” La Rassegna Italiana 19, no. 106 (February 1927): 247–52; “Architettura IV: Una nuova epoca archaica,” La Rassegna Italiana 19, no. 108 (May 1927): 467–42. Translated by Ellen R. Shapiro and reprinted in Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976): 89–92 and 93–102; Oppositions 12 (Spring 1978): 91–95 and 96–98. For a discussion of Gruppo 7’s work and their relevance in Italian modern architecture’s discourse during these years, see Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism, 24–35.

195. Gruppo 7, “Architettura I,” translated in Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976): 89. The expression echoed Le Corbusier’s appeal to “L’Esprit Nouveau.”

196. Rava claimed to have written the first and fourth articles and manuscripts of both are kept in the archive: “Articoli, manoscritti, estratti, riviste del ‘Gruppo 7’ e di Rava sue gruppo, 1927–36,” Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione (CSAC) dell’Università di Parma. Rava was originally invited as a founding member of the CIAM but was unable to attend and was replaced by Alberto Sartoris. Interior designer Gino Maggioni was the other Italian representative. Rava and Sartoris were subsequently involved in CIAM 2 as members of the CIRPAC. Gino Pollini and Piero Bottoni took their place for CIAM 3.

197. Gruppo 7, “Architettura I,” translated in Oppositions, 92.

198. Gruppo 7, “Architettura I,” translated in Oppositions, 91; emphasis in the original.

199. See Ferdinando Reggiori, “La Triennale di Monza: IV Mostra internazionale delle arti decorative,” Architettura e Arti Decorative IX, 2.11 (July 1930): 484.

200. Reggiori, “La Triennale di Monza,” 487–88. Despite their different sensitivities, Ponti praised all the three houses in “La vicina IV Esposizione internazionale d’arte decorativa alla Villa Reale di Monza,” Domus 27 (February 1930): 9–18.

201. Carlo Felice, “Italiani e stranieri in una esposizione d’arte decorativa moderna a New York,” Domus 10 (October 1928): 18.

202. Egmont Arens, “Art: The Prodigal Return,” The Nation 3283 (1928): 654.

203. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 386–434.

204. Giuseppe Prezzolini, Note from February 21, 1931, in Diario 1900–1941 (Milano: Rusconi, 1978), 470–71, cited in Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World, 137.

205. On the “portable” condition of Italianità see Mark Choate, “Italy at Home and Abroad after 150 Years: The Legacy of Emigration and the Future of Italianità,” Italian Culture 30, no. 1 (2012): 53.

2. Interiors in Print Media

1. Gio Ponti, “La donna e le arti applicate,” Corriere della Sera, April 26, 1930, 5.

2. Letter from Aldo Borelli to Gio Ponti (September 29, 1933), Carteggio, Archivio Storico Fondazione Corriere della Sera, Milano, included in “Dal carteggio Gio Ponti (1933–1964),” in Luca Molinari and Cecilia Rostagni, eds., Gio Ponti e il “Corriere della Sera” 1930–1936 (Milan: Fondazione Corriere della Sera, 2011), 755.

3. Letter from Ugo Ojetti to Gio Ponti (July 31, 1932), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. Ponti had previously asked Ojetti for the connection. See letter from Ponti to Ojetti (July 14, 1932), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives.

4. Gio Ponti, “Architettura per noi,” Corriere della Sera, February 10, 1935, 5. See also Luca Molinari, “Gli articoli di Ponti per il Corriere,” in Molinari and Rostagni, Gio Ponti e il “Corriere della Sera,” xiv.

5. See Bardi, “Architettura, Arte di Stato.”

6. See Marla Stone, “The State as Patron: Making Official Culture in Fascist Italy,” in Affron and Antliff, Fascist Visions, 212–13.

7. Edoardo Persico (signed Leader), “Tendenze e realizzazione,” La casa bella 29 (May 1930), 27: “presuppongono gli uomini del nostro tempo.”

8. Persico, “Tendenze e realizzazione,” 27.

9. Ponti returned to Domus in 1948 and stayed until his death in 1979.

10. This analysis is connected with the way in which Leora Auslander has regarded the role of taste in “the making of political and social order, as well as of people’s self-understandings” (Taste and Power, 1). In this pursuit, my work aligns with the way that scholars have approached other realms of visual culture, from fashion to advertising, as mediating the internal disputes of the regime. See, for example, Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Mario Lupano and Alessandra Vaccari, eds., Fashion at the Time of Fascism. Italian Modernist Lifestyle, 1922–1943 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009).

11. I have addressed the simultaneous founding of these magazines in chapter 1.

12. Brunetti, Architetti e Fascismo, 73, 79.

13. On the alliance of modernism and fascism’s palingenetic ambitions, see Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

14. Stone, “The State as Patron,” 208.

15. See Schnapp, “Epic Demonstrations,” 3.

16. These insecurities are not unique to the Italian context but characteristic of modernity. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Architectural historian Dianne Harris has already addressed this insecurity in her exploration of home monthly publications in the postwar United States (Little White Houses, 59).

17. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3–4; quoting Edward Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 171.

18. In addition to contributing to a number of publications, Ojetti founded two magazines of art criticism: Dedalo in 1921 and Pegaso in 1929.

19. In 1927, its title was shortened to Architettura and it became the journal of the National Fascist Union of Architects.

20. See Paolo Nicoloso, Marcello Piacentini: Architettura e potere: Una biografia (Udine: Gaspari, 2018); and Mario Lupano, Marcello Piacentini (Rome: Laterza, 1991).

21. On Quadrante, see Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism.

22. Maria Gasca Diez, “Note estetiche e igieniche sull’arredamento,” in La casa nell’igiene sociale, ed. Arcangelo Ilvento, Maria Diez Gasca, and Alessandro Lustig (Milan: Editoriale Scientifiche, 1925); and Maria Gasca Diez, Cucine di ieri e cucina di domani (Rome: Enios, 1928). See Marjan Boot and Maristella Casciato, eds., La casalinga riflessiva: La cucina razionale come mito domestico negli anni ’20 e ’30 (Rome: Multigrafica, 1983).

23. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 99.

24. Casciato, “The ‘Casa all’Italiana’ and the Idea of Modern Dwelling in Fascist Italy,” 241.

25. Casciato, “The ‘Casa all’Italiana’ and the Idea of Modern Dwelling in Fascist Italy,” 343.

26. The rationalization of the household was not only aligned with different politics across geographies, but was also contradictory in its pursuits within specific contexts, as Mary Nolan has argued for its unfolding in Weimar Germany. See “‘Housework Made Easy’: The Taylorized Housewife in Weimar Germany’s Rationalized Economy,” Feminist Studies 16 (1990): 551.

27. See, for example, Gaetano Minnucci, L’abitazione moderna popolare nell’architettura contemporanea olandese (Rome: Libreria di scienze e lettere, 1926).

28. Enrico A. Griffini, Costruzione razionale della casa (Milan: Hoepli, 1931). Griffini’s earlier publications include “Nuove tendenze nelle costruzioni delle case popolari,” La Casa 11 (February 1929): 99–109; and “Le case economiche dell’Esposizione di Stoccarda,” Rassegna di Architettura 7 (July 1928): 527–47. On the context of Griffini’s ideas and their impact see Luigi Pavan, “La casa popolare,” in Ciucci and Muratore, Storia dell’architettura italiana, 180–203. On a previous generation of manuals see Avon, “La casa all’italiana,” 165.

29. Griffini and Bottoni curated a section of the V Milan Triennale dedicated to public housing and published Elementi di case popular (Milan: Società grafica, 1933).

30. Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper, Architectural Graphic Standards (New York: J. Wiley, 1932); and Ernst Neufert, Bau-Entwurfslehre: Grundlagen, Normen und Vorschriften über Anlage, Bau, Gestaltung, Raumbedarf, Raumbeziehungen. Maße für Gebäude, Räume, Einrichtungen und Geräte mit dem Menschen als Maß und Ziel (Berlin: Bauwelt-Verlag, 1936).

31. Griffini, Costruzione razionale della casa, 15. Griffini studied vernacular Italian architecture in La casa rustica delle Alpi italiane (Milan: Stucchi-Ceretti, 1923); and Alcuni aspetti dell’architettura rustica della riviera ligure (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1927). See Elena Demartini, “Gli scritti sulla casa rustica,” in La casa modernissima: Enrico Agostino Griffini, tra sperimentazione e divulgazione con una antologia degli scritti, ed. Claudio Camponogara, Elena Demartini, Federico Ferrari, and Stefano Poli (Milan: L’Ornitorinco, 2012), 23–33. Griffini’s text was soon followed by Giuseppe Samonà, La casa popolare (Naples: EPSA, 1935).

32. Elisa Ricci, La casa (Florence: Le Monnier, 1922); Lidia Morelli, La casa che vorrei avere: Come ideare, disporre, arredare, abbellire, rimodernare la mia casa (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1931); and Lidia Morelli, Come sistemare e governare la mia casa (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1932).

33. Morelli, La casa che vorrei avere, 13, 15.

34. Morelli, La casa che vorrei avere, 85–56.

35. Raffaello Giolli, “Dedica,” Problemi d’arte attuale 1 (October 1927): 1. For a contextualization of Giolli’s editorial and critical work see Cesare de Seta, Il destino dell’architettura: Persico, Giolli, Pagano (Rome: Laterza, 1985), 116–18.

36. Raffaello Giolli, “Consigli per la casa,” Problemi d’arte attuale 1 (October 1927): 11.

37. Gio Ponti (signed Domus), “Formazione del gusto,” Domus 71 (November 1933): 573.

38. Gio Ponti, “La ‘machine à habiter,’” Domus (June 1928): 10. On this issue, see Flavia Marcello, “Una macchina per abitare? Modern Italian Housing between Gio Ponti’s Casa all’italiana and Le Corbusier’s Machine à Habiter,” in Housekeeping. The Artistic Legacy of Le Corbusier’s machine à habiter, ed. Anna Novakov and Elisabeth Schmidle (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen Press, 2008), 89–108.

39. Gio Ponti, “La casa di moda,” Domus (October 1928): 11.

40. Edoardo Persico (attributed, signed Casa Bella), “Il nostro lavoro nel 1930,” La casa bella 36 (December 1930): 1.

41. See Gio Ponti, “1933/1934,” Domus 72 (December 1933): 623. In a later letter, Ponti reflected on how Casabella’s more focused profile allowed him to maintain the heterodox profile of Domus throughout the 1930s. Letter from Gio Ponti to Donna Daria Borghese (February 7, 1950), not classified, Archivio Domus, Milan. On this topic, see also Fulvio Irace, “Domus: A House for Italians,” in Fielle and Fielle, Domus, 1:12–14.

42. Giuseppe Pagano, “Le ville,” Casabella 67 (July 1933): 2–3.

43. See “Gli anni 28–33. Novecento e razionalismo,” and Cesare de Seta, “Edoardo Persico e Giuseppe Pagano a Casabella,” Casabella 440–441, Casabella cinquant’anni 1928–78 (October–November 1978): 11–20. See also Baglione, Casabella 1928–2008, 18–20.

44. For a discussion of Casabella’s graphic design see Antonio D’Auria, “Persico architetto e grafico,” in Edoardo Persico 1900–1936, ed. Cesare de Seta (Naples: Electa, 1987), 131–36. See also Francesco Tentori, Edoardo Persico grafico e architetto (Naples: Clean, 2006).

45. See Rossano Astarita, Casabella Anni Trenta: Una cucina per il moderno (Milan: Jaca, 2010). Astarita highlights the decisive role played by Mazzucchelli (who married Argan in 1939) in the editorial direction of the project. The significance of Casabella has been highlighted by a number of historians since the early postwar period, including Bruno Zevi, Storia dell’architettura moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), 267; Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco dal Co, Architettura Contemporanea (Milan: Electa, 1976), 254; and Jean Louis Cohen, introduction to Silvia Danesi and Luciano Patetta, Rationalisme et architecture en Italie 1919–1943 (Paris: Electra, 1977), 10.

46. See, in particular, the criticism of the Quadrante group in Piero Bottoni, Mario Cereghini, Luigi Figini, Guido Frette, Enrico A. Griffini, Piero Lingeri, Gino Pollini, Gian Luigi Banfi, Lodovico B. di Belgioioso, Enrico Peressutti, and Ernesto N. Rogers, “Un Programma d’Architettura,” Quadrante 1 (1933): 5. See also Pietro Maria Bardi, “Tra Quadrante e Casabella,” Casabella 440–441, Casabella cinquant’anni 1928–78 (October–November 1978): 39.

47. While the magazine had a print run of around 3,000 at the beginning of the decade, this number had shrunk to 2,500 by 1935. As Astarita has argued, this is still a sizeable number compared with other professional magazines such as Quadrante, which in 1936 had a print run of 1,000. See Astarita, Casabella Anni Trenta, 27. While there is no consistent information on this question regarding Domus (due to the wartime bomb damage of its archive), Luigi Spinelli has argued that the magazine’s initial print run was 100,000. According to him, this run remained unsold, but this number speaks to the ambition of the magazine. See Luigi Spinelli, “Art in the Home,” in Fielle and Fielle, Domus 1:8. The price of both magazines was quite similar, increasing throughout the period from between 7 to 10 lire to reach 15 lire by the end of the 1930s.

48. While the leading architects of the period had diverse origins, they typically operated from upper-class contexts and their work was broadly characterized by an elitist attitude. See Cesare de Seta, “Cultura e architettura in Italia tra le due guerre,” in Danesi and Patetta, Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo, 10.

49. “Elogio dell’incisione,” Domus 27 (March 1930): 31.

50. Print media were not the only kind of media included in the interior, since radios were also increasingly popularized at the time in Italy, even if at a slower rate than in other Western countries. See, for example, Philip V. Cannistraro, “The Radio in Fascist Italy,” Journal of European Studies 2 (1972): 127–54; and Franco Monteleone, La radio italiana nel periodo fascista (Venice: Marsilio, 1984). New designs for radios were often featured in articles and advertisements in the magazines, and in 1936 Domus and Casabella co-organized a competition to design a radio that was won by BBPR. See “Realizzazioni nel campo della radio,” Domus 106 (October 1936): 53.

51. Edoardo Persico, “Profezia dell’architettura” (lecture delivered June 21, 1935), in Edoardo Persico: Tutte le opere, 1923–1935, ed. Giulia Veronesi (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1964), 2:234.

52. On Persico’s relation with his contemporary art scene see Elena Pontiggia, ed., Edoardo Persico e gli artisti 1929–1936: Il percorso di un critico dall’impressionismo al primitivismo (Milan: Electa, 1998).

53. Angelo D’Orsi, “Il cavaliere dalla triste figura: Edoardo Persico da Napoli a Torino,” in Intellettuali nel Novecento italiano (Turin: Einaudi 2001), 146–253.

54. On Persico’s collaboration with Bardi, including an exhibition in the gallery of the latter in Milan, see Imma Forino, “Private Exhibitions: Galleries, Art and Interior Design, 1920–1960,” in Lees-Maffei and Fallan, Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, 167. On the ambiguity of Persico’s politics see Andrea Camilleri, Dentro il labirinto (Milan: Skira, 2012).

55. See Alberto Bassi and Laura Castagno, Giuseppe Pagano (Rome: Laterza, 1994); and Flavia Marcello, Giuseppe Pagano: Design for Social Change in Fascist Italy (Chicago: Intellect Books, 2020).

56. See Società piemontese d’archeologia e di belle arti, Turin, Torino 1920–1936: Società e cultura tra sviluppo industriale e capitalismo (Turin: Progetto, 1976).

57. See Roberto Gabetti, Riccardo Gualino e la Torino degli anni 20 (Turin: Centro Studi Piamontesi, 1982).

58. See Vittorio Viale, I sei di Torino: 1929–1932 (Turin: C. Poligrafiche Riunite, 1965) and Mirella Bandini, I sei pittori di Torino (Quart: Musumeci, 1999). See also De Seta, La cultura architettonica in Italia tra la due guerre, 96.

59. See Doordan, Building Modern Italy, 58–60.

60. Lionello Venturi, Il gusto dei primitivi (1926; Turin: Einaudi, 1972), 15. On the concept of taste for Venturi and its influence in Persico see also Renato de Fusco, L’idea di architettura: Storia della critica da Viollet-le-Duc a Persico (Milan: Etas, 1968), 234.

61. On the relationship between Venturi and Croce see de Fusco, L’idea di architettura, 202.

62. Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1964 [1936]), 320.

63. See Lionello Venturi, “Per la nuova architettura,” Casabella 61 (January 1933): 3. “There are many ways in which moral content is able to become art but, naturally, only one is good, and that is its reappearance in a tradition.”

64. Frederick Etchells’s 1927 translation of Le Corbusier’s book was titled Towards a New Architecture. Although this translation predates Venturi’s text, it is more likely that Venturi had read the work in French, and meant his title as a critical response to Le Corbusier’s arguments. Vers une architecture was not translated into Italian until 1973.

65. Venturi, “Per la nuova architettura,” 3.

66. Edoardo Persico, “Stile,” La casa bella 29 (May 1930): 104.

67. Edoardo Persico, “Un alloggio a Milano,” Casabella 64 (April 1933): 30–31.

68. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Punto di partenza per la nuova architettura,” Casabella 64 (April 1933): 2; Carlo Levi, “Considerazioni sulla architettura,” Casabella 69 (September 1933): 3.

69. Venturi, “Per la nuova architettura,” 3.

70. Edoardo Persico, “Due arredamenti,” La casa bella 42 (June 1931): 22–25.

71. Persico, “Due arredamenti,” 24.

72. The distinction between the “expressive” and the “representative” functions of art was contemporaneously delineated by Croce (with the former being intuitive and the second being conceptual). See Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1902]).

73. Croce, Aesthetica in nuce, 14. Persico’s reviews of interiors might be considered part of his commitment to write “a history of architecture that goes hand in hand with that of modern man.” See “Profezia dell’architettura,” in Edoardo Persico: Tutte le opere, 1923–1935, 2:231. For additional remarks on this question see De Seta, Il destino dell’architettura, 10–11.

74. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 19.

75. Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 8.

76. Gio Ponti, “Un arredamento degli architetti Banfi, Belgioioso, Peressutti, Rogers,” Domus 128 (August 1938): 2 (emphasis added).

77. Ponti, “Un arredamento degli architetti Banfi, Belgioioso, Peressutti, Rogers,” 2.

78. Beatriz Colomina’s analysis is critical to discuss the relationship between architecture as a form of representation and in relation to its representation in media; see Privacy and Publicity: Architecture and Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

79. The increasing relevance of architecture at the Triennale meant that Ponti had a leading role in the framing of the show. See Agnoldomenico Pica, Storia della Triennale 1918–1957 (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1957), 37.

80. Gio Ponti, “Stile e civiltà,” Domus 45 (June 1931): 23. I have addressed the complex translation of the term civiltà as both culture and civilization in the introduction and chapter 1.

81. Ponti, “Stile e civiltà,” 23.

82. The term civiltà was increasingly mobilized following the anti-individualistic impetus of fascist rhetoric (in expressions such as “Fascist civiltà”) and in the regime’s appeal to traditional or racial constructions (as in “Mediterranean civiltà.”) However, the term was also deployed in liberal and democratic arguments in response, appealing to values that coalesced around shared ideas of progress beyond the country.

83. See Benito Mussolini’s speech before the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia in 1926, “Arte e Civiltà,” in Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, ed. Eduardo and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1957), 230. The exhibition’s title directly echoed the title of this speech.

84. Gio Ponti, “Quale sarà la nostra casa domani,” Domus 49 (January 1932): 2.

85. Ponti, “Quale sarà la nostra casa domani,” 2.

86. Ponti, “Quale sarà la nostra casa domani,” 2.

87. Ponti, “Quale sarà la nostra casa domani,” 2.

88. Ponti, “Quale sarà la nostra casa domani,” 2.

89. Gio Ponti (unsigned, attributed), “V Triennale di Milano. Esposizione Internazionale d’architettura moderna, 1933-XI,” Domus 61 (January 1933): 1.

90. Edoardo Persico, “La casa nuova” (incomplete and unpublished, 1935), in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 2:219.

91. Persico, “La casa nuova,” 219, 220.

92. Edoardo Persico (unsigned, attributed), “Arredamenti di Alosio e di due artisti Francesi,” La casa bella 56 (August, 1932), 23. Also in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 2:87.

93. Edoardo Persico (unsigned, attributed), “Arredamento a Venezia di De Lugi e Scarpa,” La casa bella 55 (July, 1932), 35. Also in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 2:86.

94. Edoardo Persico, “Errori Stranieri,” L’Italia Letteraria (May 28, 1933), included in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 1923–1935, 2:130. See also Edoardo Perisco, “Il gusto italiano,” L’Italia Letteraria, June 4, 1933, included in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 1923–1935, 2:135–40.

95. Edoardo Persico, “L’architetto Gio Ponti,” L’Italia Letteraria (April 29, 1934), included in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 2:268.

96. Giuseppe Pagano, “L’internazionale cattivo gusto,” Casabella 74 (February 1934): 37.

97. Pagano, “L’internazionale cattivo gusto,” 38.

98. Venturi, “Per la nuova architettura,” 3.

99. Giuseppe Pagano, “Architettura moderna di venti secoli fa,” La casa bella 47 (November 1931): 18. Michelangelo Sabatino has analyzed the relationship between Pagano’s position and other contemporaneous approaches to “minor architecture”; see “Engineering versus Architecture: The Vernacular between New Objectivity and Lyricism,” in Pride in Modesty, 128–64.

100. Giuseppe Pagano, “L’estetica delle costruzioni d’acciaio,” Casabella 68–69 (August–September 1933): 66–67. Pagano would later develop his interest in serial production with his curatorial role in the Mostra internazionale della produzione in serie for the VII Triennale of 1940.

101. A genealogy for this concern goes back to many of the references that Persico mobilized, including Pugin and Morris, along what Renato de Fusco has called a “sociological critique” of the decorative arts and architecture (L’idea di architettura, 135).

102. Giuseppe Pagano, “Tre anni di architettura in Italia,” Casabella 110 (February 1937): 3.

103. Pagano, “L’internazionale cattivo gusto,” 39.

104. Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), 29, in Antonio Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 128.

105. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 29, in Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, 128.

106. De Seta, La cultura architettonica in Italia tra le due guerre, 53.

107. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 14, in Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, 102. Here and in the previous quote, the notion of “taste” seems to be aligned with Venturi’s understanding, even if elsewhere Gramsci discussed taste as “individual.” See Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 63, in Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, 204.

108. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 189.

109. Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale, 216, in Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, 189.

110. As I discussed in the introduction, for Gramsci hegemony is the attitudes and behaviors that are taken for granted as “common sense,” often shaped and deployed by the ruling classes to achieve social consent. For a relevant discussion on Gramsci’s contribution to the relation between popular culture, politics, and state power see Tony Bennett, “Introduction: Popular Culture and the Turn to Gramsci” and Stuart Hall, “Popular Culture and the State,” both in Popular Culture and Social Relations, ed. Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986).

111. In this regard, see Stuart Hall’s reading of Gramsci in “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’” (1981) in Essential Essays, ed. David Morley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 1:347–61.

112. Edoardo Persico (signed Casa Bella), “Il nostro lavoro nel 1930,” La casa bella 36 (December 1930): 1.

113. Persico, “Punto e da capo per l’architettura,” 8. I discuss Persico’s position in chapter 3.

114. Giuseppe Pagano, “Architettura nazionale,” Casabella 96 (December 1935): 5; and Giuseppe Pagano, “Mussolini salva l’architettura italiana,” Casabella 78 (June 1934): 2. Pagano unquestionably aligned his pursuit for a “popular” taste with Mussolini’s program by advocating for “a true Italian architecture [that would] express a brutal clarity, the scrupulous administration of public funds, and an exemplary simplicity” (“Architettura nazionale,” 5). Daria Ricchi has addressed Pagano’s program in relation to Persico’s in “‘Andare verso il popolo (Moving Towards the People)’: Classicism and Rural Architecture at the 1936 VI Italian Triennale,” Architectural Histories 9, no. 1 (2021): 1–18. I will return to discuss Pagano’s position in chapter 5.

115. Ponti, “Architettura per noi,” 5.

116. Ghirardo, “Italian Architects and Fascist Politics,” 122.

117. With this statement, I do not aim to foreclose the discussion on the political nuances of the projects of these different actors (which remain particularly ambiguous in the case of Persico and Pagano). I want to highlight, however, that the distance between their projects and the worldviews of the diverse Italian peoples is the same one that Gramsci identified as prevailing among Italian intellectuals in his ruminations on the nature of “national-popular” cultural manifestations. Gramsci argued that Italian intellectuals “do not come from the people, even if by accident some of them have origins among the people. They do not feel tied to them (rhetoric apart), they do not know and sense their needs, aspirations, and feelings. In relation to the people, they are something detached, without foundation, a caste and not an articulation with organic functions of the people themselves. [. . .] In relation to the people-nation the indigenous intellectual element is more foreign than the foreigners” (Letteratura e vita nazionale, 105–6, in Gramsci, Selections of Cultural Writings, 209–10). To make sense of the way in which the diversity of references of these different critics were combined in this elitist program, it is also helpful to remember Tony Bennett’s proposal that we regard bourgeois culture as “a mobile combination of cultural and ideological elements derived from different class locations which are, but only provisionally and for the duration of specific historical conjecture, affiliated to bourgeois values, interests and objectives”; see “Popular Culture and the ‘Turn to Gramsci,” xv.

118. Gio Ponti, “Divagazioni su un ambiente,” Corriere della Sera, November 5, 1933, 5.

119. One could consider these exclusions as a differentiated version of the way in which Pierre Bourdieu has argued that different tastes are not merely an organic result of different social positions but themselves also a mode of social stratification; see Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 57.

120. Gio Ponti, “Due tendenze moderne nell’arredamento della casa,” Domus 18 (June 1929): 21–24. Despite its different emphasis, Casabella similarly appealed to and praised the “diverse aspects of contemporary taste.” See “Aspetti diversi del gusto attuale,” La casa bella 44 (August 1931).

121. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Svolta pericolosa,” Domus 37 (January 1931): 39–44.

122. Eve Blau has characterized Frank’s work through the principle of assemblage; see The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 194–95.

123. Piero Bottoni, Bedarida residence, featured in “Una casa risistemata,” Domus 131 (November 1938): 44; and Lamonaca, “A ‘Return to Order,’” 217.

124. Advertisement for Knoll armchair “La gioia del riposo,” one of the products most frequently advertised in both Domus and La casa bella in the first half of the 1930s.

125. Edoardo Persico, “Il gusto Italiano,” L’Italia Letteraria, July 4, 1933, in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 1923–1935, 2:135–40. See also Edoardo Persico, “L’architetto Gio Ponti,” L’Italia Letteraria, April 29, 1934, in Edoardo Persico: Tutte Le Opere, 1923–1935, 2:268–70.

126. Gio Ponti, “Il gusto di Hoffmann,” Domus 93 (September 1935): 3; and Gio Ponti, “Carattere dell’opera di Marcello Breuer,” Domus 86 (February 1935): 11–17. Carlo Rava had mentioned Breuer’s work for the first time in the magazine in Carlo Enrico Rava, “Necessità di selezione. Parte seconda,” Domus 40 (April 1931): 39–43.

127. See examples of these conflations in “Una ‘Villa romantica’ rimodernata da Rava,” Domus 84 (December 1934): 38–39; “Trasformazione d’una veranda,” Domus 85 (January 1935): 22–24.

128. Advertisement for a Poltrona Frau armchair in Domus 128 (August 1938): 6.

129. See David Gross, “Temporality and the Modern State,” Theory and Society 14, no. 1 (January 1985): 66.

130. See Payne, From Ornament to Object; and Spyros Papapetros, “Ornament and Object—Ornament as Object,” Journal of Art Historiography 7 (2013): 1–12.

131. See Instituto per gli studi di politica internazionale, Autarchy (Milan: A. Nicola, 1938). For an exceptional account of the materials used throughout the period in the production of furnishings see Tonelli Michail, Il design in Italia, 87–122.

132. Gio Ponti, “La Triennale alla Villa Reale di Monza,” Realtà, March 1, 1930, 228, translated in Marianne Lamonaca, “Tradition as Transformation: Gio Ponti’s Program for the Modern Italian Home, 1928–1933,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 5, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 1997–98): 70.

133. Ugo Ojetti, “L’Esposizione delle arti decorative a Monza,” Corriere della Sera, May 11, 1930, 3.

134. For an analysis of the myths associated with modern materials in Italian design (though focusing on the textile industry), see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “The Fabric of Modern Times,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 191–245.

135. Gio Ponti, “L’arredamento alla Triennale,” Domus 67 (July 1933): 376.

136. Ugo Ojetti, “Lettera a Giovanni Ponti sul lusso necessario,” Pegaso 1 (January 1933): 97.

137. Piero Bottoni, “Arredamento della casa popolare,” and Piero Bottoni and Enrico Griffini, “Elementi di case popolari alla V Triennale,” Quadrante 3 (July 1933): 19–25. These furnishings were also included by Griffini in his Costruzione razionale della casa and featured in the V Milan Triennale.

138. Letter from Ponti to Ojetti (January 31, 1932), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. This letter was written in response to a previous letter by Ojetti in which he had criticized Ponti’s modernist tendencies in his program for the 1930 Triennale, which he thought promoted “newness at any cost”; see letter from Ugo Ojetti to Ponti (May 21, 1931), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. On the terminology of modernist architecture in Italy see Paolo Nicoloso, “Le parole dell’architettura: Il dibattito terminologico 1929–1931,” in Ernesti, La costruzione dell’utopia, 31–45.

139. I have addressed this question in chapter 1.

140. See Sparke, Design in Italy, 65–72.

141. In this sense, it was closer to Quatremère de Quincy’s engagement with types, as explained by Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 86.

142. See, for example, Pietro Selvatico, Il disegno elementare e superiore ad uso delle scuole pubbliche e private d’Italia (Padua: F. Sacchetto, 1872).

143. Giuseppe Ronchetti, Grammatica del disegno: Metodo pratico per imparare il disegno (Milan: Hoepli, 1902).

144. Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “Introduction: Architecture and Technics,” in Design Techniques: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice, ed. Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

145. See Anthony Vidler, “Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation,” Representations 72 (Autumn 2000): 8.

146. Nader Vossoughian, “Standardization Reconsidered: Normierung in and after Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre (1936),” Grey Room 54 (2014): 40–41.

147. See, for example, Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, Quaderno 1: Sedie, Cucine, Armadi (Rome: Edizioni ENAPI, 1933).

148. See, for example, “Libreria aperta/ Libreria con sportello a ribalta,” Domus 50 (February 1932): 118. The design of a bookshelf published by Ponti as an anonymous model offered construction documents at the price of L.50. On the DIY culture in the United States see Carolyn Goldstein, Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998).

149. See, for example, “Annotazioni dell’architetto,” Domus 73 (January 1934); and Gio Ponti, “Elementi tipici: Ordinativo balaustre” (ca. 1933), PRA 72 / GPON 112/2, Archivio Gio Ponti, CSAC, Università di Parma.

150. Gio Ponti, “Nuova concezione dell’edificio di abitazione,” Domus 52 (April 1932): 187. Similar arguments were developed in Gio Ponti, “Distribuzione e proporzioni degli ambienti” and “L’apparecchio per abitare,” Corriere della Sera, February 15, 1934, 5.

151. On the shrinking condition of urban dwelling see Casciato, “L’abitazione e gli spazi domestici,” 535. Fulvio Irace has carefully analyzed how many of these transformations unfolded in Ponti’s own designs; see “Le case ‘tipiche,’” in Gio Ponti: La casa all’italiana, 73–82. See also Fulvio Irace, “Gio Ponti e la ‘casa attrezzata,’” Ottagono 82 (1986): 50–59, including developments of Ponti’s work beyond this period.

152. Far from unique to Italy, this shift was common in both Europe and the United States. See, for example, Katherine C. Grier, “Decline of the Memory Palace: The Parlor after 1890,” in American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, ed. Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 49–74.

153. Elisa Ricci, La casa (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1921), 14.

154. See Morelli, La casa che vorrei avere, 85, 115–16, 133. See also Lidia Morelli, “La dona, la casa e la radio,” Radiocorrere 8, no. 1 (January 1932): 25. For earlier social shifts supporting these new distributions see Ann Hallmore Caesar, “Women and the Public/Private Divide: The Salotto, Home and Theatre in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy,” in Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy 1860–1945, ed. Perry Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 105–21. On these concerns beyond Italy see Hilde Heynen, “Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions,” in Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde Heinen and Gülsüm Baydar (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–29.

155. Gio Ponti, “Distribuzione e proporzioni degli ambienti,” Corriere della Sera, October 22, 1933, 6.

156. Gino Levi-Montalcini, “Il salotto interpretato come camera di soggiorno,” La casa bella 13 (January 1929): 26.

157. Ponti, “Distribuzione e proporzioni degli ambienti,” 6.

158. On this topic see also Irace, “Gio Ponti e la ‘casa attrezzata.’”

159. Levi-Montalcini, “Il salotto interpretato come camera di soggiorno,” 26.

160. See, for example, the republication of some of the magazine’s arguments in “Note di Economia Domestica (Da L’Organizzazione scientifica del lavoro),” Domus 110 (February 1937): xvi; and “Consigli tecnici per la casa,” Domus 137 (May 1939): 25. Diana Garvin has provided an excellent analysis of contemporaneous conversations on the kitchen in Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).

161. Ignazio Gardella, “I servizi della casa: La cucina,” Domus 133 (January 1939): 56.

162. Morelli, La casa che vorrei avere, 74–75; Gardella, “I servizi della casa: La Cucina,” 56.

163. Lidia Morelli, Dalla cucina al salotto: Enciclopedia della vita domestica (Turin: S. Lattes, 1935).

164. See Garvin, Feeding Fascism, 121.

165. Gardella, “I servizi della casa: La cucina,” 56.

166. Pietro Maria Bardi, Un fascista al paese dei soviet (Rome: L’Edizioni d’Italia, 1933), 157–58.

167. First published in 1929, political involvement in the book grew throughout the fascist period, with the inclusion in 1934 of an “Elogio della cucina italiana.” See Harry Eli Kashdan, “Local Recipes in the National Kitchen: The Life and Legacies of Ada Boni’s Il talismano della felicità,” Italian Culture 39, no. 2 (2021): 174–200. See also Massimo Montanari, L’identità italiana in cucina (Rome: Laterza, 2010); and Emanuela Scarpellini, Food and Foodways in Italy from 1861 to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

168. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Luigi Colombo Fillia, “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking,” Gazzetta del Popolo, December 28, 1930. See also Carol Helstosky, “Recipe for the Nation: Reading Italian History through La Scienza in Cucina and La Cucina Futurista,” Food and Foodways 11, no. 2–3 (2003): 113–40.

169. Ada Boni, Il talismano della felicità, 6th ed. (Rome: Preziosa, 1939) 17; “La cucina elegante: Specialità di Milano,” Domus 85 (January 1935): 54–59; “Per una buona cucina,” Domus 109 (January 1937): xx–xxi.

170. Conversations between architects and household experts were common in modern architecture across the international scene. See, for example, Anna-Maria Meister, “‘Housewives and Architects’: Marie-Elisabeth Lüders’ Management of the New Architecture from Pot-Lid to Siedlung,” Architectural Histories 10, no. 1 (2022): 1–24. Garvin has insisted on the relevance of these conversations for discussions concerning the kitchen, but they expanded beyond this significant space (Feeding Fascism, 131).

171. Piero Bottoni, “Determinare i criteri della casa di oggi,” Domus 145 (1940): 24.

172. Gasca Diez, Cucine di ieri, cucine di domani, 44.

173. See Piero Cimbolli Spagnesi, “Fondamenti normativi dell’insegnamento dell’architettura a Roma e in Italia, 1871–1935,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, “Le nuove sedi universitarie e la città” (2018): 39–64; Gianni Ottolini, “La Scuola di Milano e gli interni” (unpublished report); Michele Ugolini and Amedeo Zilioli, “La didattica dell’arredamento nelle Facoltà di Architettura in Italia—Milano, Dottorato di Ricerca di Arredamento e Architettura delgi Interni, VII Ciclo, Politecnico di Milano, Facoltà di Architettura, Dipartimento di Progettazione dell’Architettura” (report including a comprehensive archive of class syllabi, unpublished); and Elena Dellapiana, “Da dove vengono i designer (se non si insegna i design)? Torino dagli anni Trenta ai Sessanta,” Quaderni di Architettura e Design 1, “Insegnare Architettura e Design” (2018): 237–50. Ponti’s class included exercises ranging from specific furniture pieces to ensembles, domestic spaces, and rooms in representative buildings.

174. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35.

175. See Rita Cambria, “I giornali milanesi e l’organizzazione del consenso,” in Milano durante el fascismo, 1922–1945 (Milan: Cariplo, 1994).

176. See Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso, 173. See also Paolo Murialdi, La stampa del regime fascista (Milan: Laterza, 2008).

177. Letter from Augusto Turati to Corriere della Sera, cited in Doug Thompson, State Control in Fascist Italy: Culture and Conformity, 1925–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 126. Thompson suggests that the letter might be understood to be pointing at Ugo Ojetti, the newspaper’s chief editor, despite his alliance with the regime. Control consequently passed to the Crespi brothers.

178. Illustrations sometimes defied the technical limitations of their reproduction, and creatively addressed suggestions for color combinations, for example. See Gio Ponti, “I colori nell’arredamento,” Corriere della Sera, December 31, 1933, 5.

179. Gio Ponti, “Divagazioni su un ambiente,” Corriere della Sera, November 5, 1933, 5.

180. While such understanding of manuals was quite generalized, I am borrowing the quote from the Architectural Graphic Standards quoted in Paul Emmons, “Diagrammatic Practices: The Office of Frederick L. Ackerman and ‘Architectural Graphic Standards,’” JSAH 64, no. 1 (March 2005): 5. Emmons himself challenges the alleged neutrality of the manual in his arguments. Others have done the same with the contemporaneous work of Ernst Neufert in Germany. See Anna-Maria Meister, “Ernst Neufert’s ‘Lebensgestaltungslehre’: Formatting Life beyond the Built,” BJHS Themes 5 (2020): 167–85.

181. Gio Ponti, “Ambienti in trasformazione,” Corriere della Sera, November, 21, 1933, 5.

182. See Gio Ponti, “Divagazioni su un ambiente,” Corriere della Sera, November 5, 1933, 5; and “Tutta la Nazione celebra con imponenti manifestazioni di Popolo al RE e al DUCE il valore e la gloria dell Armi italiane nel XV anniversario della Vittoria,” Corriere della Sera, November 5, 1933, 1.

183. Ponti, “Tutta la Nazione . . . ,” 1; and “Divagazioni su un ambiente,” 5.

184. Particularly interesting is the use of “noi” in Ponti, “Architettura per noi.”

185. Ponti, “Ambienti in trasformazione,” 5.

186. Gio Ponti, “Distribuzione e proporzioni degli ambienti,” Corriere della Sera, October 22, 1933, 13; and Gio Ponti, “Case per famiglie numerose,” Corriere della Sera, April 19, 1934, 5.

187. See “L’alto elogio del Duce all’opera delle Casse di risparmio. Lo Stato, difendendo fermentemente la lira, ha impedito ogni perdita ai risparmiatori,” Corriere della Sera, October 22, 1933, 1.

188. Alfredo Rocco, “La dottrina polica del fascismo [Address delivered in Perugia, 20 August],” in Scritti e discorsi politici (Milan: Giuffrè, 1938), 3:1103, quoted in Horn, Social Bodies, 26–27.

189. Gio Ponti, “L’arredamento semplice,” Corriere della Sera, June 7, 1934, 5.

190. “La distribuzione dei prodotti,” Corriere della Sera, June 7, 1934, 1.

191. “La distribuzione dei prodotti,” Corriere della Sera, June 7, 1934, 1.

192. See Metron, “Le comunicazioni e i trasporti nell’ultimo decennio,” Corriere della Sera, June 7, 1934, 5.

193. Ponti, “Architettura per noi,” 5. This proposition makes particular sense if we understand tradition, following Stuart Hall’s reading of Gramsci, as an arena defined by how “elements have been linked together or articulated”—a project of articulation that Ponti’s publications effectively pursued (“Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’,” 357).

194. Enrico Arrigotti, “Case cantoniere,” in Quadrante 35–36 (October 1936), 34, quoted in Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism, 175.

195. Gio Ponti, “Una abitazione dimostrativa,” Domus 103 (July 1936): 14.

196. See Carlo Felice, Giuseppe Pagano, and Mario Sironi, “Programma della VI Triennale 1936,” Casabella 76 (April 1934): 2.

197. Doordan, Building Modern Italy, 146.

198. Giulio Barella, preface to Tecnica dell’abitazione: Quaderni della Triennale (Milan: Hoepli, 1936), 7. Domestic interiors were discussed alongside broader technical concerns not only in the Dwelling show but also in the Building Systems and Materials show curated by Pagano and Guido Frette.

199. Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Introduzione alla Mostra dell’abitazione,” in Guida della Sesta Triennale (Milan: S.AlM.E., 1936), 19. Also in Tecnica dell’abitazione, 10.

200. Giuseppe Pagano, Tecnica dell’abitazione, 11.

201. See Raffaello Giolli, “La mostra dell’abitazione,” Casabella 106 (October 1936): 224–25.

202. Consider, for example, Irenio Diotallevi and Franco Marescotti, “Analisi e problemi della casa popolare,” Costruzioni Casabella 162–164 (1941): 20–43.

203. Giuseppe Pagano, “Una solenne paternale,” Costruzioni Casabella 149 (May 1940): 2.

204. Giuseppe Pagano, “Potremo salvarci dalle false tradizioni e dalle ossessioni monumentali?,” Costruzioni Casabella 157 (January 1941): 2.

205. Gio Ponti, editorial in Domus 122 (February 1938): xxv.

206. Letter from Gio Ponti to Aldo Borelli (November 5, 1936), Carteggio, Archivio Storico Fondazione Corriere della Sera, Milano. Included in “Dal carteggio Gio Ponti (1933–1964),” in Molinari and Rostagni, Gio Ponti e il “Corriere della Sera” 1930–1936, 757–58.

207. Note in original drawings, Gio Ponti, Giuseppe Vaccaro, Cesare Valle, Ignazio Guidi, “Progetto per il Piano Regolatore della città di Addis-Abeba,” PRA 80, Archivio Gio Ponti, CSAC, Università di Parma.

208. On this question see “Who Needs Identity,” in Stuart Hall, Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 1–16. I analyze these entanglements in greater depth in chapter 4.

209. The identification of life within the interior—its provision with an identity—is part of the systems that, following Homi Bhabha, we might consider to “signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the straight insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the language of the law and the parole of the people” (introduction to Nation and Narration, 2).

210. Fulvio Irace, for example, has considered Ponti’s style as a means of evasion in La casa all’a italiana, 37. Ponti himself referred to the house as a place of evasion in “La casa ‘vivente,’” Bellezza 10 (1941): 39–41.

3. National Film Sets

1. Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of apparatuses as “orienting” devices seems relevant in this context; see “What Is an Apparatus?” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12. The notion of apparatus has been widely mobilized in film studies since the 1970s, starting with film theorists like Jean-Louis Baudry; see “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus” (1970) in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 345–55.

2. See interview with Mario Camerini in Francisco Savio, ed., Cinecittà anni trenta: Parlano 116 protagonisti del secondo cinema italiano, 1930–1943 (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1979), 1:218.

3. For a critical history of Cinecittà see Massimiliano Fasoli, ed., La città del cinema: Produzione e lavoro nel cinema Italiano 1930–1970 (Rome: Napoleone, 1979).

4. In Italy and elsewhere, white telephones were a status symbol at a time when most phones were made of black Bakelite. The white telephone became a contested signifier in debates about taste in films in different Western countries. See, for example, Gabrielle Esperdy, “From Instruction to Consumption: Architecture and Design in Hollywood Movies of the 1930s,” Journal of American Culture 2 (June 2007): 198, 211.

5. See Filippo Sacchi, “Pieno successo di ‘Grande Magazzini,’” Corriere della Sera, August 11, 1939, 2.

6. On the culture of celebrities in Italian interwar cinema see Forgacs and Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society, 160. See also a review of the film in Umberto Barbaro, “La VII Esposizione di Venezia: I film italiani,” Bianco e Nero 9 (September 1939), 9.

7. There were more than four thousand theaters in the country that year, providing for 622,271 days of screening. See Fasoli, ed., La città del cinema, 398–99.

8. See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), xvi.

9. Interview with Mario Camerini in Savio, Cinecittà anni trenta, 217. Il Signor Max would eventually be awarded the Ministry of Popular Culture Cup.

10. Cinema was described as the regime’s strongest weapon at the groundbreaking ceremony for Cinecittà. Previous scholarship has explored how diverse film genres related to the politics of the period beyond the more obviously propagandistic films. See Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy; Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, eds., Re-viewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922–1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Steven Ricci, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). I have appealed to the understanding of architecture as the “art of the state” in the introduction.

11. The complete quotation reads: “Order, hierarchy, the importance of classical precedent, and technological innovation as a sign of industrial progress could all be readily exploited to give concrete form to abstract political values” (Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism, 13).

12. Architecture and film had found alternative alliances in other European countries at an earlier time, with foci other than interiors and furnishing. These included the architectural inventions of German expressionist films; the filmic spatial explorations of Mallet-Stevens in France; and the speculations on architecture and montage by Sergei Eisenstein, among others, all developed throughout the 1920s and early 1930s (even if the latter would only consolidate them in writing a decade later).

13. Edoardo Persico, “Un alloggio a Milano,” Casabella 64 (April 1933): 30.

14. Persico, “Un alloggio a Milano,” 30.

15. Persico, “Un alloggio a Milano,” 30.

16. See de Seta, La cultura architettonica in Italia tra le due guerre, 96. On this intellectual circle see chapter 2. Levi often wrote for Casabella about film, painting, and furnishing, while different aspects of Paulucci’s work were featured in its pages. See for example Carlo Levi, “Scenografia cinematografica,” La casa bella 59 (November 1932): 62; Carlo Levi, “Idee su Pabst,” Casabella 63 (March 1933): 34–35; Piero Torriano, “Il pittore Enrico Paulucci,” Casabella 64 (April 1933): 24–29; Carlo Levi, “Considerazioni sulla architettura,” Casabella 81 (September 1934): 2–3; “Arredamento da Enrico Paulucci,” Casabella 112 (April 1937). Levi also wrote about Paulucci’s work in “Un arredamento a Torino di Enrico Paulucci,” Casabella 63 (March 1933): 28–29.

17. Edoardo Persico (attributed, signed “Leader”), “Arredamento di un film,” La casa bella 46 (October 1931): 30. Persico’s review refers to the film Patatrac as La vittoria di Pirro (The pyrrhic victory), which was the film’s working title.

18. Persico, “Arredamento di un film,” 31.

19. See Persico, “Punto e da capo per l’architettura,” 1–9. See also Diane Ghirardo, introduction to “Edoardo Persico, Prophecy of Architecture,” Archetype 1, no. 2 (1979): 17. I have introduced the alignment of Persico’s critical emphasis with the politics of nationalism in chapter 2.

20. See Edoardo Persico, “Primitivi,” Casabella 86 (February 1935): 6.

21. Persico, “Arredamento di un film,” 31.

22. Persico was also involved in the design of propaganda posters for the plebiscite. Just as the structure has rarely been discussed in connection to its political role, Carlo Vinti has argued that the political content of these posters remains “virtually banned” from design histories; see “The New Typography in Fascist Italy: Between Internationalism and the Search for a National Style,” in Archigraphiæ. Rationalist Lettering and Architecture in Fascist Rome, ed. Matthieu Cortat and Davide Fornari (Renens: ECAL, 2020), 51. See also Chiara Barbieri and Davide Fornari, “Xanti Schawinsky and the Fascist Plebiscitary Elections of 1934: Everyday Design Practice and Visual Culture in Early 1930s Italy,” Journal of Design History 37, no. 1 (March 2024): 19–36.

23. I take these structures to provide a materialization of Jeffrey T. Schnapp’s formulation that the contradictions within fascist culture provide “the taut but hollow frame over which a canvas must be stretched in order for the illusion of fullness to spring forth,” to which I appealed in chapter 2 (“Epic Demonstrations,” 3).

24. Persico, “Arredamento di un film,” 31.

25. The politics of these different figures and the whole group of the “Six Painters” are discussed in chapter 2.

26. Edoardo Persico (attributed, signed “Leader”), “L’arredamento moderno nel cinema,” La casa bella 59 (November 1932): 37.

27. See Persico, “L’arredamento moderno nel cinema,” 34.

28. Persico, “L’arredamento moderno nel cinema,” 38.

29. Persico, “L’arredamento moderno nel cinema,” 34.

30. Edoardo Persico (attributed, signed “Leader”), “Una sedia,” La casa bella 45 (September 1931): 56.

31. Persico, “Una sedia,” 57, emphasis added.

32. David Rifkind, “Furnishing the Fascist Interior: Giuseppe Terragni, Mario Radice and the Casa del Fascio,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 10, no. 2 (June 2006): 165.

33. Rifkind, “Furnishing the Fascist Interior,” 165. Rifkind highlights some differences between Terragni’s chairs and other European models, particularly the fact that the seat is not directly connected to the back, which remains more rigid and thus “propels the sitter upward and outward, ready for action” (166).

34. Oh the intersection between the cult of virility and constructions of women in fascist Italy see Gigliola Gori, “Fascism As a Cult of Virility and the Duce As Its Political Athlete,” in Italian Fascism and the Female Body: Sport, Submissive Women, and Strong Mothers (London: Routledge, 2004), 9–33. There were tennis courts included in Mussolini’s Foro Italico in Rome.

35. In contrast with white telephone films, other films celebrated local traditional cultures, seeking to promote what at the time were regarded as “authentic national idioms.” See Corrado Alvaro, “Del cinematographo,” Italia Letteraria, September 8, 1929, cited in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 76.

36. Tobin Siebers, “Disability Aesthetics,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 543. Siebers argues, contrary to Persico’s premise, that modern art “claims disability as a distinct version of the beautiful” (544).

37. Bourdieu, Distinction, 56.

38. On the production of noncitizens, see Étienne Balibar, Citizenship (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2015), 76.

39. Of Jewish descent, Arnheim emigrated from Germany in 1933 and remained in Italy until 1939, after the enactment of the racial laws. See Scott Higgins, “Introduction,” in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. See also Adriano D’Aloia, “Rudolf Arnheim’s Italian Writings on Cinema (1932–1939),” Communicazione sociale on-line 5 (2011), http://www.comunicazionisocialionline.it/2011/5/5. Arnheim contributed to several Italian magazines and regularly taught courses at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. The choice of Italy for Arnheim after departing Nazi Germany was shared by other intellectuals, for whom Italy offered a more benevolent context while providing easy conditions for migration. See Klaus Voigt, Il rifugio precario: Gli esuli in Italia dal 1933 al 1945 (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1993).

40. Rudolf Arnheim, “Dettagli che non sono dettagli,” Cinema 17 (March 1937): 181.

41. Rudolf Arnheim, “Nuovo Laocoonte,” Bianco e Nero 8 (August 1938): 26. For a complete English translation, see Rudolf Arnheim, “The New Laocoon,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).

42. Arnheim, “Dettagli che non sono dettagli,” 182.

43. Schuldenfrei, Luxury and Modernism, 4.

44. Borrowing from Mary Ann Doane, we could understand him to treat the film here as “a kind of display window, and spectatorship consequently [as] a form of window shopping”; see “The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 1 (1989): 27. For a discussion of Doane’s work in relation to the film I grandi magazzini, see Barbara Spackman, “Shopping for Autarchy,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 286.

45. Persico, “Arredamento di un film,” 31.

46. Persico, “L’arredamento moderno nel cinema,” 35.

47. La Rinascente particularly regarded the design quality of its products in its goal to “link art to life” (chapter 1).

48. See Nicoloso, Gli architetti di Mussolini, 72, 108. Like Ponti, Rava obtained his architecture license in 1928, when a special commission was established for similar cases.

49. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Premessa,” in Nove anni di architettura vissuta, 7–9.

50. Carlo Enrico Rava, “La casa nel film I,” Domus 119 (November 1937): 31.

51. Rava, “La casa nel film I,” 31.

52. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Scenografia: Elementi formativi del gusto,” Bianco e Nero 10 (October 1937), quoted in Rava, “La casa nel film I,” 32.

53. Rava, “La casa nel film I,” 32.

54. Carlo Enrico Rava, “La casa nel film IV,” Domus 125 (May 1938): 66.

55. Carlo Enrico Rava, “La casa nel film II,” Domus 121 (January 1938): 37–39.

56. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Architettura e arredamento nel film italiano III,” Domus 138 (June 1939): 68. Rava addressed this argument fundamentally to those—including art critic Ugo Ojetti—who suggested that painters should take on the design of sets.

57. Rava, “Scenografia,” 13. These arguments unfolded in a number of discussions with other critics. See for example Rava, “La casa nel film IV.” Rava’s arguments borrowed from Medin’s writings in the magazine Cinema; see Gastone Medin, “Sottocenere: Gastone Medin,” Cinema 25 (July 1937): 21.

58. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Il gusto negli interni di film,” Lo Stile 2 (1941): 85. In his arguments, the architect-scenographer sought to provide “a stylistic and interpretative synthesis according to which each piece, adequately chosen, would have, in the composition of the whole, its own value [. . .].”

59. Umberto De Franciscis, “Le pareti finte,” Cinema 80 (October 1939): 250.

60. Rava, “La casa nel film I,” 31–32.

61. Rava, “La casa nel film I,” 30.

62. Carlo Enrico Rava, “L’architetto e il cinema,” Cinema 40 (February 1938): 115.

63. As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, these were both indebted to Christine Frederick’s foundational work, The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management. Interest in related international developments manifested also in Alberto Sartoris’s analysis of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen in Alberto Sartoris, “Intorno alla cucina standardizzata di Francoforte,” La casa bella 26 (February 1930): 59–60.

64. Rava, “L’architetto e il cinema,” 115.

65. Persico regarded rational architecture in Italy with skepticism, as he considered it lacked any real demand. He evaluated it as “dilettante” work and criticized its “morality” and its aspiration to “contemporaneity,” which he thought did not address any real problem. See “Gli architetti italiani,” in Edoardo Persico: Tutte le opere, 1923–1935, 2: 145.

66. Carlo Mollino, “Tutto e permesso sempre salva la fantasia,” Domus 344 (March 1950): 21.

67. Mollino, “Tutto e permesso sempre salva la fantasia,” 21.

68. A number of comprehensive volumes have addressed the diverse aspects of his work: Sergio Pace, ed. Carlo Mollino architetto (1905–1973): Costruire le modernità (Milan: Electa, 2006); Chris Dercon and Wilfried Kuehn, eds., Carlo Mollino: Maniera Moderna (Cologne: Walther König, 2011); Napoleone Ferrari and Michelangelo Sabatino, Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller (Zurich: Park Books, 2022). His first novel, Vita di Oberon, was a sort of architectural manifesto and was published in the magazine Casabella (1933).

69. Carlo Mollino, “Vita di Oberon,” Casabella, no. 71 (November 1933). Translated in Ferrari and Sabatino, Carlo Mollino, 79.

70. Mollino, “Tutto e permesso sempre salva la fantasia,” 21.

71. Mollino, “Tutto e permesso sempre salva la fantasia,” 20–21.

72. Mollino’s work throughout the period was not stylistically constrained by his interest in surrealism, and right from the beginning combined diverse influences from German expressionism and other artistic developments.

73. Carlo Mollino, “La casa e l’ideale: Casa in collina,” Domus 182 (February 1943): 50; and André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 18. Mollino’s statement was included in the text accompanying his entry to the competition “La Casa e l’ideale,” launched in 1942 by Domus. The magazine was at that point no longer edited by Ponti but was under the direction of Pagano, Melchiorre Bega, and Massimo Bontempelli, who asked architects to envision their ideal house “as a form of evasion,” since the competition was held during the turbulence of the Second World War. Domus, “La casa e l’ideale,” Domus 176 (August 1942): 312; translated in Fiell and Fiell, Domus, 2:540–41.

74. Mollino, “La casa e l’ideale: Casa in collina,” 50. When asked to describe his ideal house, Mollino described the one in which he lived with his father. For an analysis of Carlo Mollino’s “Casa in Collina” see also Fulvio Irace, “Carlo Mollino e la ‘casa ideale,’” in Pace, Carlo Mollino, 79–91.

75. See Carlo Levi, “Casa Miller,” Domus 129 (September 1938): 1–11.

76. There are no planimetric representations of Casa Miller other than this small and incomplete plan, which was, in fact, faked for its publication. See Enrico Moncalvo, “Casa Miller ritrovata,” Domus 721 (November 1990): 14.

77. I discussed the transformation of the kitchen in chapter 2.

78. Mollino would later contend that “photography helped to liberate painting from the practical and intellectualistic effort of reproducing the perceptible truth”; see Carlo Mollino, Il messaggio dalla camera oscura (Milan: Chiantore, 1949), 38.

79. Carlo Mollino, in a letter to Raffaello Giolli, Domus (June 12, 1938), Correspondenza 1938, Archivio Carlo Mollino, Castello del Valentino, Torino.

80. Freud defines the uncanny as “what is not known and familiar at the same time.” See Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 217–56. As in Freud’s uncanny (unheimlich), the familiar appeared strange and expectations were disappointed in many aspects of Casa Miller.

81. On Max Ernst’s collages see Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 157–91. For an analysis of the relationship between surrealist imaginary and Mollino’s own work see Federica Rovati, “La camera incantata: Carlo Mollino e la cultura artistica torinese, 1935–41,” in Pace, Carlo Mollino, 65.

82. Levi, “Casa Miller,” 7.

83. Mollino, Il Messaggio dalla Camera Oscura, 68.

84. Carlo Levi was highly influenced by Lionello Venturi’s own taste, and what he called “pride in modesty” (discussed in chapter 2). See Venturi, “Per la nuova architettura,” 2–3.

85. Levi, “Casa Miller,” 5.

86. On Levi’s intellectual project and his politics see Nicola Carducci, Storia intellettuale di Carlo Levi (Lecce: Pensa MultiMedia, 1999).

87. Levi, “Casa Miller,” 5.

88. Levi, “Casa Miller,” 7.

89. Albino Galvano, “Casa Devalle,” Lo Stile 5–6 (May–June 1941): 31.

90. Galvano, “Casa Devalle,” 31.

91. Levi, “Casa Miller,” 7.

92. Cremona was a close friend of Mollino’s, and they had collaborated on an installation titled Tè numero 2—Cenni d’Architettura Interna for a show organized by the Società Pro Cultura Femmnile directed by Paola Levi-Montalcini—a painter close to Casorati and sister of the rationalist architect Gino Levi-Montalcini. See Sabatino and Ferrari, Carlo Mollino, 32–37.

93. Levi, “Casa Miller,” 7. Mollino took a number of photographs of models in the interior of his apartment unfolding this critical agenda: hidden behind a glass case, partially covered by curtains or in fragmentary reflections in a mirror, different figures—mostly women—populate these pictures with their bodies consistently rendered in parts, intertwined with the different objects that construct the interior. After the war, he continued to use the interior as a stage in a series of photographs explored in Beatriz Colomina, “A Slight Nausea,” in Dercon and Kuehn, Carlo Mollino: Maniera Moderna, 250–59.

94. Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 18.

95. On the project of “denaturalization” see also Judith Butler, “How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler,” Signs 2 (Winter 1998): 277.

96. In spite of Levi’s arguments, it is difficult to find any explicit political statement in Mollino in these years beyond the general alignment with the regime that characterized the profession. An example of such alignment is the co-authored “Civiltà,” Domus 98 (1936): 1–3. With some exceptions of this kind, Mollino evaded political conversations even during the war. As Carlo Olmo has argued, such “silences” carry their own weight of blame. See Carlo Olmo, “L’impossibile cittadino: Un’introduzione a Carlo Mollino architetto,” in Pace, Carlo Mollino architetto (1905–1973), 22.

97. Rava, “La casa nel film IV,” 51.

98. Rava, “La casa nel film IV,” 51.

99. Founded in 1933, the IRI helped the recovery of industries made bankrupt by the Great Depression in the interwar years and played a major role in the coordination of production and consumption in the country in the postwar economic boom as well. See Piero Barucci, Simone Misiani, and Manuela Mosca, eds., La cultura economica tra le due guerre (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2015), 130.

100. Freddi was director of cinematography within the Ministry for Press and Propaganda. On the constitution of the General Directorship of Cinematography, see Galeazzo Ciano, “Sulla cinematografia fascista,” Lo Schermo 6 (1936): 13.

101. While Cines hosted the production of most of the films discussed by Persico, Cinecittà was where most of the films discussed by Rava later in the decade were shot.

102. The Istituto LUCE was designed by Andrea and Clemente Busiri Vici, Arnaldo Regagioli, and Rodolfo Rustichelli, and the CSC by Antonio Valente and Pietro Aschieri. On the architecture of Archivio Luce see Ernesto Guido Laura, Le stagioni dell’Aquila: Storia dell’Istituto Luce (Rome: Ente dello Spettacolo, 2000); and Giuseppe Pezzotti and Carlo Bordin, “L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE): Dall’istituzione al progetto,” Bimestrale della Fondazione Ce.S.A.R. Onlus 4 (July–August 2008). On the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia see Igino Carbonari, “Gli edifici del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia,” Bianco e Nero 566 (2010): 36–42. Both Valente and Aschieri were significant architects and scenographers, the latter responsible for the set design of Scipione il Africano—one of the major film productions shot in the first year of Cinecittà’s operation.

103. See Federico Caprotti, “Information Management and Fascist Identity: Newsreels in Fascist Italy,” Media History 11 (2005): 184, 186.

104. On Freddi’s life and activities consider the autobiography included as part as his retrospective account of the development of the Italian film industry, in Luigi Freddi, Il cinema: Il governo dell’immagine (Rome: L’Arnia, 1949).

105. For an account of previous works by Gino Peressutti, see Sara Martin, Gino Peressutti: L’architetto di Cinecittà (Udine: Forum, 2013).

106. Freddi, Il cinema, 2:203. The rapid development of the design seems to suggest that, contrary to the official version, the major infrastructural and real estate operation leading to the construction of Cinecittà had preceded the fire at the structure that it replaced.

107. Gino Peressutti, “Cinecittà,” Cinema 20 (April 25, 1937): 302.

108. Mary Pickford, “Editorial,” Cinema 20 (April 25, 1937): 299.

109. See Freddi, “Primo Rapporto su la cinematografia,” Fascicolo 3.2.2/1397. Presidenza del Consigllio, PCM 1934–36, Archivio Central dello Stato, Roma. See also Freddi, Il cinema, 1:71.

110. Freddi, Il cinema, 1:43. I have addressed the complex translation of the term civiltà as both culture and civilization in the introduction and chapter 1.

111. On the different positions regarding the relation between the film industry and state intervention, see Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema italiano tra le due guerre: Fascismo e politica cinematografica (Milan: Mursia, 1975), 303–20.

112. See Italo Insolera, Roma moderna: Da Napoleone I al XXI secolo (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 135.

113. As Insolera has argued, the “archeological mandate” was the motivation that set this transformation of Rome apart from other major urban interventions throughout European cities—most famously including nineteenth-century operations such as that of Baron Haussmann in Paris (Roma moderna).

114. Insolera, Roma moderna, 130. The borgate ufficiali included the Quartiere Prenestino, Borgata del Trullo, Borgata Quatricciolo, Borgata Sab Basilio, and Tiburtino Terzo, among others. Maristella Casciato has described the Roman periphery as a “second-class city” [città di seconda categoria] that would host most of the population. See Casciato, “L’abitazione e gli spazi domestici,” 534.

115. A major loophole in the plan’s development was Article 14, which essentially prohibited construction outside its limits, yet left space open for interpretation. See Insolera, Roma moderna, 161.

116. “L’inaugurazione di un complesso abitativo costruito nel quartiere Tiburtino Terzo dal regime fascista,” Giornale Luce, 1937 (Istituto Luce).

117. Peressutti, “Cinecittà,” 302.

118. Siegfried Kracauer, “Calico-World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 281.

119. Advertisement for Cinecittà, Cinema 103 (October 1940).

120. In this regard, consider the number of projects for film theaters approved by the Ministry for Popular Culture, as recorded in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato. See “Premi,” ca. 1935, Busta 23, Direzione Generale Cinematografia, Ministero della Cultura Popolare, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. See also Freddi, Il cinema, 1:254. The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro was also significant in providing facilities for cinema attendance throughout the country, including by sending traveling theaters to smaller villages in the Italian countryside and offering discounts for movie-goers. See de Grazia, Culture of Consent, 160; Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 15.

121. Freddi, Il cinema, 1:13.

122. Virgilio Marchi, “Da quattro mura a un cinema sonoro,” Cinema 1 (July 1936): 19.

123. A. B. “Il sonoro e i cinema della periferia,” Lo Schermo (June 1937), 39.

124. A. B. “Il sonoro e i cinema della periferia,” 39.

125. Freddi, Il cinema, 1:74.

126. For a discussion of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the film industry, see Gian Piero Brunetta, “La censura ecclesiastica,” in Cinema italiano tra le due guerre, 60–66.

127. See Italo Calvino, “Autobiografía di uno spettatore,” in Quattro film, by Federico Fellini (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), ix.

128. Calvino, “Autobiografía di uno spettatore,” ix.

129. See Freddi, Il Cinema, 2:279.

130. Kracauer, “Calico-World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg,” 281–82.

131. Rudolf Arnheim, “Accident and the Necessity of Art” (1957), in Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 169, quoted in Malcolm Turvey, “Arnheim and Modernism,” in Higgins, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, 43.

132. Turvey, “Arnheim and Modernism,” 43.

133. See Rudolf Arnheim, “Il film come opera d’arte,” Bianco e Nero 4 (April 1938): 11–13.

134. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Sociology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 [1954]), 5.

135. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 5.

136. The use of the telephone in film with this particular goal was paradigmatically introduced by D. W. Griffith in The Lonedale Operator in 1911. I am grateful to Thomas Y. Levin for this observation.

137. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25–26.

138. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 26.

139. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 28.

140. Giuseppe Pagano, “Le case ‘popolarissime,’” Casabella 112 (April 1937): 2–4. See also Giuseppe Pagano, “Il fascismo e la casa,” Casabella 122 (February 1938): 2–5, which reflects on the book of the same title by Carlo Teodori, dedicated to the ways in which the abstractions of economic speculation was affecting the housing market.

141. See, for example, Giancarlo Palanti, “Note sulle case popolari,” and “Architetti Albini, Camus, Palanti: una casa per famiglie numerose,” Casabella 78 (June 1934): 6–12.

142. See Vezio Orazi, “Cinematografico e il teatro,” Film 16 (April 1940) in Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy, 181.

143. Rava, “Il gusto negli interni di film,” Lo Stile 13 (1942): 48.

144. Rava, “La casa nel film II,” 38.

145. Rava, “La casa nel film II,” 38–39.

146. On these types of films, see Ben-Ghiat, Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema.

147. Rava, “Architettura di razza italiana,” L’Architettura Italiana 34, no. 1 (January 1939): 37.

148. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Stile negli interni di film,” Lo Stile 10 (October 1941): 30.

149. Rava, “Scenografia: Elementi formativi del gusto,” 17.

150. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Dell’europeismo in architettura,” Rassegna Italiana (December 1927), included in Rava, Nove anni di architettura vissuta, 27–35.

151. Gino Visentini, “Film di questi giorni,” Cinema 62 (January 1939): 56.

152. Rava, “La casa nel film V,” Domus 128 (August 1938): 48. See also Rava, “Verità negli ambiente,” Cinema 44 (April 1938): 268–69.

153. On the definition of these films as “escapist” see Barbara Spackman, “Shopping for Autarchy,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 289n5.

154. James Hay, “Placing Cinema, Fascism, and the Nation within a Diagram of Italian Modernity,” in Reich and Garofalo, Re-viewing Fascism, 118.

155. Persico highlights these other interiors in his review as examples of “how not to furnish one’s own house” (“Arredamento di un film,” 31).

156. For example, the film Il Signor Max (dir. Mario Camerini, 1937), depicted the steamboat, the railway station, and the hotel lobby as spaces of unexpected encounters, in a scenography composed of modernist furniture by Gastone Medin.

157. See Gian Piero Brunetta, “Mille e più di mille (lire al mese),” in Risate di regime: La commedia italiana 1930–1944, ed. Mino Argentieri (Venice: Marsilio, 1991), 100.

158. In this sense, the space opened up by Hungary as a ground for socio-spatial speculation was different from the lyrical and abstract “any-space-whatever” enunciated by Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 111.

159. Edoardo Persico (attributed), “Arredamenti moderni di Ludwig Kozma,” La casa bella 52 (April 1932): 28–29.

160. See Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 111–22.

161. Luigi Freddi, “Rapporto sulla cinematografia italiana,” Lo Schermo 1 (1936): 13.

162. Marcello Piacentini, “Fantasie di un architetto,” Cinema 167 (1943): 329.

163. Freddi, “Rapporto sulla cinematografia italiana,” 13.

164. See Vidler, “Metropolitan Montage,” 112. It should be noted that Canzone dell’amore (dir. Gennaro Righelli), the first Italian talkie, was already filmed on location in 1930.

165. Carlo Felice, “Nota sul cinema,” Domus 158 (February 1941): 63.

166. Filippo Sacchi, “Gli uomini, che mascalzoni,” in Corriere della Sera, August 12, 1932.

167. Sacchi, “Gli uomini, che mascalzoni.”

168. Michelangelo Antonioni, “La avventure della rinascita: il ‘sonoro,” Aria d’Italia, vol. VII: Stile Italiano nel Cinema (Winter 1941), 5: “un film delicatamente nostrano.” Emphasis added. I will return to the magazine Aria d’Italia in chapter 5.

169. Freddi, Il cinema, 2:459–83.

170. See Noa Steimatsky, “The Cinecittà Refugee Camp (1944–1950),” October 128 (Spring 2009): 22–50.

4. Furnishing the Empire

1. Carlo Enrico Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano (Milan: Triennale di Milano, 1940), 9.

2. On this engagement see, for example, Brian McLaren, Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy.

3. On the violence of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia see Alberto Sbacchi, “Poison Gas and Atrocities in the Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–36),” in Italian Colonialism, ed. Mia Fuller and Ruth Ben-Ghiat (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 47–56.

4. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 9.

5. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 9.

6. Benito Mussolini, “La vittoria fatale,” Discorso di Bologna (May 19, 1918) quoted in Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York: Routledge, 2002), 37.

7. Rava’s work on furnishings and interiors lacks the scholarly attention of other areas of his output, even if it was widely published at the time in different magazines (including Domus and Architettura e Arti Decorative).

8. A large body of scholarship has addressed how the ideologies of Western modernity—with their characteristic expansionist assumptions—are tied to strategies of othering that are essential to colonization, from Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) to Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

9. On Rava’s contribution to colonial architecture see Mia Fuller, “Carlo Enrico Rava, the Radical: First Formulations of Colonial Rationalism,” Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Center 1–2 (1994–1995): 150–59; and Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya. The scale of furnishing is overlooked by this scholarship.

10. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 6.

11. See Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6. Scholarship discussing the role of design in colonial contexts typically concentrates on architecture and planning and dismisses furniture and interior design. Histories of colonial domesticity and homemaking, despite their critical sophistication, often at most, acknowledge furniture as a marker of status. See, for example, Karen Tranberg Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Rosemary Marangoly George, “Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home,” Cultural Critique 26 (Winter 1993–1994): 95–127; Alison Blunt, “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 4 (1999): 421–40; Victoria Haskins and Margaret D. Jacobs, eds., Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 28, no. 1–2 (2007). Exceptions to this trend include Tracey Avery, “Furniture Design and Colonialism: Negotiating Relationships between Britain and Australia, 1880–1901,” Home Cultures 4, no. 1 (2007): 69–92; Jordan Sand, “Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia,” Positions 21, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 95–132; Johan Lagae, “Nomadic Furniture in the ‘Heart of Darkness’,” in McAtee and Floré, The Politics of Furniture, 15–32.

12. Said is particularly attentive to the ways in which these links unfold through the “quotidian processes of hegemony” (Culture and Imperialism, 109). I have briefly unpacked Gramsci’s notion of hegemony in the introduction.

13. See Rice, The Emergence of the Interior.

14. Furniture design and decorative arts are absent in most major works on Italian colonial architecture, including Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti, Stefano Zagnoni, eds., Architettura italiana d’oltremare, 1870–1940 (Venice: Marsilio, 1993). There are many studies discussing the Italians’ manifold engagements with the decorative arts and crafts in their colonies, including Nicola Labanca, ed., L’Africa in Vetrina: Storie di Musei e di Esposizioni Coloniali in Italia (Treviso: Pagus, 1992); Brian McLaren, “The Tripoli Trade Fair and the Representation of Italy’s African Colonies,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24 (2002): 170–97; Brian McLaren, “The Italian Colonial Appropriation of Indigenous North African Architecture in the 1930s,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World 29 (2002): 164–92; Brian McLaren, “Architecture during Wartime: The Mostra d’Oltremare and Esposizione Universale di Roma,” Architectural Theory Review 19, no. 3 (2014): 299–318; and Anderson, Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea, 191–242.

15. While the scholarship on the topic is broad, I am borrowing the expression from the 1984–85 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art: The Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

16. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects. Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5.

17. See Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 3. For a similar argument, see also Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 286.

18. On the mutually constitutive relationship between colonialism and nationalism see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Modernity Is Just Over There: Colonialism and Italian National Identity,” International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2006): 380–93; Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, eds., Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Paolo Bertella Farnetti and Cecilia Dau Novelli, eds., Colonialism and National Identity (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Considering these relations beyond Italy, Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have argued that “Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself”; see “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1.

19. With this focus, I contribute both to scholarship on Italian colonialism as well as to McLaren’s recent analysis of the role that the regime’s imperial project played in the identity negotiations at stake in architectural projects in Italy, rather than merely in its colonies, particularly focusing on the last years of the Fascist era (Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy).

20. See Ben-Ghiat and Hom, “Introduction,” in Italian Mobilities, 2, 4.

21. Giorgio Pini, cited in Mario Isnenghi, Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari: Appunti sulla cultura fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 197.

22. “1911: Le esposizioni e le feste commemorative,” Rivista Marittima (March 1911): 3–15. Michelangelo Sabatino has mobilized this statement to discuss the explicitly “political” ambitions of the show (Pride in Modesty, 29). I addressed this show in chapter 1.

23. See Ministero delle Colonie, Direzione Centrale delgi Affari Coloniali, Ufficio di Studi Coloniali, Le mostre coloniali all’Esposizione internazionale di Torino del 1911: Relazione generale (Rome: Tipografia Nazionale di G. Bertero E.C., 1913), 5. The exhibition was organized by the Direzione Centrale degli Affari Coloniali within the Ministero per gli Affari Esteri; a year later the central directorate would become a separate Ministry of the Colonies.

24. Ministero delle Colonie, Le mostre coloniali, 48.

25. Ministero delle Colonie, Le mostre coloniali, 46.

26. St. Hidalgo, “Il Villaggio Eritreo all’Esposizione di Torino,” L’Esposizione di Torino: Giornale ufficiale illustrato dell’Esposizione internazionale delle industrie e del lavoro 19 (April 1911): 293.

27. Ministero delle Colonie, Le mostre coloniali, 46.

28. See Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” 388.

29. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Routledge, 2019), 36–37. Representational strategies like this prove Martin Jay’s argument that “the role of visuality in creating, sustaining, justifying, and undermining imperial power is impossible to deny.” See “Conclusion: A Parting Glance: Empire and Visuality,” in Empires of Vision: A Reader, ed. Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 615.

30. Ministero delle Colonie, Le mostre coloniali, 46.

31. On the colonial framing of tribes as an “institutionalization of group life” imposed by colonial rule, see Mahmood Mamdani, “What Is a Tribe?,” London Review of Books 34, no. 17 (September 2012): 20–22.

32. There were multiple colonial exhibitions between these two expositions, even if they were smaller in their development. Particularly significant was the 1914 Mostra coloniale in Genoa. For a complete list of these shows see Anderson, Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea, 261.

33. Maurizio Rava, “Mussolini Fondatore dell’Impero,” in L’impero coloniale fascista, ed. Mario Giordano (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1936), 18–19.

34. Armando Melis, “L’Esposizione di Torino del 1928,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VII, 2.8 (April 1928): 372.

35. Plinio Marconi, “Commento all’Esposizione di Torino 1928,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VIII, 1.4 (December 1928): 155.

36. Giovanni Biadene, “Le celebrazioni torinesi: L’inaugurazione dell’Esposizione,” L’Illustrazione Italiana, May 6, 1928, 346.

37. See Marconi, “Commento all’Esposizione di Torino 1928,” 166.

38. “La chiusura della Mostra coloniale di Torino,” L’Italia Coloniale 5, no. 11 (November 1928): 215. See also Umberto Giglio, “La Mostra coloniale di Torino,” Rivista delle Colonie Italiane 3, no. 1 (January 1929): 86.

39. See McLaren, “The Tripoli Trade Fair.”

40. See Francesco M. Rossi, “Le piccole industrie indigene,” in La Rinascita della Tripolitania (Milan: Mondadori, 1926), 513. See also McLaren, “The Italian Colonial Appropriation of Indigenous North African Architecture,” 166.

41. Rossi, “Le piccole industrie indigene,” 513–14.

42. See Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, L’Africa Orientale: Illustrazione Storico-Geografica (Milan: Mondadori, 1936), 188.

43. See “La Mostra coloniale di Torino,” L’Italia Coloniale 5, no. 7 (July 1928): 141.

44. See, for example, Emilio Scarin, L’insediamento umano nella Libia Occidentale (Verona: Mondadori, 1940), which contains references to Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1891), Die geographische Verbreitung des Menschen (1897), and La terra e la vita (geografia comparativa) (1907).

45. Lidio Cipriani, Abitazioni indigene dell’Africa Orientale Italiana (Naples: Edizioni della Mostra d’Oltremare, 1940), 53. This volume was published to accompany the 1940 colonial show in Naples. For a detailed description of domestic objects in East African dwellings, see also Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, L’Africa Orientale: Illustrazione Storico-Geografica (Milan: Mondadori, 1936), 180.

46. Graziella Pavari, “L’abitazione umana nell’A.O.,” L’Universo (May 1936): 317–45.

47. Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 121.

48. See, for example, Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, L’Africa Orientale: Illustrazione Storico-Geografica (Milan: Mondadori, 1936), 3; and Scarin, L’insediamento umano nella Libia Occidentale, 52.

49. Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale, L’Africa Orientale, 3. Mixed races were systematically considered inferior to unmixed ones. See David Atkinson, “Constructing Italian Africa: Geography and Geopolitics,” in Italian Colonialism, 21.

50. See Guido Guidi, “Le Abitazioni indigene di Addis Abeba,” Rivista delle Colonie (January 1941): 12.

51. On the “localizing” pursuit of ethnography see James Clifford, “Travelling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–116, 98.

52. See, for example, Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Enigmatic Mobilities/Historical Mobilities” in African Mobilities, http://africanmobilities.org/discourse/2018/05/enigmatic-mobilities-historical-mobilities. Typical of those pushing this racist outlook was Lidio Cipriani himself, a supporter of the Manifesto della Razza (1938) and an editor of the magazine La difesa della razza. See Francesco Cassata, La difesa della razza: Politica, ideologia e immagine del razzismo fascista (Torino: Einaudi, 2008).

53. See Gilette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, 35–49. While repeatedly invoked, the nature of Italian race remained both ambiguous and contentious throughout the fascist period, with discussions only coming into greater focus toward the end of the fascist era, when they also resulted in specific legislation.

54. I am extending the link that others have built between national regeneration or palingenesis and racial regeneration to include the renewal of domestic architecture operating along the same logics. On that link see Gilette, Racial Theories of Fascist Italy, 40.

55. Here I am building on Martin Jay’s argument, in conversation with Christopher Pinney, that “the always already creolized status of ‘Europe’ itself meant that a unified, hegemonic culture, that of the imperial power, never really existed in the first place.” See Jay, “Conclusion,” and Chistopher Pinney, “Creole Europe: The Reflection of a Reflection,” in Jay and Ramaswamy, Empires of Vision, 620 and 539–562.

56. Marconi, “Commento alla Esposizioni di Torino,” 179. I discussed this project in chapter 1.

57. At stake in this distinction was also the tension between nation and ethnic group—with the former deemed essential to organized collective action. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 97.

58. See Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Boston: Brill, 2009), 161.

59. Timothy Mitchell, “Introduction,” Questions of Modernity, xiii.

60. See Aldina Serrazanetti, Edilizia Nuova: Le costruzioni ne l’Africa Italiana (Bologna: Eidizioni Tecniche-Utilitarie, 1936), 50.

61. “Due significativi arredamenti,” Domus 138 (June 1939): 63.

62. See “Un viaggio del nostro amministratore delegato nell’Africa Orientale Italiana,” La famiglia Rinascente-UPIM (March 1937): 4–15; and E. Bertarelli, “La Nuova Filiale UPIM all’Asmara,” La famiglia Rinascente-UPIM (January 1938): 14–16.

63. Emanuel Admassu, “Menged Merkato,” ARPA Journal 3 (2015), https://arpajournal.net/menged-merkato.

64. See Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 199.

65. “Un viaggio del nostro amministratore delegato nell’Africa Orientale Italiana,” 9.

66. “I mercati in A.O.,” La famiglia Rinascente-UPIM (November 1937): 10.

67. “I mercati in A.O.,” 15. Mia Fuller has traced the evolution of Italian settlements in the colonies from modern quarters alongside old walled cities, to satellite villages in Libya, and eventually to the establishment of an apartheid regime in East Africa’s colonial cities—similar to the planning developed in other European colonies such as those of France in Algiers (Moderns Abroad, 6–9).

68. See note in original drawings, “Progetto per il Piano Regolatore della Città di Addis-Abeba,” PRA 80, Gio Ponti Archives.

69. Diana Garvin, “Constructing Race through Commercial Space: Merkato Ketema under Fascist Urban Planning,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 25, no. 2 (2020): 121.

70. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002 [1848]), 224.

71. See Tranberg Hansen, African Encounters with Domesticity, 4.

72. Borletti, “Inaugural Discourse by Senatore Borletti for La Rinascente at Piazza del Duomo,” 5. See chapter 1. I have addressed the complex translation of the term civiltà as both culture and civilization in the introduction and chapter 1.

73. In the account of the directors’ trip, the clientele for the different stores is defined as Italian nationals and indigenous soldiers serving Italy. See “Un viaggio del nostro amministratore delegato nell’Africa Orientale Italiana,” 9.

74. Umberto Brustio, “La Mostra dell’Artigianato Libico alla Rinascente di Roma,” La Famiglia Rinascente-UPIM (January 1938): 2.

75. The racial laws were an enactment of this desire in the late 1930s. On the racist turn of the fascist regime see Gillette, “The Implementation of Nordic Racism in Italy, 1936–1938,” in Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, 50–99. In highlighting the role of race in outlining Italianness and modernity through architecture, I build on recent foundational scholarship that has discussed the constitutive role that race played in the shaping of modern architecture. See Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson, eds., Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

76. “Un viaggio del nostro amministratore delegato nell’Africa Orientale Italiana,” 4.

77. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Attrezzatura coloniale,” Domus 138 (June 1939), booklet attached.

78. Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, “La dottrina del fascismo” (1932) in “Fascismo,” Dizionario di Politica, ed. Partito Fascista (Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1940), 2:133.

79. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Per la casa e la vita in colonia 2,” Domus 158 (February 1941): 63. On their disagreements see Victoria de Grazia, Storia delle donne nel regime fascista (Venezia: Marsilio, 2023), 502.

80. Cartographic surveys in the colonial territories were developed by Italy as a way to “establish hegemony over its territory.” On the role of geographical surveys in Italian geopolitical imaginations, see David Atkinson, “Geopolitics, Cartography and Geographical Knowledge: Envisioning Africa from Fascist Italy,” in Geography and Imperialism, 1820–1940, ed. Morag Bell, Robin A. Butlin, and Michael Heffernan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 272. Rava was aware of the borders delimiting the colonies as a result of his travels, as documented in the photo albums that are kept at the Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, CSAC, Università di Parma.

81. See, for example, “I confini della Libia e dell’Eritrea,” Le Vie D’Italia: Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano 41, no. 4 (April 1935): 241–47. On the deserts in colonial imaginations see also Samia Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022).

82. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Costruire in colonia III,” Domus 109 (January 1937): 23–27.

83. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2009), 13–14. Before chemical weaponry, “long-distance killing has to create an intentio directa on his body by means of firearm and immobilize the targeted object with a sufficient number of accurate hits.” With chemical weaponry, however, the target is “no longer the body, but the enemy’s environment.”

84. Carlo Enrico Rava, Viaggio a Tunin (Bologna: Cappelli Editore, 1932); reprinted as Carlo Enrico Rava, Ai margini del Sahara (Bologna: Cappelli Editore, 1936). See also the review by Piero Gadda in Domus 63 (March 1933): 143–44.

85. Henri Fauconnier, The Soul of Malaya (1930), cited in C. Rava, Viaggio a Tunin, 1; and Carlo Enrico Rava, “La casa dell’alloe,” Il Tevere (Rome), March 1932.

86. “Progetto per una chiesa in Oriente,” in “Progetti Eseguite a Scuola,” Coll. 202/3 B010286P, Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, CSAC, Università di Parma. On similar contemporaneous projects see Fuller, Moderns Abroad, 107–8.

87. “Concorso per il progetto del Padiglione delle Colonie alla Fiera Campionaria di Milano. Relazione della Commissione giudicatrice,” in “Concorso per il progetto delle colonie alla Fiera Campionaria di Milano,” Coll. 202/3 B010332P, Archivio Carlo Enrico Rava, CSAC, Università di Parma.

88. His work was influenced by the earlier writings of historian Gustavo Giovannoni, with whom he worked in the magazine Architettura e Arti Decorative throughout the 1920s. See Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 57–58; McLaren, “The Italian Colonial Appropriation of Indigenous North African Architecture,” 179. I’ll address these concerns in chapter 5 in more detail.

89. Significant among the efforts to mobilize so-called “minor” architecture in the pursuit of modern architecture is also Pagano and Daniel, Architettura Rurale Italiana.

90. Marcello Piacentini, “Due lavori di S. Larco e C.E. Rava,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VII, 2.11 (July 1928): 524.

91. These projects were contemporaneously addressed by Piacentini, who considered that Rava and Larco’s work was overcoming the limitations of rationalism to become “more individual, more environmental in their colonial projects,” seemingly appealing to their relation to their location. See Marcelo Piacentini, “Una mostra di architettura moderna e arredamento a Roma,” Architettura: Rivista del Sindacato nazionale fascista architetti X, no. 7 (July 1932): 346.

92. Rava aligned himself with this lineage in “Dell’Europeismo in architettura,” included in Nove anni di architettura vissuta, 33–34.

93. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Svolta pericolosa: Situazione dell’Italia di fronte al razionalismo europeo,” Domus, 37 (January 1931), 39.

94. Fulvio Suvich, “Memorandum to Benito Mussolini” (November 18, 1931), cited in McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya, 180.

95. This is how Rava criticized the abuse of a “medieval-Moorish style” in Tripoli, in Maurizio Rava, “Per una Tripoli più bella,” L’Avvenire di Tripoli: quotidiano della Federazione fascista della tripolitania (September 22, 1929). Republished as “Dobbiamo rispettare il carattere dell’edilizia tripolina,” L’Oltremare 3, no. 11 (November 1929): 458–64.

96. Maurizio Rava, “Dobbiamo rispettare il carattere dell’edilizia tripolina,” 458.

97. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Tripoli e l’edilizia coloniale moderna,” in Nove anni di architettura vissuta, 65–76.

98. C. Rava, “Tripoli e la edilizia coloniale moderna,” 74–75.

99. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Di una architettura coloniale moderna. Parte prima,” Domus 41 (May 1931): 39–43, 89; and “Di una architettura coloniale moderna. Parte seconda,” Domus 42 (June 1931): 32–36.

100. See, for example, C. Rava, “Tripoli e la edilizia coloniale moderna,” 73.

101. Luigi Piccinato, “La casa in colonia: Il problema che si prospetta ai nostri architetti,” Domus 101 (May 1936): 22–25 and Domus 102 (May 1936): 12–17.

102. C. Rava, “Tripoli e la edilizia coloniale moderna,” 75. Piccinato also emphasized the patio not merely as characteristic of the colonized regions but “in rapport to Latin habitation [. . .], demonstrating an economic, logical, and Mediterranean solution of the house to the climate of Northern Africa” (“La casa in colonia,” 24). Carlo Enrico Rava also acknowledged other influences for those architectures: the “vigorous primitiveness” of the architectures of the region were allegedly “derived from its relationship with the southern populations” (“Di una architettura coloniale moderna. Parte prima,” 89).

103. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Spirito Latino,” Domus 38 (February 1931): 24–29; C. Rava, “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna. Parte seconda,” 36; Carlo Enrico Rava, “Conclusione,” Domus 47 (November 1931): 40. Other scholars who have addressed this topic include, for the colonial context, Mia Fuller, “Building Power: Italy’s Colonial Architecture and Urbanism, 1923–1940,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 4 (November 1988): 455–87; and Brian McLaren, “Casa Mediterranea, Casa Araba and Primitivism in the Writings of Carlo Enrico Rava,” Journal of Architecture 13, no. 4 (August 2008): 453–67. I will address the links between the Mediterranean and modern architecture beyond the colonial context in chapter 5.

104. Silvia Danesi, “Aporie dell’architettura italiana in periodo fascista—Mediterraneità e purismo,” in Danesi and Patetta, Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo, 21. See also Brian McLaren, “Carlo Enrico Rava: Mediterraneità and the Architecture of the Colonies in Africa,” Environmental Design: Journal of the Islamic Environmental Design Research Centre 15–16, no. 1–2 (1994): 160–73.

105. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Giovani architetti nordamericani,” Domus 43 (July 1931): 33–36, 88; and C. Rava, “Conclusione.” Rava conflated more clearly regionalist interpretations of the Spanish colonial tradition with projects clearly embracing modern premises such as those by Neutra, disregarding some of the nuances that would be at the core of discussions regarding these architectures some years later in the United States. See, for example, James F. O’Gorman, “Neff and Neutra: Regionalism versus Internationalism,” in Wallace Neff, 1895–1982: The Romance of Regional Architecture, ed. Andrea Belloli (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1989), 215–21.

106. C. Rava, “Conclusione,” 39.

107. Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” Diacritics 24, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 1994): 23–24.

108. C. Rava, “Tripoli e la edilizia coloniale moderna,” 69.

109. C. Rava, “Tripoli e la edilizia coloniale moderna,” 67.

110. C. Rava, “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna. Parte seconda,” 35.

111. Persico, “Punto e da capo per l’architettura,” 2–3.

112. C. Rava, introduction to Nove anni di architettura vissuta, 9.

113. C. Rava, “Conclusione,” 40.

114. This coincides with the way in which the bungalow has been discussed to perform as an enactment of global expansion by Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

115. See for example Alberto Alpago-Novello and Ottavio Cabiati, “Le case degli impiegati statali (I.N.C.I.S.) a Tripoli,” Rassegna d’Architettura (July 1934): 275–78. See also Stefano Zagnoni, “L’attività dell’INCIS: Le case degli uomini bianche,” in Gresleri, Massaretti, and Zagnoni, Architettura italiana d’oltremare, 1870–1940, 231–41. The IFACP (Istituto Fascista Autonomo per le Case Popolari) similarly sponsored architectural projects for the colonies.

116. See Marcello Piacentini (signed La Direzione), “Realizzazione costruttiva dell’Impero: Appello agli architetti italiani,” Architettura. Rivista del Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Architetti XIV, no. 1 (January 1936): 243. See also Stefano Zagnoni, “Abitare l’altopiano: La casa coloniale per l’Africa Orientale,” in Gresleri, Massaretti, and Zagnoni, Architettura italiana d’oltremare, 1870–1940, 215–30.

117. Giuseppe Pagano, “Una casa per la colonia,” Casabella 120 (December 1937): 32–33; and Ana Maria Mazzucchelli, “Architetto G. Pagano: Studi per l’applicazione razionale di una struttura a elementi di cemento,” Casabella Costruzioni 123 (March 1938): 20–21.

118. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Costruire in colonia II,” Domus 106 (October 1936): 30.

119. See Stefano Zagnoni, “L’Eritrea delle piccole città, 1897–1936,” in Gresleri, Massaretti, and Zagnoni, Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, 153–59.

120. See Piacentini, “Realizzazione costruttiva dell’Impero: Appello agli architetti italiani,” Architettura: Rivista del Sindacato nazionale fascista architetti, XV, no. 6 (June 1936): 241–44; and Gherardo Bosio, “Future Città dell’Impero,” Architettura: Rivista del Sindacato nazionale fascista architetti XVI, no. 7 (July 1937): 419–31. See also Giuliano Gresleri, “La ‘Nuova Roma dello Scioa’ e l’improbabile architettura dell’Impero,” in Gresleri, Massaretti, and Zagnoni, Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, 165–78; Anna Nuzzaci, “Architecture and Town Planning in Italian East Africa during the Years of the Empire (1936–1941),” in Urban Planning in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial and Post-Colonial Planning Cultures, ed. Carlos Nunes Silva (New York: Routledge, 2015), 129–44.

121. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Per la casa e la vita in colonia 6,” Domus 162 (June 1941): 66.

122. C. Rava, “Per la casa in colonia 6,” 24. As World War II began to encroach on Italy, Rava questioned whether his preoccupation with furnishings might seem unimportant for many; see “Per la casa in colonia 12,” Domus 168 (December 1941): 24.

123. Carla Zanini, “A proposito di un arredamento esposto alla VII Triennale,” Costruzioni Casabella 157 (January 1941): 34.

124. The term “equipment” was earlier used by Le Corbusier in discussions on furnishing in Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991 [1930]). The notion was developed in conversation with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret. See Mary McLeod, “New Designs for Living: Domestic Equipment of Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret, 1928–29,” in Charlotte Perriand. An Art of Living, ed. Mary McLeod (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 36–67. Jean Louis Cohen has emphasized the distinction of “furniture and the military or industrial concept of equipment” on his ruminations on modern architecture and war in The Future of Architecture Since 1889: A World History (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 292. For the intersections of modernist architecture and war see Jean Louis-Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2011).

125. The contested notion of domesticity for Italians in the colonies was entangled with the role of women in the colonial project, which de Grazia’s recent additions to her seminal work on women in the fascist period has addressed. See de Grazia, “L’impero chiama” and “Una sponda troppo lontana,” in Storia delle Donne nel Regime Fascista, 431–544.

126. King, The Bungalow, 195.

127. See Carlo Enrico Rava and Piero Bottoni, “Tre problemi della nostra vita,” Domus 145 (January 1940): 21–24.

128. C. Rava, “Costruire in colonia II,” 66.

129. C. Rava, “Per la casa e la vita in colonia 2,” 61.

130. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 17.

131. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 10–11 and 11–12.

132. C. Rava and Bottoni, “Tre problemi della nostra vita,” 23.

133. David Bunn, “‘Our Wattled Cot’: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 129.

134. Bunn, “‘Our Wattled Cot’,” 136.

135. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 26.

136. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 27.

137. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Per la casa e la vita in colonia 4,” Domus 160 (April 1941): 40–42.

138. See C. Rava, “Abitare e vivere in colonia,” 21; and “Per la casa e la vita in colonia,” 60.

139. See Alfonso Gatto, “Mobili in serie per gli ufficiali in A.O.,” Casabella 114–115 (June–July 1937): 28–29.

140. An example of these kinds of relationships can be found in the work of Christoph and Unmack AG and their furniture line “Harmonika,” coordinated with their prefabricated and movable housing projects. See Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), 207.

141. See Carlo Enrico Rava, “Per la casa e la vita in colonia 2,” Domus 158 (February 1941): 63.

142. See C. Rava, “Tripoli e l’edilizia coloniale moderna,” 65.

143. McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya, 58.

144. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Architettura di razza italiana,” L’Architettura Italiana 34, no. 2 (February 1939): 37–45.

145. As Diana Fuss has it, “space operates as one of the chief signifiers of racial difference”—the distinct marker of colonial relationships: “Under colonial rule, freedom of movement (psychical and social) becomes a white prerogative” (“Interior Colonies,” 21).

146. C. Rava, L’attrezzatura coloniale alla VII Triennale di Milano, 17.

147. Rava himself proposed this re-appropriation of colonial equipment in the metropole in “Per la casa e la vita in colonia,” 61. Reflecting on the international phenomena, Jean-Louis Cohen has argued that “the war would thus act as a kind of accelerator in the transformation of taste [with] the expectation that the first attempts to link ‘utility and austerity’ [rehearsed in war equipment] would lead to ‘utility furniture’ in thousands of houses” (Architecture in Uniform, 75). On design and war see also the 1942 exhibition at MoMA, “Useful Objects for War Times” (1942).

148. C. Rava, “Abitare e vivere in colonia,” 23.

149. C. Rava, “Abitare e vivere in colonia,” 23.

150. On the role of mobility as a property of colonial architecture, see Irit Katz, “Mobile Colonial Architecture: Facilitating Settler Colonialism’s Expansions, Expulsions, Resistance, and Decolonisation,” Mobilities 17, no. 2 (2022): 213–37.

151. See David Forgacs, “Colonies,” in Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 81; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 124.

152. Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 3.

153. See Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip, particularly chapter 2, “The Camp.” See also Muhammad T. Jerary, “Damages Caused by the Italian Fascist Colonization of Libya,” in Fuller and Ben-Ghiat, Italian Colonialism, 203–8.

154. Achille Mbembe, “The Idea of a Borderless World,” Chimurenga Chronic: On Circulations and the African Imagination of a Borderless World (October 2018), https://chimurengachronic.co.za/the-idea-of-a-borderless-world.

155. Anderson, Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea, 179.

156. My use of the Agambenian term is informed by David Atkinson, “Encountering Bare Life in Italian Libya and Colonial Amnesia in Agamben,” in Agamben and Colonialism, ed. Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 157.

157. The Commissario General Governativo quoted in Plinio Marconi, “Prima Mostra delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare,” Architettura: Rivista del Sindacato nazionale fascista architetti XX, no. 1–2 (January–February 1941): 1.

158. See letter [signature unreadable, from Agenzia Lloyd Triestino] to Attilio Teruzzi, Minister for Italian Africa (February 21, 1940), Busta 93, Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, Affari Politici (MAI-AP), Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASMAE), Rome.

159. This incident is recorded in the documents of the 1940 Triennale d’Oltremare, Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome. The incident has been previsouly discussed in Anderson, Modern Architecture and Its Representation in Colonial Eritrea, 243; and Brian McLaren “Architecture during Wartime: The Mostra d’Oltremare and Esposizione Universale di Roma,” Architectural Theory Review 19, no. 3 (2014): 315.

160. Letter from Adem Besciro to the Ministro dell’Africa Italiana [Attilio Teruzzi] (November 12, 1941), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

161. Letter, translated into Italian, signed by “Il nativo di Gimma cabba Gifar Abba Foghi Abba Giobir” to the Ministro dell’Africa Italiana [Attilio Teruzzi] (February 18, 1943), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

162. Letter, translated into Italian, signed by “I nativi della Mostra di Napoli” to the Ministro dell’Africa Italiana (date and month unreadable, 1941). Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

163. “Promemoria per la Direzone Generale per Gli Affari Politici” (January 8, 1943), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

164. “Promemoria per la Direzione Generale per gli Affari Politici: Nativi dell’AOI per la ripresa del film ‘Harlem’” (November 9, 1942), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

165. See letter from Luigi Freddi to De Cesare, Segretario Particolare del Duce (April 6, 1942), Busta 554084, Film Harlem, Segreteria Particolare del Duce (CO), Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Rome.

166. Letter from Attilio Teruzzi, Minister of Italian Africa, to the Direzione della Mostra Triennale delle Terre d’Oltremare (March 29, 1943), “Trasferimento nativi dell’A.O.I. da Napoli a Treia (Macerata),” Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

167. Report to the Direttore Generale Degli Affari Economici e Finanziari, “Spese dei nativi dell’AOI” (August 9, 1944), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

168. See report to the Direttore Generale Degli Affari Politici, “Promemoria per la Direzione Generale Affari Politici” (January 8, 1943), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

169. See “Situazione Numerica dei Nativi dell’A.I.: Residenti nella Villa Vannutelli a Treia al I Febraio 1944 Quale Risulta dagli Atti Esistenti”; and report signed by the Minister [of Italian Africa, Attilio Teruzzi] (February 1, 1944), Busta 93, MAI-AP, ASMAE, Rome.

170. Letter from the Segreteria Capo della Polizia (May 14, 1944), Folder “PAI Gruppo Neri,” Busta 49, Ministero dell’Interno, ACS, Rome. Cited in https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/2015/02/due-wuminglab-al-centro-racconti-doltremare-e-bottega-bottego. See also Matteo Petracci, Partigiani d’Oltremare: Dal Corno D’Africa alla Resistenza Italiana (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2019).

171. Zeynep Çelik and Leila Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibitionism at the Expositions Universelles,” Assemblage 13 (December 1990): 36.

172. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3.

173. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 2, quoted in Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip, 8.

5. The Mobile Objects of Tourism

1. Lo Stile nella casa e nell’arredamento 7 (July 1941).

2. See Gio Ponti, “Facciamoci una coscienza nazionale della architettura mediterranea,” Lo Stile 7 (July 1941): 2.

3. Ponti, “Facciamoci una coscienza nazionale,” 2.

4. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 24. On the transnational history of the sea, see also David Abulafia, The Mediterranean in History (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003); and in particular the chapter “A Globalized Mediterranean, 1900–2000.”

5. Gio Ponti, “Una villa a Bordighera,” Lo Stile 7 (July 1941): 3–13.

6. Ponti, “Facciamoci una coscienza nazionale,” 2.

7. A. M. Rebucci, “Visioni di economia turistica,” Rivisita delle stazioni di cura, soggiorno e turismo 17, no. 6–7 (1941), quoted in R. J. B. Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian Culture,” Contemporary European History 6, no. 1 (March 1997): 5.

8. Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy,” 6–7.

9. See Stephanie Malia Hom, “Empires of Tourism: Travel and Rhetoric in Italian Colonial Libya and Albania, 1911–1943,” Journal of Tourism History 4, no. 3 (2012): 281–300.

10. In answering this question, I am in conversation with Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy,” 4.

11. Gio Ponti, introduction to “Invito al turismo,” Domus 104 (August 1936): 22.

12. Different scholars who have addressed this concern include Danesi, “Aporie dell’architettura italiana in periodo fascista—Mediterraneità e purismo,” in Danesi and Patetta, Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo, 21–28; Carlo Cresti, “Mediterraneità e ruralità,” in Architettura e fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1986), 102–7; Brunetti, “L’idea di Mediterraneità negli scritti di Carlo Enrico Rava e del Gruppo di Quadrante,” in Architetti e fascismo, 203–16; Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 92–127. For a compendium of this concern beyond the Italian context see Jean-François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino, eds., Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (London: Routledge, 2009); and Michelangelo Sabatino, “North versus South: The Mediterranean and Histories of Modern Architecture,” New Geographies 5 (2013): 272–83.

13. Payne discusses these differences in her discussion of cultural artifacts in the Mediterranean context. See Alina Payne, Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archeology and the Poetics of Influence (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

14. Annunziata Berrino, Storia del turismo in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 118–15.

15. See Hom, The Beautiful Country, 8.

16. Article III of the TCI statutes, cited in Hom, The Beautiful Country, 112. See also R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World (London: Routledge, 1995), 159. Likening tourism to an operation of colonization led from the North of the country, Hom has argued that with the founding of the Italian Touring Club in Milan “Italy’s domestic tourism sector [. . .] developed from the North to the South, not unlike the process of unification itself [. . .] less a goal of fusing all regions into a unified political state but more an aim to integrate the South into destination Italy” (The Beautiful Country, 106).

17. Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “La Missione del Touring,” in L’Italia e il Touring negli scritti di Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1927 [1901]), 6.

18. Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “La Guida d’Italia del TCI: Una grande opera di propulsione per il turismo,” Rivista Mensile del Touring (November 1912): 580, quoted in Hom, The Beautiful Country, 113.

19. See Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy,” 1–25.

20. For a nuanced analysis of the relationship between the TCI and fascism, see R. J. B. Bosworth, “The Touring Club Italiano and the Nationalization of the Bourgeoisie,” European History Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1997): 371–410.

21. See Paul Corner, “Italy 1915–1945: Politics and Society,” in The Oxford History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 268–69.

22. The creation of the so-called “Fascist Saturdays” was one of the regime’s tools to appropriate leisure and tourism as part of its program. See Andrea Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia (Milan: Mursia, 2012), 195.

23. See Forgacs and Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society, 233–70.

24. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 179–84; and Hom, The Beautiful Country, 121–26.

25. See, for example, Anna Maria Gobbi Belcredi, “Al mare, al monte con le colonie fasciste,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano 61, no. 8 (August 1935): 627. For a contextualization of the Italian case within a larger discussion of summer colonies see Valter Balducci, ed., Architetture per le colonie di vacanza. Esperienze Europee (Florence: Alinea, 2005), 8–19.

26. On the primary targets of tourism at the time see Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia, 212–27.

27. Clemente Del Drago, “Campeggio,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano (July 1935): 529.

28. See Gabriele Gardini, Milano Marittima: La città giardino dell’Adriatico (Firenze: Alinea editrice, 2013).

29. I discussed this anti-urban agenda in chapter 1.

30. “Vita balneare a Riccione,” Giornale Luce B1141 (August 4, 1937).

31. Dario Gaggio, The Shaping of Tuscany: Landscape and Society between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 22. An initial statement of this agenda was outlined by Mussolini from the outset. See Benito Mussolini, “Fascist Agrarian Program (January 1921),” in Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945, ed. Charles F. Delzell (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 18–22.

32. These processes were backed by the Mussolini Law of 1928, which led to what was called bonifica integrale, and supported by the Ministry of Agriculture and Secretary for Land Reclamation.

33. On the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, see Federico Caprotti, Mussolini’s Cities: Internal Colonialism in Italy, 1930–1939 (Youngstown, Ohio: Cambria Press, 2007).

34. See Gaggio, The Shaping of Tuscany, 52. See also Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), for a groundbreaking study of the inclusion of the peasantry into national culture beyond the Italian peninsula.

35. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 16. On the mobilization of folklore by the fascist regime, see also W. E. Simeone, “Fascists and Folklorists in Italy,” Journal of American Folklore 91 (1978): 543–57; de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 201–16; Stefano Cavazza, “La folkloristica italiana e il fascismo: Il Comitato Nazionale per le Arti Popolari,” La Ricerca Folklorica 15 (April 1987): 109–22; and Stefano Cavazza, Piccole patrie: Feste popolari tra regione e nazione durante il fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997).

36. The magazine of the TCI devoted several articles to the governor of Libya, Italo Balbo, and his efforts to promote tourism. See, for example, Carlo Bonardi, “Italo Balbo,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista Mensile della Consociazione Turistica Italiana 46, no. 8 (August 1940): 920–21; and Carlo Bonardi, “Nuove mete del turismo coloniale: Col Touring Nel Fezzan,” Le Vie d’Italia 41, no. 7 (July 1935): 485–92.

37. Giuseppe Vedovato, Colonizzazione e turismo in Libia (Salerno: Prem Stamperia Raffaello Beaglia, 1934), 8, quoted in McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya, 47. Tourism’s relation to colonialism was contested, as it operated with its own logics and beyond the control of the fascist government. See Hom, “Empires of Tourism,” 281–300.

38. See Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia, 227–41.

39. De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 184.

40. Michelangelo Sabatino has discussed the important nuances in the terminology mobilized throughout the period for what I am broadly referring to as “vernacular architecture” (Pride in Modesty, 6).

41. Both Giovannoni and Piacentini worked together at the magazine Architettura e Arti Decorative throughout the 1920s, as I discussed in chapter 4. In 1921, Giovannoni, Piacentini, and Vittorio Morpurgo presented the “Mostra di arte rustica” at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and in 1926 Piacentini published a book dedicated to the issue: Marcello Piacentini, Architectural minore in Italia, Roma (Turin: Società Italiana Edizioni Artistiche C. Crudo, 1926). See Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 57–58.

42. Marcello Piacentini, “Il momento architettonico all’estero,” Architettura e Arti Decorative I, 1.1 (September–October 1921): 75–76.

43. Asvero Gravelli, “L’Idea storica fascista—Difesa dall’Europa e funzione antieuropea—Noi siamo l’eresia della moderna Europa,” Antieuropa 1 (April 1929): 10, cited in Cresti, “Mediterraneità e ruralità,” 115.

44. Mino Maccari, “Il Cemento disarmato: Vigilanza agli ingressi,” Il Selvaggio 7 (September 31, 1933): 50.

45. On the confrontation between the Novecento and Strapaese as well as the alliances of Novecento with the regime see chapter 1. Mussolini’s simultaneous embrace of the Strapaese is one of the most fundamental tensions within the regime’s cultural policies. See Mussolini quoted in G. Tassinari, La bonifica integrale nel decennale della legge Mussolini (Rome: Editrice Arti grafiche “Aldina,” 1939), 18: “Between ‘stracittà’ and ‘strapaese’, I am for ‘strapaese.’”

46. Piacentini, “Il momento architettonico all’estero,” 76. For an exploration of this wider phenomenon beyond Italy see, for example, Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

47. Michelucci studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and after winning a number of competitions moved to Rome, where he collaborated with modernist architect Mario Ridolfi. He authored some significant modernist projects throughout the period, such as the Santa Maria Novella train station in Florence along the Gruppo Toscano. See Francesco dal Co, “Giovanni Michelucci: A Life One Century Long,” Perspecta 27 (1992): 98–115.

48. See Giovanni Michelucci, “Fonti della moderna architettura italiana,” Domus 56 (August 1932): 460–61. For more examples of this instrumentalization see Giovanni Michelucci, “Contatti fra architetture antiche e moderne (I),” Domus 50 (February 1932): 70–71, and “Contatti fra architetture antiche e moderne (II),” Domus 51 (March 1932): 134–36. On the history of farmhouses since the Renaissance in Italy, including the origins of the casa colonica, see Claudia Lazzaro, “Rustic Country House to Refined Farmhouse: The Evolution and Migration of an Architectural Form,” JSAH 44, no. 4 (December 1985): 346–67.

49. Michelangelo Sabatino, “The Politics of Mediterraneità in Italian Modernist Architecture,” in Lejeune and Sabatino, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean, 60. See also Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 138–43. Other contemporaneous publications include Mario Tinti, La architettura delle case coloniche in Toscana (Florence: Rinascimento del libro, 1935); and Renato Biasutti, La casa rurale nella Toscana (Bologna: Olschki, 1938).

50. Giuseppe Pagano, “Case rurali,” Casabella 86 (February 1935); Giuseppe Pagano, “Documenti di architettura rurale,” Casabella 95 (November 1935); Giuseppe Pagano, “Architettura rurale in Italia,” Casabella 96 (December 1935); and Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana, Quaderni della Triennale (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1936).

51. Pagano and Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana 21.

52. Mia Fuller, “Tradition as a Means to the End of Tradition: Farmers’ Houses in Italy’s Fascist-Era New Towns,” in The End of Tradition?, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (New York: Routledge, 2004), 172. On the mobilization of tradition by nationalisms see Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

53. Ponti, introduction to “Invito al turismo,” 22.

54. See, for example, Giuseppe Pagano, “Del ‘monumentale’ nell’architettura moderna,” Casabella 40 (April 1931): 9–14.

55. Ponti, introduction to “Invito al turismo,” 22.

56. Giuseppe Pagano, “Invito al turismo,” Domus 104 (August 1936): 22. On Pagano’s photographs see Flavia Marcello, Giuseppe Pagano: Design and Social Change in Fascist Italy, 116–37 and 152–63.

57. Pagano, “Invito al turismo,” 28.

58. Pagano, “Invito al turismo,” 28. The orientation of the project was also emphasized by the rejection of collective forms of transportation in favor of the freedom provided by private cars, concentrated mostly in northern regions. See for example “Le automobili in Europa e nel Mondo,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista Mensile del Touring Club Italiano 41, no. 2 (February 1935): 142. See also Jelardi, Storia del viaggio e del turismo in Italia, 246–23.

59. Pagano, “Invito al turismo,” 25–26.

60. I have addressed this relationship in chapter 4. The same issue of Domus with Pagano’s article also contained one by Rava on colonial architecture: “Costruire in colonia,” 8.

61. “L’architetto Giuseppe Pagano progetta una piccola casa che vi potete costruire per la campagna,” Domus 108 (December 1936): 16.

62. “L’architetto Giuseppe Pagano progetta una piccola casa,” 18. The average yearly wage for an agriculture worker in 1938 would be close to 3,000 lire. See “Labor Conditions in Fascist Italy,” Monthly Labor Review 57, no. 5 (1943): 924. As discussed in chapter 2, Pagano borrowed the expression “pride in modesty” from Lionello Venturi, “Per la nuova architettura,” 3.

63. Pagano and Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana, 23.

64. See de Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 99.

65. Pagano and Daniel, Architettura rurale italiana, 23. This strategy would be consistent with the logics of colonization that Gramsci used to describe the attitudes of northern Italians toward the South of the country, as I have already discussed (see Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” 171–85). This is far from the way in which Gramsci had attempted to incorporate the South into Italy’s self-understanding and functioning as a nation-state. See Nadia Urbinati, “The Souths of Antonio Gramsci and the Concept of Hegemony,” in Schneider, Italy’s “Southern Question,” 135–51.

66. Marinetti called Capri “a futuristic island.” See “Il Discorso di Marinetti,” in Il convegno del paesaggio, ed. Edwin Cerio (Naples: Gaspare Casella, 1923), 66–68, quoted in Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 99.

67. Virgilio Marchi, Architettura futurista (Foligno: Franco Campitelli Editore, 1924).

68. Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, “Elogio di Capri,” Natura 1 (January 1928): 41–48, quoted in Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 100.

69. I have discussed the former in chapter 1. For the latter see, for example, Gruppo 7, “Architettura I.”

70. Luigi Figini, “Polemica Mediterranea,” Domus 49 (1932): 66; and Carlo Enrico Rava, “Spirito Latino I,” Domus 37 (January 1931): 44.

71. On the nuances of their different positions among others throughout the period, see Brunetti, “L’idea di Mediterraneità negli scritti di Carlo Enrico Rava e del Gruppo di Quadrante”; and Danesi, “Aporie dell’architettura italiana in periodo fascista—Mediterraneità e purismo.”

72. Enrico Peressutti, “Architettura mediterranea,” Quadrante 21 (January 1935): 40.

73. Gio Ponti, “Case per vacanze,” Domus 66 (June 1933): 292. See Flavia Marcello, “Fascism, Middle-Class Ideals, and Holiday Villas at the 5th Milan Triennale,” Open Arts Journal 2 (Winter 2013–14): 2–20.

74. “Architetture libiche degli Arch. Carlo Enrico Rava e Sebastiano Larco,” Architettura e Arti Decorative X, 1.13 (September 1931): 682. I explored this connection in chapter 4.

75. Rava, “Di un’architettura coloniale moderna, Parte prima.”

76. See McLaren, Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy, 98. There were nonetheless significant works toward the end of this period, most notably the Villa Malaparte designed by the writer Curzio Malaparte in collaboration with the architects Adalberto Libera and Adolfo Amitrano (1942). On this project in relation to the aforementioned genealogies, see Sabatino, Pride in Modesty, 108–9. On the contested discussions about Nordicist and Mediterraneanist factions within the regime, see Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, 104–29.

77. See Marisa García Vergara and Antonio Pizza, “The Mediterranean and Modern Architecture: The Dissemination of a Myth in Architectural Media,” Journal of Architecture 26, no. 8 (2021): 1117–45.

78. On Cosenza, see M. Pia Fontana and Miguel Y. Mayorga, eds., Luigi Cosenza: il territorio abitabile (Florence: Alinea, 2007). The literature on Rudofsky is extensive, including Andrea Bocco Guarneri, Bernard Rudofsky: A Humane Designer (Vienna: Springer, 2003); and Alessandra Como, The Voyage and the House: Bernard Rudofsky’s Search for Place (New York: Routledge, 2007).

79. Gio Ponti’s daughter Lisa described this rapport in the following terms: “The Mediterranean taught Rudofsky, Rudofsky taught me: this is how Gio Ponti described his collaboration with Bernard Rudofsky in the forties.” Lisa Licitra Ponti, Gio Ponti: The Complete Work 1923–1978 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 96.

80. In this, he followed many other migrants who temporarily found in Italy a benevolent context during the 1930s, as I have discussed for Rudolf Arnheim in chapter 3.

81. Significant European architects traveling to the South of Italy included Karl Friedrich Schinkel, John Ruskin, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Josef Hoffmann. See Fabio Mangone, Viaggi a Sud: Gli architetti nordici e l’Italia 1850–1925 (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2002).

82. Key to his contribution were his symposium on landscape in 1922, which served as a context for the Futurists’ engagement with the island, and his book La casa nel paesaggio di Capri (Rome: Editori Alfieri & Lacroix, 1922). See also Andrea Nastri, Edwin Cerio e la casa caprese (Naples: Clean Edizioni, 2008); and Michelangelo Sabatino, “Ghosts and Barbarians: The Vernacular in Italian Modern Architecture and Design,” Journal of Design History 21, no. 4 (2008): 336–49.

83. See Giuseppe Capponi, “Architettura ed accademia a Capri—Il ‘Rosaio’ di Edwin Cerio,” Architettura e Arti Decorative IX, 1.4 (December 1929): 177–88.

84. See Giovanni Battista Ceas, Luigi Parpagliolo, and Edwin Cerio, eds., Capri: Visioni architettoniche di Giovanni Battista Ceas (Rome: Biblioteca d’Arte Editrice, 1930).

85. Maria Teresa Parpagliolo, “Dei casini di campagna, casa Orlandi, Anacapri,” Domus 73 (January 1934): 54.

86. Parpagliolo, “Dei casini di campagna, casa Orlandi, Anacapri,” 55.

87. “Una villa per Positano,” Domus 109 (January 1937): 11–17.

88. “Una villa per Positano,” 13.

89. Gio Ponti, “Casa a Posillipo,” Domus 120 (December 1937): 6–15. Not only Capri but the whole region had been subject to different studies in the previous decade. See, for example, Roberto Pane, “Tipi di architettura rustica in Napoli e nei Campi Flegrei,” Architettura e Arti Decorative VII, 2.12 (August 1928): 529–43; and Roberto Pane, Architettura rurale campana (Florence: Rinascimento del Libro, 1936).

90. Ponti, “Casa a Posillipo,” 6.

91. See, for example, Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality, Modernity, Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–18.

92. According to Felicity Scott’s account of Rudofsky’s years in Italy, he met Ponti in 1937 in Positano and decided to move to Milan to collaborate with him. See “Functionalism’s Discontent: Bernard Rudofsky’s Other Architecture” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2001), 81. On Rudofsky and the Mediterranean see Ugo Rossi, “The Mediterranean Is Not a Myth: Bernard Rudofsky’s Mediterranean Eutopias,” in Immaginare il Mediterraneo: Architettura Arti Fotografia, ed. A. Maglio, F. Mangone, and A. Pizza (Naples: Artstudio Paparo, 2017), 197–204.

93. Bernardo Rudofsky, “La scoperta d’una isola,” Domus 123 (March 1938): 2–5; and Bernard Rudofsky (signed R), “Origini della abitazione,” Domus 124 (April 1938): 16–19.

94. On the parallels between Pagano’s and Rudofsky’s outlooks, both in relation to the teachings of art historian Lionello Venturi, see Elena Dellapiana, “Case e sandali: Bernard Rudofsky dalle isole del Mediterraneo al mito dell’anonimo,” in Maglio, Mangone, and Pizza, Immaginare il Mediterraneo, 205–14.

95. Rudofsky, “Origini della abitazione,” 18.

96. Rudofsky, “Origini della abitazione,” 18.

97. Bernardo Rudofsky, “Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di viviere,” Domus 123 (March 1938): 6–15. See also Attilio Podestà, “Una casa a Procida dell’architetto Bernard Rudofsky,” Casabella 117 (September 1937): 12–17.

98. Scott, “Functionalism’s Discontent,” 83.

99. I have addressed the role of “types” in Ponti’s work and their ambition to shape a “tradition” in chapter 2.

100. Rudofsky, “Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di viviere,” 14–15.

101. He explored the contact with the ground in Bernard Rudofsky (signed R.), “Variazioni del pavimento / dell’andatura,” Domus 124 (April 1938): 14–15.

102. Bernardo Rudofsky, “Finne della città,” Domus 124 (April 1938): 20–21.

103. Rudofsky, “La scoperta d’una isola,” 3. For a discussion of Rudofsky’s evolving engagements with transience and mobility in the postwar period see Felicity Scott, “Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault (Cambridge, Mass.: CCA and MIT Press, 2000), 215–34.

104. Rudofsky, “La scoperta d’una isola,” 3.

105. Gio Ponti, “Problemi italiani della abitazione al mare,” Domus 52 (August 1940): 19–20.

106. Ponti, “Problemi italiani della abitazione al mare,” 20.

107. Ponti, “Problemi italiani della abitazione al mare,” 20.

108. Gio Ponti, “Una piccola casa ideale,” Domus 138 (June 1939): 40–46; and Gio Ponti, “Proposta di una casa al mare,” Domus 138 (June 1939): 48–49.

109. Ponti, “Una piccola casa ideale,” 40.

110. Gio Ponti, “Immaginate la vostra casa al mare,” Lo Stile 10 (October 1941): 8.

111. Gio Ponti, “Una casa al mare,” Domus 138 (June 1939): 34.

112. See Benito Mussolini, “Mussolini’s First Speech in the Chamber of Deputies (June 21, 1921),” in Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945, 23.

113. Seven issues were published between 1939 and 1941. Together with Pietro Maria Bardi, Daria Guarnati planned to co-edit a monograph on Ponti’s work and, while it never came to fruition, a special issue of Aria d’Italia was devoted to Ponti in 1954. See Silvia Bignami, “Daria Guarnati e lo stile Italiano,” in “Aria d’Italia” di Daria Guarnati: L’arte della rivista intorno al 1940 (Milan: Skira, 2008), 13–16. On the relationship of this editorial endeavor with Domus, Guarnati wrote: “I like Domus a lot and it’s necessary for me to be careful not to come too close to its line, even if involuntarily.” Letter from Daria Guarnati to Gio Ponti (August 2, 1940), CAT GP 002, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives. The magazine aimed to capture a collective artistic milieu in the country, gathering “images, pages of our own things, colors, characters of life and spirits” in loosely themed volumes framed by a nationalist emphasis that was evident in an understanding of Italy’s “air” as a common ground during an increasingly critical historical moment. See Daria Guarnati, “Aria d’Italia,” Aria d’Italia: Inverno 1939 (Winter 1939).

114. “Estate mediterranea,” Aria d’Italia (Summer 1940).

115. Giacomo Zanibelli and Vito Ricci, “Literacy and Land Inequality in Italy During Fascism: A Geographic Historical Analysis,” Rivista di storia economica 38, no. 2 (2022): 186.

116. On the architecture of the colonie see Armando Melis, “Schema funzionale di colonia marina” in Caratteri degli edifici: Distribuzione, proporzionamento, organizzazione degli edifici tipici (Turin: Libraria Italiana, 1939), 183; Mario Labò and Attilio Podesta, Colonie marine, montane, elioterapiche (Milan: Editoriale Domus, 1941); Mario Labo, “Colonie marine, montane, elioterapiche,” Casabella Costruzioni 167–168 (November–December 1941): 2–6. These architectures supported highly programmed experiences that sought to discipline the youth into Italian citizens. See, for example, Giulio Roisecco, “Gli edifici per l’assistenza alla gioventù,” Architettura Italiana 3–4 (March–April 1943): 6: “All the affairs of everyday life are carried out from one morning to the next [following] a regular and disciplined rhythm.” See also Giornale Luce B1152 (August 25, 1937).

117. Ponti, “Problemi italiani della abitazione al mare,” 20.

118. U. Cirani, “Il problema turistico nel Mezzogiorno,” Turismo d’italia 1 (1927). See also Angelo Della Massea “Portorose, calamità balneare,” Turismo d’Italia 14, no. 7 (July 1939): 37.

119. See “L’attrezzatura alberghiera e la Produzione Nazionale,” Corriere della Sera, May 27, 1939, reprinted in Domus 138 (June 1939): 69–70.

120. “Programma: Riunione,” October 25, 1939, Fascicolo 2, ENITEA, Archivio Central dello Stato, Roma.

121. “Verbale della Riunione del Consiglio,” September 18, 1940/ XVIII Fascicolo 2, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome.

122. See “Verbale della Reunione del Consiglio dell’ENITEA” 19 dicembre 1939/XVIII Fascicolo 2, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma. Examples of this pursuit kept in the archive include the Albergo Savoia (1941), in Terminillo, Rieti—a location that Mussolini would have famously reached trekking in 1933—and the speculative project for a “Typical Mountain Pension.” Fascicolo 83, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma.

123. Ponti, “L’attrezzatura alberghiera e la produzione nazionale,” 69–70.

124. Ponti, “L’attrezzatura alberghiera e la produzione nazionale,” 70.

125. See “Un nuovo albergo, un nuovo stupendo centro turistico italiano,” Domus 121 (January 1938): 10–11. See also Giovanni Denti and Chiara Toscani, Gio Ponti: Albergo Paradiso al Cevedale (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 2011).

126. “Progetto di massima di albergo al Lido, Albergo turistico tipo in Roma per manifestazioni di masse (1942),” Fascicolo 103, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma. In a letter to the General Director for Tourism, Ponti lamented the lack of opportunities to work with the organization. Letter from Ponti to Giuseppe Toffano, Direttore Generale per il Turismo (September 26, 1942), Fascicolo 103, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma.

127. Gio Ponti, “Albergo di San Michele o ‘Nel Bosco’ all’Isola di Capri,” Architettura: Rivista del Sindacato nazionale fascista architetti XVII, no. 6 (June 1940): 273.

128. These drawings were probably authored by Ponti as later elaborations of his collaboration with Rudofsky. Assigned to the “Albergo Cap d’Antibes,” many represent rooms that keep the names of their shared project in Capri. GPON 102/5, Archivio Gio Ponti, CSAC, Università di Parma. Some were later developed by Ponti alone as new projects for the Island of Comino in Malta (1962), Folder 333, Archivio Ponti, Milan.

129. Ponti, “Albergo di San Michele o ‘Nel Bosco’ all’Isola di Capri,” 273.

130. Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, and Enrico Peressutti, “Sala del Piano turistico dell’isola d’Elba,” Guida VII Triennale de Milano (Milan 1940), 167. See also “Isola d’Elba, nuova meta turistica,” Domus 152 (August 1940): 44–53. Rogers, who was of Jewish descent, was not listed as author of the project due to the regime’s anti-Semitic policies in this moment. Elba was also among the targets of ENITEA, as evinced by the documentation in the archive, including P. L. Bellacci, “L’Avvenire turistico dell’Elba,” Gazzetta Azzura (ca. 1942), Fascicolo 104, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma. On Elba, see Chiara Baglione, “Immaginare la Capri del Nord: Architetti e architettura all’isola d’Elba,” in Immaginare il Mediterraneo, 317–26.

131. See Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Piani regolatori regionali per una sistemazione dei litorali,” in L’Albergo in Italia, no. 4 (July–August 1937): 214–21.

132. Gio Ponti, introduction to “Isola d’Elba, nuova meta turistica,” Domus 152 (August 1940): 44.

133. On the relation of vacation houses designed during the period and middle-class ideals see Marcelo, “Fascism, Middle Class Ideals, and Holiday Villas at the 5th Milan Triennale.”

134. See, for example, “Una zona di ville in Liguria,” Domus 140 (August 1939): 39–40.

135. E. Cerio, Il giardino e la pergola nel paesaggio di Capri (Rome: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1922), quoted in Lucia Miodini, “Il racconto dell’abitare mediterraneo: Narrazione e progetto nell’ideario architettonico pontiano,” Magazine del Festival dell’Architettura (2018). Consulted in https://www.famagazine.it/index.php/famagazine/article/view/218/831#_ednref17. I have addressed the complex translation of the term civiltà as both culture and civilization in the introduction and chapter 1.

136. Sonja Dümpelmann, “Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (1903–1974): Her Development as a Landscape Architect between Tradition and Modernism,” Garden History 30, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 49–73.

137. Dümpelmann, “Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard,” 61. According to Dümpelmann, it is unclear how this emphasis related to fascist politics, which Parpagliolo later embraced more decisively in her project for the Exhibition of the Italian Garden at the EUR.

138. Gio Ponti, “Un giardino disegnato da Bo e Pagani,” Domus 156 (December 1940): 44.

139. A comprehensive evaluation of Pagani’s contribution to architecture culture in Italy is still missing.

140. While the bibliography on Lina Bo Bardi is extensive, the most detailed account of her early years can be found in Zeuler R.M. de A. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). See also Lina Bo Bardi, “Curriculum Literário,” in Lina Bo Bardi, ed. Marcelo Ferraz (São Paulo: ILBPMB, 1994); and Renato L. S. Anelli, “Ponderações sobre os relatos da trajetória de Lina Bo Bardi na Itália,” Pós. Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo da FAUUSP 17, no. 27 (June 2010): 86–101.

141. Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Casa sul mare di Sicilia,” Domus 152 (August 1940): 30–35.

142. This emphasis was evident, for example, in “Domus sceglie per voi e per la vostra casa le migliori idee dalle riviste di tutto il mondo,” Domus 128 (August 1938): 52. See also “L’arredamento e l’ornamento del giardino e la bellezza della produzione italiana alla Triennale,” Domus 151 (July 1940): 47: “It has been only for a few years that Italy has developed a complete repertoire of garden furniture. To this question, ‘Domus’ has made a great contribution.”

143. “Novità nelle forniture per la casa,” Domus 111 (March 1937): 26–27. I briefly discussed this chair in chapter 2.

144. The magazine added this subtitle in March 1937 and kept it until November of the same year.

145. On earlier examples of the hybrid incorporation of local crafts and regional furniture style see, for example, the Chiavari chairs on a steel structure at the 1933 Milan Triennale. See “L’arredamento alla Triennale,” Domus 65 (May 1933): 232.

146. Ponti linked the interest in local crafts and the politics of autarchy under the cry “Everything Is National” in Gio Ponti, “Artigianato: Problema Nazionale,” Domus 153 (September 1940): 18–19. That issue included a thorough report of the Crafts Market and Exhibition in Florence. A more general statement on autarchic politics in architecture was included in the previous issue of the journal: Luigi Cosenza, “Autarchia,” Domus 152 (August 1940): 78.

147. See “Particolari di un appartamento a Milano,” Domus 144 (December 1939): 48–49.

148. See McLaren, Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race, 5, quoting Benito Mussolini, “Discorso di Mussolini al Consiglio Nazionale del pnf,” October 25, 1938, Il Popolo d’Italia (26 October 1938), 298, in Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1959), 29:185–96.

149. I have addressed this question in chapter 4.

150. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Per la casa e la vita in colonia,” Domus 157 (January 1941): 61. Already at the beginning of the 1930s, La Rinascente was marketing foldable chairs destined for holiday houses similar to those promoted by Rava for the Italian colonies. See La Rinascente advertisement in Domus, no. 31 (July 1930), 4. A similar emphasis on mobility was evident around this time beyond the borders of Italy, including for example in Eileen Gray’s “camping” style, with furnishing pieces that “no longer depend on their architectural milieu,” as Caroline Constant has noted. See Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray (London: Phaidon, 2000), 105.

151. As an example of these new emphasis, see “Una collezione di oggetti e di arredi per la vostra casa al mare, per la vostra vita al mare,” Domus 152 (August 1940): 55.

152. Ponti considered that his role in the administration of the magazine had been reduced, and he resigned from his position with a letter to the director Gianni Mazzochi. Letter from Ponti to Gianni Mazzochi (November 16, 1940), CAT GP 045, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives.

153. On the project of Lo Stile see Massimo Martignoni, Gio Ponti: Gli anni di Stile, 1941–1974 (Milan: Abitare Segesta, 2002).

154. Giuseppe Bottai, “Stile,” Lo Stile 1 (January 1941): 10.

155. See, for example, “I Servizi di Stile: Consigli sull’arredamento,” Lo Stile 17 (May 1942), 28–29. On their drawings for these and other journals see Zeuler Lima, Lina Bo Bardi: Drawings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 29–30.

156. Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Arredamenti degli architetti Lina Bo e Carlo Pagani,” Lo Stile, no. 1 (January 1941): 88.

157. Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Terrazze in città,” Lo Stile 4 (April 1941): 70–71; “Finistre e balconi d’estate” and “Fodere d’estate,” Lo Stile 7 (July 1941): 32–35; Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Tende e cabine,” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941): 40–41.

158. See “Aspetti nuovi di vecchi mobili,” Lo Stile 7 (July 1941): 30–31; and “Stoffe e poltrone” and Lina Bo and Carlo Pagani, “Vecchi mobili in provincia,” both in Lo Stile 11 (November 1941): 16–19.

159. See, for example, “Mobili per la campagna e il mare,” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941): 72–73. See also a wicker armchair designed by Lio Carminati (a student and collaborator of Gio Ponti) and produced for Casa e Giardino, a house by the sea, accompanying a short article on a “Simple House for Healthy Life.” See Andrea Busiri Vicci, “Casa semplice per la vita sana,” Lo Stile 4 (April 1941): 2–4.

160. See “Verbale della Reunione del Consiglio dell’ENITEA,” October 25, 1939/XVIII, Fascicolo 2, ENITEA, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma.

161. Ponti, “Turismo mediterraneo italiano e turismo ideale nella Dalmazia,” 15.

162. Gio Ponti, “Un nuovo tipo d’albergo progettato da Ponti e Rudofsky per le coste e le isole del tirreno e che può essere ideale per la Dalmazia,” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941): 16–22.

163. The aforementioned pursuit of collaboration with ENITEA is just one among many examples of this commitment. See, for example, letter from Gio Ponti to Nicolo de Cesare, Segretatrio Particuloare del Duce (February 2, 1942), Fascicolo 511.102, Cartegio Ordinario, Segretaria Particolare del Duce, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome. I owe this reference to Paolo Nicoloso: Mussolini, Architect: Propaganda and Urban Landscape in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 109.

164. Carlo Enrico Rava, “Addobbi delle città o l’architettura delle cerimonie,” Lo Stile 19–20 (July–August 1942): 79–81, including photographs of the “Mostra del cartello di Guerra” and “Allestimento per la raccolta della lana.” See Sarah Catalano, “Lina Bo [Bardi] in Italy,” Revista de pesquisa em arquitetura e urbanismo 20, no. 1 (2014): 65–73. Authorship is not clearly assigned in Rava’s article.

165. According to Lima, it is unclear if Bo was part of the resistance (Lina Bo Bardi, 27).

166. Lina Bo, “Casa e nuclei abitativi in Roma,” Lo Stile 20 (July 1943): 15.

167. Letter from Lina Bo to Carlo Pagani (May 10, 1943) in Carlo Pagani, “Allegati alle considerazioni sul ‘Curriculum letterario,’” 8, quoted in Lima, Lina Bo Bardi, 24.

168. Lina Bo Bardi (signed L.B.), “Architettura e natura: La casa nel paesaggio,” Domus 191 (November 1943): 464.

169. Pagano enlisted as a volunteer to battle in Albania in 1941 but then left the Fascist Party in 1942; he was captured after trying to join the resistance and then interned in a concentration camp in 1943; he escaped in 1944 and was captured again soon after, then tortured and transferred to different concentration camps and finally to Mauthausen. See Giancarlo Palanti, “Notizie biografiche,” Casabella Costruzioni 195–198 (1946): 17.

170. “Realism” would become one of the cultural forces of postwar Italy, conventionally gathered under the umbrella of “neorealism,” as I will briefly address in the conclusion.

171. Paulo Tavares has pushed similar arguments further in his analysis of the postwar alignment between Lina Bo Bardi’s engagement with indigenous cultures in Brazil (particularly through her magazine Habitat, created in 1950), nationalism, and “episodes of dis-possession, des-territorializaton, des-habitat.” See “Des-Habitat,” in Bauhaus Imaginista: A School in the World, ed. Marion von Osten and Grant Watson (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019), 157.

172. Gio Ponti, “Il turismo è per l’Italia un problema nazionale e di primo piano,” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941): 2. Ponti developed similar arguments in “Paesaggio italiano,” Lo Stile 9 (September 1941): 1.

173. Gio Ponti, “Perchè questo numero sul mare e sul turismo marino? Perchè questo invito alla Dalmazia?,” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941): 1.

174. Ponti, “Perchè questo numero?,” 1.

175. Ponti, “Perchè questo numero?,” 1. Luigi Bertolini faced, in a poetic tone, a similar question in writing for Lo Stile: “It is the maritime solitude that comforted me and was sufficient to me.” See “Se dovessi tornare al mare,” Lo Stile 8 (August 1941): 27. The centrality of the sea in Italian culture through the period was evident in the plethora of literary sources addressing this subject matter. See Piero Gadda, “Letture Marine,” Domus 138 (June 1939): 70. He mentioned, among others, Riccardo Bacchelli, Lo sa il tonno (1923); Giovanni Comisso, Gente di Mare (1928); Alessandro Varaldo, Al vento d’Occidente (1932); Vittorio Giovanni Rossi, Oceano (1935); Ugo Cuesta, Garibaldi sul mare (1932) and Uomini sul mare (1938); and Pier Angelo Soldini, Alghe e meduse (1935). He also appealed to more instrumental manuals such as Berto Bertù, Conoscere il Mare (1928), and Tommaso Gropallo, Il romanzo della Vela (1929).

176. Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings, 27.

177. Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings, 24.

178. Empirical studies on the need for housing even took over the magazine cover. See front covers of Lo Stile 51 (March 1945) and 53 (May 1945). In October 1944, the magazine was renamed Stile: Architettura arti arredamento, Rivista per la ricostruzione e per la casa di domani (Style: architecture, art, furnishing: magazine for the reconstruction and for the house of tomorrow). The magazine dealt with the transformation of modes of production to address the need for housing, reflecting concerns with industrialization, normalization, and customization (considering also their social implications). See, for example, “Rispondete a questi interrogativi,” Lo Stile 52 (April 1945): 1.

179. Gio Ponti, “Il momento della casa,” Lo Stile 19–20 (July–August 1942): 32; Gio Ponti, “L’urbanistica sarà il problema del futuro,” Lo Stile 21 (September 1942): 6.

180. See, for example, Adalberto Libera, “Anatomia per arredatore,” Lo Stile 32 (August 1943): 56–59.

181. Ugo Ojetti, “Domande: Razionale e ragionevole,” Corriere della Sera, January 16, 1944, 3. Marinetti aimed to support Ponti’s quest in response to Ojetti: “My colleague from the Academy, Ugo Ojetti, your contradictor, is obsessed with the need to condemn the standardization of construction, which might be an economic and social requirement but does not presuppose the aesthetic value of functionalism brought to the great art through diversity, polychromy, originality, and more or less mysterious poetic lyricism.” Letter from Marinetti to Ponti (March 7, 1944), CAT GP 001, EGP, Gio Ponti Archives.

182. Gio Ponti, “Costruzione d’una civiltà universale,” Lo Stile 49 (January 1945): 1. The issue also contained an article by Carlo Mollino and Giuseppe Vadacchino, “Architettura e unificazione,” pp. 2–3. See also Gio Ponti, “Orgoglio, Amore, Pietà dell’Europa,” Lo Stile 50 (February 1945): ix–2.

183. See Lo Stile 50 (February 1945).

Conclusion

1. Lo Stile 32 (August 1943).

2. Adalberto Libera, Gio Ponti, and Giuseppe Vaccaro, “Per la carta della casa,” Lo Stile 30 (June 1943): 12.

3. Libera, Ponti, and Vaccaro, “Per la carta della casa.”

4. Libera, Ponti, and Vaccaro, “Per la carta della casa.” Furnishing was to be similarly prefabricated, as seen, for example, in the pieces Ponti designed with SAFFA (Società Anonima Fabbriche Fiammiferi e Affini). See “La casa entro l’armadio,” Lo Stile 42 (June 1944): 18. See Maria Teresa Feraboli, “Typical-Exact-Suitable,” in Gio Ponti: Loving Architecture, ed. Maristella Casciato and Fulvio Irace (Florence: Forma, 2019), 72–73.

5. Cover of Lo Stile 49 (January 1945).

6. For an overview of the time see Penny Sparke, “‘A Home for Everybody?’ Design, Ideology and the Culture of the Home in Italy, 1945–1972,” in Modernism in Design, ed. Paul Greenhalgh (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 185–88; and Vittorio Gregotti, “Italian Design, 1945–1971,” in Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, 315–21.

7. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Divagazioni attorno a una mostra d’arredamento,” Domus 211 (July 1946): 6.

8. Dennis Doordan, “Rebuilding the House of Man,” in The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1994), 588.

9. Rogers had been affiliated with the anti-fascist Partito d’Azione during the war, and his politics were oriented toward a complete rupture with fascism in the shaping of Italian society for the new era.

10. E. N. Rogers, “Divagazioni,” 6.

11. See, for example, Manfredo Tafuri, “Realismo e architettura,” in Architettura moderna: L’avventura delle idée, 1750–1980, ed. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (Milan: Electa, 1985), 123–45; Doordan, “Rebuilding the House of Man,” 586–93; Maristella Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture,” in Goldhagen, Anxious Modernisms, 25–53; and Bruno Reichlin, “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 1),” Grey Room 5 (Fall 2001): 78–101; and “Figures of Neorealism in Italian Architecture (Part 2),” Grey Room 6 (Winter 2002): 110–133. On neorealism more broadly, see Charles L. Leavitt IV, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

12. Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture,” 25.

13. On the implications of these alliances in design and architecture, see Paolo Scrivano, Building Transatlantic Italy: Architectural Dialogues with Postwar America (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013). The show traveled to twelve different locations after its Brooklyn iteration.

14. Meyric R. Rogers, introduction to Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (Rome: Comagnia Nazionale Artigiana, 1950), 13.

15. Penny Sparke, “The Straw Donkey: Tourist Kitsch or Proto-Design? Craft and Design in Italy, 1945–1960,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 1 (1998): 59. See also Elena Dellapiana, “Italy Creates: Gio Ponti, America and the Shaping of the Italian Design Image,” Res Mobilis 7, no. 8 (2018): 20–48; Kate Devine, “Selling Italy: Craft and Italianness in Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (1950–53),” Journal of Modern Craft (2022): 1–15.

16. M. R. Rogers, introduction to Italy at Work, 14.

17. M. R. Rogers, “Regional Distribution,” in Italy at Work, 19. See also Sparke, “The Straw Donkey,” 62. The exhibition announced many of the trends of postwar Italian design and its circulation in an international context. See, for example, Catharine Rossi, Crafting Design in Italy: From Post-War to Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). On the role of design in crafting a national image for international audiences see, for example, Grace Lees-Maffei, “Italianità and Internationalism: Production, Design and Mediation at Alessi, 1976–96,” Modern Italy 7, no. 1 (2002): 37–57.

18. Carlo Pagani, “Convincere non imporre,” Domus 212 (August 1946): 4.

19. Giancarlo De Carlo, “William Morris, pioniere dell’arte sociale,” Domus 211 (July 1946): 21.

20. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Programma: Domus, la casa dell’uomo,” Domus, La casa dell’uomo 205 (January 1946): 3. Translated in Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture 1943–1968. A Documentary Anthology (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993): 79. Ockman translates “gusto” as “style,” while I prefer to use “taste,” closer to the original and a significant term in Italian discourse.

21. E. N. Rogers, “Programma: Domus, la casa dell’uomo,” 3.

22. E. N. Rogers, “Programma: Domus, la casa dell’uomo,” 3.

23. E. N. Rogers, “Ricostruzione,” 14.

24. Paul F. Wendt, “Post World-War-II Housing Policies in Italy,” Land Economics 38, no. 2 (May 1962): 113–33.

25. Franco Baldasso, Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-Fascist Italy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), 26.

26. Baldasso, Against Redemption, 140.

27. Baldasso, Against Redemption, 148–49.

28. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7.

29. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, ix. See also Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.”

30. Carlo Levi, “La città,” in Dopo il diluvio. Sommario dell’Italia contemporanea, ed. Dino Terra (Milan: Garzanti, 1947), 18.

31. Writing in 1972, Manfredo Tafuri argued that there is an “essential continuity between the Italian design of the prewar period and that of the years from 1945 to 1960”; see “Design and Technological Utopia,” in Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, 388. See also Rossi, Crafting Design in Italy, 5.

32. Camilla Hawthorne has argued that the processes of racialization and the racial exclusions fueled by fascism were “re-embedded” in the ideologies of citizenship of the postwar period. See Camilla Hawthorne, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), 3.

33. As members of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative have put it, “Governing by design [. . .] is not simply a matter of monumental symbolism and space, state power and authority, imposed control and surveillance.” Daniel M. Abramson, Arindam Dutta, Timothy Hyde, and Jonathan Massey for Aggregate, eds., introduction to Governing by Design (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), vii.

34. See Appadurai, The Social Life of Things.

35. This is the question that I explored, together with the co-curators of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016, in Lluis A. Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio G. Galán, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Marina Otero Verzier, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, eds., After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016).

36. Jean-Luc Nancy, Fragments, Frankness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

37. Paulo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 32.

Index

All main entries that begin with numerals (Arabic or Roman) appear at the top of the index. The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. The letter pl denotes a plate.

1851 Great Exhibition in London, 165

1889 Paris World’s Fair, 165

1902 First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts, 22–23, 264n15

1911 Turin World’s Fair (International Exhibition of Industry and Work), 25–26, 55; Mostra etnografica (Ethnographic exhibition), 26; Mostra regionale (Regional exhibition), 26; Padiglione degli Italiani all’estero (Pavilion of Italians abroad), 165; Reconstruction of the Eritrean village, 25, 165, 166f4.2

1928 National Exposition in Turin (1928 National Exposition), 55; La Casa degli Architetti, 55, 56f1.11, 172; Mostra coloniale (Colonial show) (see Mostra coloniale 1928; reflection of link between colonialism and nationalism, 166–67

I Monza Biennale, 1923: bias toward regional arts, 31; broad target audience, 30; “Saletta in Stile Futurista” by Fortunato Depero, 31

II Monza Biennale, 1925: display of Richard Ginori ceramic vases, 37; greater search for unity, 31; Marangoni on, 31–32; “synthesis of collective taste” as goal, 31

III Monza Biennale, 1927: abstraction and reassertion of classical motifs, 34; connected to modernist developments, 34; criticism of, 42; Domus Nova (see Domus Nova); members of the new artistic council for, 36; models and drawings of Gruppo 7, 268n84; presentation of ENAPI products, 48, 50; spirit of the Novecento group, 34, 35, 35f1.3

IV Monza Triennale, 1930: as “applied arts,” 53–54; the architect as professional in charge of furnishing, 60–61; directors of the, 53; diversity and modernity in, 53; and “exemplary production,” 53. See also Casa del Dopolavorista; Casa Elettrica; Casa per le Vacanze

V Milan Triennale, 1933: chairs at the, 80f2.7; civiltà-style-culture, 79–80; diversity of designs on show, 79; Griffini contribution to, 67; holiday houses at the, 212, 213f5.8; Luigi Piccinato’s Colonial House at the, 212

VI Milan Triennale, 1936: Abitazione Dimostrativa (Demonstration house) (see Abitazione Dimostrativa [Demonstration house]); Giulio Barella on, 111; Mostra dell’abitazione (Dwelling show), 111, 112f2.25; Mostra dell’architettura rurale (Rural Architecture show), 205, 207f5.4; Mostra dell’arredamento (Furnishing show), 108, 111–12; Ponti’s chair at the, 94f2.14

VII Milan Triennale, 1940, 186; Italian identity and Italy’s colonial adventure, 162; Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale (Exhibition of colonial equipment) (see Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale [Exhibition of colonial equipment]); tourism plan for Elba Island, 226, 229f5.20

VII Milan Triennale 1940: designs in the Exhibition of colonial equipment, 188–89, 190f4.16, 191f4.17; Italian identity and Italy’s colonial adventure, 162; Rava’s entrance to the Exhibition of colonial equipment, 179f4.11; Rava’s Exhibition of colonial equipment, 178; Salvo d’Angelo’s kitchen and boudoir, 190f4.16

Abitazione Dimostrativa (Demonstration house), 94f2.15, 108, 109f2.23, 110f2.24, 111

Abuna Messias, 118, 119

Academy Braidense, 120

Addis Ababa, urban plan, 173–74, 176f4.8

advertisements (ads): compositional logics, 85–86, 87f2.9; of furniture line Domus Nova in Domus, 19, 20f1.1

Africa/n, 14, 16, 26, 172, 186, 187, 197, 230, 246; applied and decorative arts, furnishings, objects, 162, 163, 165, 167, 173, 174, 176, 187; architecture, 183, 184; carceral habitations, 194–95; a “continent with little articulation,” 170–72; houses, 169, 172; nationalist sentiments reinforced by colonial expansion in, 7; objects, as foil for modernist furnishings, 176, 179; settings, exoticized settings for propaganda films, 153; a space of Otherness, 6

agdò dwellings, 165

aggiornamento (updating), 29

Agnelli, Giovanni, 76

Ai margini del Sahara (Viaggio a Tunin) (Carlo Enrico Rava), 180, 181f4.13

Albergo di San Michele, 224, 226, 227f5.18, 228f5.19

Albergo Paradiso del Cevedale, 224, 225f5.16, 226f5.17

Albini, Franco, 245; designs and furnishings, 78, 78f2.6, 96, 112f2.25, 187, 232; types for ENAPI with Ponti, 93; Zanini on project by, 187

Alessandrini, Goffredo: Abuna Messias, 118; Luciano Serra, Pilota (Luciano Serra, pilot), 153

Alfieri, Dino, 118, 153

Alle Città d’Italia, 44, 47

Alpago-Novello, Alberto, 53, 186

ambienti (environments), 9, 77

Ambrosiano, 76

Anderson, Benedict, 4; on the daily newspaper reading, 103; simultaneity, 151–52

anti-bourgeois politics, 11, 233, 245, 260n63. See also bourgeois; bourgeoisie

anti-Semitic politics, 9

architect/s: as arredatore, Morelli on, 69; as guarantor of a shared project, 60–61; integral (architetto integrale), 38; as leaders of domestic renewal, 72; as mediators, 52; modernity and the specialized knowledge of the, 69; as synthesizer, 132; term confused with engineer, 269n94

Architect’s Data, 67

Architectural Graphic Standards, 67

architectural profession, 2, 38, 66, 216–18

architecture: as an arte di stato (art of the state), 2, 63, 119; classical (see classicism); colonial (see colonial architecture); commercial establishments and markets, 174; exhibitions, 33; fascist, 1–2; fascist of classical lineage v. antifascist modernist tradition, 253n2; garden, 229–31; Liberty (see Liberty style); minor (see minor); as a mobile object of tourism, 199, 312n13; modern (see modernism); monumental, 148; national, 1; Novecento (see Novecento); publications, 66–67; rationalist (see rationalism); rural (see rural); schools, 38, 101; significant part in fascist narratives, 204; vernacular (see vernacular)

“Architecture of the Italian Race,” 192

Architettura e Arti Decorative, 34, 66

Arendt, Hannah, 8

arengario, 47

Argan, Giulio Carlo: on arredamento (furnishing), 255n10; in Casabella on modern architecture, 77; contributions to Domus, 72; on Italian design, futurism, and metaphysical art, 3

Aria d’Italia, 158, 223, 319n113

Arnheim, Rudolf, 128–29, 142, 151; “The New Laocoon,” 129

arredamento (furnishing), 2; v. attrezzatura, 187; etymology, 255n9

Asmara, 173, 175f4.7, 193

atmosfera (atmosphere), 79

attrezzatura (equipment) v. arredamento, 187, 307n125

autarky, 88, 202

Aux Villes d’Italie. See Alle Città d’Italia

avant-garde, 19, 57, 64, 79, 85, 90, 115, 132, 139

Baedeker’s Handbooks for Travellers, 200

Baldessari, Luciano, 85, 119

Banfi, Gianluigi, 66

Bardi, Lina Bo. See Bo, Lina

Bardi, Pietro Maria: on architecture as arte di stato (art of the state), 2, 63, 119; on homes in the Soviet Union, 99; invitation to Persico to move to Milan, 75; promotion of rationalism, 64; relocation to Brazil, 238

Bauhaus, 13, 19, 27

BBPR, 66, 71, 85

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 8, 119, 164

Bennett, Tony, 48, 50

Bernège, Paulette, 66

Bertarelli, Luigi Vittorio: ostensibly maintaining a “political neutrality,” 200, 312n16; Touring Club Italiano (TCI), 200; view of all Italians as actors and spectators, 228. See also Touring Club Italiano (TCI)

Bianchini, Giuseppe, 186

Biennio Rosso (two red years), 1919–1920, 201

Bo, Lina: furnishing designs with Pagani, 234, 235f5.24, 236f5.25; garden designs with Pagani, 231; “House by the Sea in Sicily” with Pagani, 230–31, 231f5.21; politically ambiguous position, 9, 236–37; relocation to Brazil, 238; student of Piacentini, architecture faculty of Rome, 230, 321n140

Bocconi brothers, 44, 47

Boni, Ada, 99

Bordighera. See Villa Marchesano in Bordighera

Borelli, Aldo, 63, 66

Borgata Tiburtino III, Rome, 148f3.21

Borletti, Senatore: on civilità, 45; founder of La Rinascente, 5, 44; goods at the La Rinascente addressed to all classes, 46; Piazza del Duomo, 48

Boswell, Jesse, 76

Bottai, Giuseppe: Critica Fascista, 75; Il Popolo d’Italia, 143; Lo Stile, 234; support for Quandrante, 66

Bottoni, Piero: Casa Elettrica, 57, 59f1.13, 98; collaboration with Griffini, 67, 213f5.8; dining set of, 85, 86f2.8; Ojetti on proposals of, 90

Bourdieu, Pierre, 128

bourgeois: apartments, 173; culture of household management, 72; environments, popular and, 30; holidays, 215; Italian furnishings, 88; memory, 57; rural populations and urban, 12, 172; tendencies, 82; vices, 123; villas, 96; women groups, 67. See also anti-bourgeois politics

bourgeoisie, 11; limitations of, 260n62

Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico, 123, 124f3.5

Braun, Emily, 43

Breuer, Marcel, 13, 86–87

Brustio, Umberto: founder of La Rinascente, 5, 44; travel to Asmara, 173

Bugatti, Carlo, 23, 24f1.2

Buzzi, Tomaso: on the III Monza Biennale, 42; featured in Domus, 73, 75, 85; Il Labirinto, 35f1.3; Villa Bouilhet with Ponti, 37

Camerini, Mario: Gli uomini, che mascalzoni!, 158; I grandi magazzini, 115, 116f3.1, 117, 118, 118f3.2, 119, 152f3.23; Il Signor Max, 119; praise in Corriere della Sera, 158; white telephone films, 123

Camus, Renato, 112f2.25, 187

Carceral habitations, Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare in Naples, 194–96, 195f4.19

“carceral space,” 193

Casabella, 72, 73f2.4, 75–79, 82, 84, 112, 119–20, 123, 125–26, 152, 189, 205–6. See also La casa bella

Casabella Costruzioni, 112

casa calonica, 205–6, 206f5.3, 220

Casa del Dopolavorista, 57

Casa del Fascio in Cuomo, 108, 126–27, 127f3.8

Casa Devalle, 139–40, 140f3.15, 141f3.16; Galvano’s review of, 139–40

Casa e Giardino furniture, 94f2.14, 231, 232, 232f5.22, 233f5.23, 234, 322n159

Casa Elettrica (Electric house), 57, 59f1.13, 132

Casa Manusardi, 87f2.9

Casa Miller in Turin, 134–40, 135f3.11, 136f3.12, 137f3.13, 137f3.14, 141f3.17; Carlo Levi’s criticism and praise, 138–39

Casa M in Milano, 232, 233f5.23

Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house), 56–57, 58f1.1, 64; Ponti’s “types” inspired by, 101, 102f2.19

Casciato, Maristella, 67, 243

Casorati, Felice, 34, 61, 133

Ceas, Giovanni Battista, 218

Central Commission of Industrial Arts Education, 23

Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC), 142

Cerio, Edwin, 214–15, 229, 214f5.9, 317n82

Chair with coils, 94f2.14

Chambers, Iain, 12, 198, 238

Chessa, Gigi, 34, 35f1.3, 76

Chiarini, Luigi, 142

Chiesa, Pietro, 31, 34, 88, 186

Cinecittà studios in Rome, 5, 16, 17, 117, 142–47, 149, 298n120; groundbreaking ceremony of, 145, 145f3.19; Harlem, filmed at, 195; I grandi magazzini, filmed at, 117; location in Rome, 146, 146f3.20; Peressutti’s design, 143, 148, 144f3.18, 297n106; as a refugee camp, 158, 159f3.26

cinema: Arnheim on, 128–29, 142, 151; described as the regime’s strongest weapon, 291n10; Marchi on the need for more theaters, 149

“cinematographic reality,” 130, 132, 134

Cipriani, Lidio, 169, 304n52; floor plans of a “Somali mondùll” and “Sidamo hive dwelling,” 170f4.5

citizenry: aesthetic education of the, 32; a voluntarily self-regulating, 50

civiltà, 11–12, 27, 29–30, 45, 81–82, 145, 147, 176, 229, 239, 241, 246, 261n70, 283n82; in the V Triennale of 1933, 79–80

classicism, 19, 24, 33, 42, 64, 66, 85; architecture, 25, 204, 218; classical motifs, 38, 39, 43, 53; classicist lineage in Turinese baroque, 25

Cobra Chair, 23, 24f1.2

Colombo, Ettore, 39

colonial architecture, 113, 162, 173, 181–85, 182f4.14; African decorative art in the Colonial show, 167, 168f4.3; development of a critical discourse, 162; and identity negotiations between colonizer and colonized, 184–85; interiors replicating generic principles, 173; minor architecture, 183–84; modern, 183; perspectives for Pavilion for the Colonies, 182f4.14 (above); photos from East Africa, 181f4.13; reconstruction of an Eritrean village, 165, 166f4.2, 168, 169f4.4

colonialism, “colonial consciousness”: civilizing mission, 174–76; codification of colonial furnishings, 168–71; ethnographic expeditions and displays, 162, 163, 165–72; and Italian identity, 163–64, 181–85, 193–94; and modernist design, 196; and modernity, 161–64, 193; and nationalism, 166–68; and racism/racial hierarchies, 172, 174, 176–78, 192–93, 196–97; and the violent enactment of otherness, 113

Colonial show. See Mostra coloniale 1928

Colonial shows. See Mostre coloniali 1911

colonial shows, and Italian identity, 25–26

colonie (summer camps), 201, 223

colonies: architecture with an Italian identity, 183; conception as shapeless regions, 179; contested role of modern architecture in the, 183; definition of modern design to achieve hegemony in the, 164; different kinds of intervention in, 185–86; discrimination against African peoples in the, 153; Exhibition of colonial equipment at VII Milan Triennale (see Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale [Exhibition of colonial equipment]); furnishing spaces for Italians in the, 173; Italian identity and architecture in the, 183; La Rinascente’s incursions into the, 173; “minor architecture” of the, 183–84; National Exposition as a presentation of the, 166; the Pavilion for the Colonies, Rava and Larco, 181, 182f4.14, 183; scale of intervention in the, 185–86; select features of architecture in the, 184; source of work for Italian architects, 162; vague knowledge of the colonies, 179–80

colonization: in Africa, 7; as a form of expansion and circulation, 194; furnishing as a technique of, 164; hierarchies of, 188–89, 188f4.15; internal, 202–3; and the modern “adventure,” 162; of the South by the North (Antonio Gramsci), 7, 26; and tourism, 189, 203

Commissariato per il Turismo, 200

Como Group, 212

Como sistemare e gobernare la casa mia (How to fix and manage my house), 68

Consociazione Turistica Italiana. See Touring Club Italiano (TCI)

Contessa Visconti di Modrone Erba, 34

cooking paradigms. See Boni, Ada; Marinetti, Tommaso

Corbusian formalism, 212

Corriere della Sera: appointment of party members to managerial positions in, 103; Ojetti’s “La patria e la sedia” in, 1; Ponti’s collaboration with, 63, 101, 103, 104f2.21, 105f2.22, 111

Cosenza, Luigi: Villa in Posillipo, 215, 217f5.11; Villa in Positano, 213, 215, 216f5.10

Costruzioni Casabella, 112

Costruzione razionale della casa (Griffini), 67, 122, 123f3.10, 132, 133f3.10

Cremona Italo, 139, 296n92

“Criteria of today’s home,” 187

Critica Fascista, 75

Croce, Benedetto, 76–77; limitations of “bourgeoise,” 260n62

CSC. See Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC)

cultural regeneration, 4, 7–8, 16, 30, 36, 60, 81, 84–85; “new Italians,” 65

Cyrenaica, 168, 193

dal Fabbro, Mario, 191f4.17

D’Angelo, Salvo, 189, 190f4.16

Daniel, Guarniero, 205, 207f5.4

D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 44–45

Darmstadt Artist’s Colony, 23, 26–27

d’Aronco, Raimondo, 23

de Grazia, Victoria: on the alignment of fascist ideology and commercial culture, 273n142; politicization of leisure trips, 204; “popular” culture in the regime’s definition, 83; role of women in the colonial project, 309n125; staying at home, a form of social engagement, 10

Del Debbio, Enrico, 113, 174, 176f4.8, 189

Demonstration House. See Abitazione Dimostrativa (Demonstration House)

De Stefani, Alessandro, 123, 124f3.5 (below)

di Belgiojoso, Lodovico Barbiano, 66. See also BBPR

Diez, Maria Gasca, 66

dissemination: of compositions of different material and formal choices, 81; of designed furnishings linked to renewed values, 244; of European housing models in Italy, 67; of expressions by the discourse of taste, 81; of ideas as the purpose of film studios, 145; of knowledge on gardens, 230; of model houses as a national project, 101; of new principles by Ponti, 107; platforms and media for, 4; of specific designs, 91

distribution: circulation of the applied arts, 54; networks of, 50

Ditta Fratelli Suemin, 50, 51f1.10

“domestically constrained politics” (politica del piede di casa), 178

domestic economy, 57, 66–67, 98

Domus, 4, 9, 15–16, 21, 52, 54–55, 57, 61, 64, 69–75, 74f2.5, 77–101, 111–12, 162, 186–87, 198, 207–9, 213, 218, 220, 230–31, 233–34, 238, 243–45, pl1

Domus Nova, 19–22, 20f1.1, 36, 38–44, 40f1.7, 41f1.8, 45–47, 50, 61; Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house) (see Casa per le Vacanze [Vacation house])

Dopolavoro. See Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National leisure-time organization)

Duce/Il Duce, 53, 93, 121, 178. See also Mussolini, Benito

ENAPI. See Ente Nationale per la Piccola Industria e l’Artigianato (ENAPI)

English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 25

Ente Nazionale Industrie per le Turistiche ed Alberghiere (ENITEA), 223, 224, 236, 319n122, 320n126, 322n163

Ente Nazionale Italiano per l’Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro, 67

Ente Nationale per la Piccola Industria e l’Artigianato (ENAPI), 48–50, 93, 232, 321n146

Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche (ENIT), 200

Ente Turistico ed Alberghiero della Libia (ETAL), 203, 314n36

Eritrea, 165–67, 166f4.2, 168, 169f4.4, 173, 183

ethnographic studies, 168–72, 170f4.5, 171f4.6

Exhibition of colonial equipment. See Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale (Exhibition of colonial equipment)

Exhibition of the National Competition for Economic Furnishing, 50, 51f1.10

Experimental center of cinematography. See Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC)

Faludi, Eugenio, 212, 213f5.13

Fanon, Frantz, 184, 196

fascism, 3–5, 7–8, 10–15, 17, 19, 22, 30, 32, 42–43, 44–45, 47, 50, 52, 60, 64–67, 75, 81, 84, 85, 88, 93, 98–99, 103, 106–7, 120–21, 123, 127–28, 139–40, 143, 153, 155, 159, 161, 172, 178, 184, 192, 204, 212, 218, 237, 239, 241, 243, 244, 247, 258n39

fascist regime, 1, 2, 5, 8–10, 16–17, 19, 45–48, 57, 60, 63–64, 66–67, 75, 81, 83, 88, 90, 96, 107, 117–20, 123, 129, 140, 143, 147, 149, 153, 155–56, 159, 161, 163, 174, 178, 199–206, 210, 212, 224, 228, 230, 236–37, 239, 241, 243, 245, 248

Felice, Carlo, 32, 53, 157, 186

Fiera Campionaria, 158, 181, 183

Figini, Luigi: avant-garde pieces, in the Domus, 85; Domus, a platform for arguments, 213; framing of a “Mediterranean polemic,” 210, 212; project reflecting the influence of rationalist trends, 50; responsible for the architecture of Casa Elettrica, 57, 60

film sets, 119–20, 123, 125, 126–29, 294n44

Fireside chair, 231, 232f5.22

First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts, 22, 23, 24f1.2

First Italian Exposition of Rational Architecture, 60

fixed-price store. See UPIM (fixed-price store)

Fondra, Elena, 173, 178

Fontana d’Arte, 88, 97f2.17, 244

Freddi, Luigi, 5, 16, 142–43, 149–50, 156–57, 195, 297n100

Frette, Guido, 57, 60

Fuller, Mia, 164, 206

furnishing/s: as characters, 16; as a commodity, 15, 21, 62; in the fascist regime, complexities of, 10; of gardens and vacation architectures, 230–31, 321n142; as information, 16, 65, 84; means to new identity-building, 4, 12; as medium and message, 4; as a mode of territorial appropriation, 237–38; national, 1; networks, 52; politicization of, 5, 8; and politics of fascism, 3–4; and politics of modernism beyond fascism, 247; principles of, 4; spatial distribution of, 68f2.1, 70, 98, 134, 135f3.11; strategies to update old, 234, 235f5.24, 236f5.25; as a technology of modernism, 3; and universality of values in Italy v. in the colonies, 187–88

futurism, 3, 31, 99

Gaggio, Dario, 202, 313n31

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, 47, 121, 122f3.4

Gamela Stream, 174

GANT (Giovani Architetti Novatori Torinese), 55, 76, 276n184

Gardella, Ignazio, 98–99

garden/s, 201, 229–31, 233

Garvin, Diana, 174, 288n160, 288n170

Gazzetta del Popolo, 76

genarchia, 84

Gentile, Emilio, 7, 30, 257n32

Gentile, Giovanni, 38, 178

Giachi, Giovanni, 47, 49f1.9

Giolli, Raffaello: on the Furnishing show of the 1936 Milan Triennale, 111; Mollino’s photos for publication, 135; on the Monza Biennale exhibitions, 33; privileged interlocutor of Pagano and Persico, 259n54; Problemi d’arte attuale, 69

Giornale Luce: newsreel “inauguration of a residential complex,” 149f3.22; newsreel “swimmers at the beach,” Romagna, 203f5.2

Giovannoni, Gustavo, 66, 204

Gobetti, Piero, 75, 76

Golan, Romy, 39

Government Office of Indigenous Applied Art, 167

Grammatica del disegno, 91, 91f2.12

Gramsci, Antonio: on architecture, 82; on culture, 12; on hegemony, 11, 164, 284n110; on historicity of works of art, 83; on Italian intellectuals and Italian peoples, 285n117; on rationalism, 83; on relation to context, 83; on the Southern Question, 7, 26; on taste, 284n107; on urban/rural relations, 270n109

Griffin, Roger, 7, 45, 258n39

Griffini, Enrico, 50, 67, 132, 187; arengario in the Piazza del Duomo, 47; contributions to Domus and La casa bella, 71–72; holiday house by the sea, 212, 213f5.13; housing, Costruzione razionale della casa, 67–69, 68f2.1, 90, 132, 133f3.10

Gruppi Universitari Fascisti (GUF), 201

Gruppo 7, 57–60, 66, 85, 167, 181, 183, 210; Casa Elettrica, 57, 59f1.13, 132; Quadrante as platform for, 66; Rava and promotion of rationalism in, 130

Guarnati, Daria, 223, 318n113

Guidi, Ignazio, 113, 174, 176f4.8, 186, 189

Harlem, 194–59

hegemony, 7, 11–12, 83, 164; of the bourgeois, 11–12, 46, 176; disputing of, 83; over knowledge, assumption of, 218

hierarchy/ies, 4, 12, 46, 65, 137, 139; in the colonies, 16, 174, 188, 192, 196, 247; fascist notion of gerarchia, 84; territorial, 11, 220, 244

Higher institute for artistic industries. See Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA)

history of taste. See taste

Hoffman, Josef, 13, 31, 81, 86, 317n81

Holiday House by the Sea (Griffini et al.), 212, 213f5.8. See also Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house)

Hom, Stephanie Malia, 164, 200

hotel, 15–16, 156f3.24, 182f4.14, 183, 212, 223, 224–26

house. See Italian house; La casa all’italiana

household management (massaismo), 67, 72

housing, 50, 55, 67–69, 68f2.1, 72, 75, 88, 90, 96, 98, 101, 107, 117, 120, 132, 133f3.10, 152f3.23, 152, 186, 238, 241, 299n140

Hungary, 155–56

I grandi magazzini (The department store), 115, 116f3.1, 116f3.2, 117, 118, 118f3.2, 119, 151–52, 152f3.23; white telephone films (cinema dei telefoni bianchi), 117

Il gusto dei primitivi, 76

Il Labirinto, 35f1.3, 37, 42

Il Popolo d’Italia, 36, 142, 143, 272n138

Il talismano della felicità (Talisman of happiness), 99

industrialization, 13, 27–29, 88, 90

Institute for industrial reconstruction. See Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI)

Institute for public housing. See Istituto per le Case Popolari (ICP)

interior/s: contrast with exteriors as per Loos and Ojetti, 265n37; and cultural dissolution, 13–14; as a form of expression, 79; and furnishing in architecture schools, 101; imagined and physical, 16; and interiority, association between, 3, 255n11; the kitchen, 98–99; the living room, 96–98; and modernity, 3, 164; as the realm of women, 256n21

International Exhibition of Art in Industry at Macy’s, 61

International Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Modern Arts. See I Monza Biennale; II Monza Biennale; III Monza Biennale

International Exhibition of Industry and Work. See 1911 Turin World’s Fair

International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts. See IV Monza Triennale

International Exhibition of the Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and Modern Architecture. See V Milan Triennale; VI Milan Triennale; VII Milan Triennale

Inventiamo l’amore (Let’s invent love), 132

Istituto LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), 142–43, 297n102

Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI), 142, 297n99

Istituto per le Case Popolari (ICP), 46

Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche (ISIA), 54

Italian architects and designers, alliance with fascist regime, 8, 9–10

Italian army, 106; in the colonies, 197; Pagano in World War I, enlisting in the, 75; surrender in North Africa in 1943, 239; use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia, 179–80

Italian house: architects and urban elite as leaders of domestic renewal, 72; Borletti on, 45; as “container of our happy and sad times,” Ponti on, 70–71; and cultural regeneration as a national pursuit, 60; domestic economy, Ponti on, 66; expansion of the definition of the Italian “home” to the colonies, 178; furnishing and the, 62; Griffini on the modern, 67; laboratory for the “new Italian house,” 33–34; Le Arti Decorative and, 32–33; Morelli on the renewal of the home, 69; as a national construct, 52–53; Persico on the renewal of the house, 64; as a single definitive model, 22; and the stability of the nation, 47. See also Abitazione Dimostrativa (Demonstration House); Casa del Dopolavorista; Casa Elettrica (Electric house); Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house)

Italianness (italianità), 14; in the colonies, 176, 189, 193; furnishing as shaping and disseminating, 62, 277n205; not applicable to all Italian migrants, 62

Italian unification: industrialization after, 28; the North v. the South, 6–7; stylistic debates after, 24; tourism and, 200. See also national unification

“Italy at Work” Exhibition, 243–44, 245fC.3

kitchen, 95f2.16, 98–101; Bottoni’s design for Casa Elettrica, 57; cost of furnishing, 21; d’Angelo’s kitchen at VII Milan Triennale, 189, 190f4.16 (above); Diez’s article and book on, 66; Griffini’s diagram for a rationalized layout, 132, 133f3.10; Morelli’s Dalla cucina al salotto, 98; part of renovation of existing buildings, 88; Rava on the overemphasis on technical considerations, 132

Kitchen of Yesterday and Kitchen of Tomorrow, 66

Kultur, 30

Kurtume Stream, 174

La casa, 67

La casa all’italiana (the Italian house), 4, 52, 275n172

La casa bella, 21, 52, 71–72, 71f2.3, 75, 77, 83, 280n47. See also Casabella

La casa che vorrei avere (The house I wish I had), 67, 70f2.2

La Casa degli Architetti. See 1928 National Exposition in Turin

La dinamo dell’eroismo. See O la borsa o la vita

Lamonaca, Marianne, 85

Lancia, Emilio, 15, 21, 34, 36–37, 45, 50, 56, 61

La Rassegna Italiana, 60, 130

Larco, Sebastiano, 50, 53, 60, 130, 162, 181, 183, 212

La Rinascente, 44–48: advertisement of furniture line Domus Nova in Domus, 20f1.1; in the colonies, 178; furnishing networks and Italian characterization, 57; geographical and consumer base expansion of, 48–50; history, 44–45, 47; the Libyan crafts show in the Piazza Colonna store in Rome, 176, 177f4.9; redesigned by Giovanni Giachi, 47, 49f1.9; store on the Piazza del Duomo, 47–48, 117, 129; UPIM (fixed-price store), 48; UPIM in Asmara, 173

Lasansky, Medina, 203

Latin spirit/heritage, 184

La vie d’un poète, 122

Lavini, Giuseppe, 25

League of Nations, sanctions imposed on Italy, 173

Le Arti Decorative, 32–33

Le Bon Marché, 13

Le Corbusier, 13, 67, 69, 74, 77; correspondence with Ponti, 275n179; decorative arts and industry, 54

Levi, Carlo, 13–14, 72, 76; design of film sets for Patatrac with Paulucci, 120, 121, 121f3.3, 125f3.6, 155, 156f3.24, 157f3.25; interlocutor of Pagano and Persico, 259n54; position diverged from modernist ideology, 246–47; review of Casa Miller, 134, 137, 138–39

Levi-Montalcini, Gino, 76; commissioned to design Gualino’s office and family apartment, 76; exploration of the living room in La casa bela, 96, 98; living room of La Casa degli Architetti, 55, 56f1.11

Libera, Adalberto, 57

Liberty style, 23–25, 61, 126, 128

Libya, 167, 173, 183, 184, 193, 212

living room (camera di soggiorno), discourse in Domus and La casa bella, 96–98

“living space” (Lebensraum), 168

Lombardy, 4, 36, 43

Loos, on interiors v. exteriors, 265n37

Lo Schermo, 149

Lo Stile, 16, 130, 139, 197, 213, 233–34, 236–38, 239, 240fC.1, 241, 242fC.2; Bo and Pagani’s role in approach to furniture, 234–36, 235f5.24; cover design, “a home for everybody,” 241, 242fC.2; criticism by Ojetti, 238, 323n181; launch by Ponti in 1940, 233–34; map of Italy held in a hand, cover page, 239, 240fC.1; provision of housing “for all,” 237, 323n178

Lo Stile nella casa e nell’arredamento, See Lo Stile

Lovarini, Luisa, 57

Macy’s, 61

magazines: as key instruments in the formation of taste (see Casabella; Domus); as media participating in “the mythographic construction” of the Mediterranean, 213. See also specific architecture publications

Magistretti, Pier Giulio, 47

“making of Italians,” 6, 7, 12, 17

Malchiodi, 189

Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 13, 85, 292n12

“Manifesto of Futurist Cooking” (Marinetti and Fillia), 99

Manzoni theater, 47

Marangoni, Guido, 5, 21–22, 27–32. See also La casa bella; Le Arti Decorative

Marchi, Virgilio: on cinemas, 149; as futurist architect, 210, 211f5.7

Marconi, Plinio, 189

Marelli, Michele, 34, 35f1.3

marghef, 165

Marinetti, Tommaso, 99, 324n181

massaismo. See household management (massaismo)

Mastrocinque, Camilo, 132

Matisse, Henri, 27

Mazzocchi, Cesare, 187

Mazzocchi, Gianni, 237

Mazzocchi, Maurizio, 187

Mazzoleni, Giuseppe, 112f2.25, 187

Mazzucchelli, Anna Maria, 72

Mbembe, Achille, 193

McLaren, Brian, 189

Medin, Gastone: design for Due cuori felici and O la borsa o la vita, 123, 124f3.5, 125; design for I grandi magazzini, 117

Mediterranean architecture, 197–99, 210–12, 218, 220, 223, 225; campaign to create national consciousness, 197; contested referent for Italian architects, 212, 317n76; with diverse territories and architectures of Italy, 210; linked to new attitudes to leisure, 212; as a malleable reality for political programs, 212–13; Ponti’s interest in, 220, 223; reevaluation of rural vernacular architectures, 199; in relation to tourism, 213; and Rudofsky and Cosenza’s houses, 215, 216f5.10

Mediterranean spirit/character, 184, 185, 210

Mengoni, Giuseppe, 47

Menzio, Francesco, 76

MIAR. See Movimento Italiano per l’Architettura Razionale (MIAR)

Michelucci, Giovanni, 205, 206f5.3, 315n47

Mignolo, Walter, 247

migrants: in the colonie (summer camps), 201; in New York, 62; remittances, 62; from the South and rural areas to northern cities, 6, 14, 28, 46, 47, 272n137; who left the country, 6, 28

Milanese bourgeoisie, 46, 198

Milano Marittima, 201

Milan Triennale exhibitions. See V Milan Triennale; VI Milan Triennale; VII Milan Triennale

Minoletti, Giulio, 112f2.25, 187

minor: architecture in Italy, 183, 184, 212, 283n99, 306n89; arts, 2 See also peasant; rural; vernacular

Minotaure, the Surrealist magazine, 134

Mitchell, Timothy, 14, 173

mobili, term used for furnishing, 264n15

mobility: in African cultures, 172; in colonial furnishings/the designs in the Exhibition of colonial equipment, 189, 192; and colonial hierarchies, 196; in the contemporary world, 248; in furnishing, 2; in garden furnishing, 233; of Italian colonizers v. “nomadism” of Bedouin, 193–94; Rava’s modernity’s characteristic “adventure,” 164. See also portability

model house/houses. See Casa del Dopolavorista; Casa Elettrica (Electric house); La Casa Degli Architetti; types

modern architecture, 27, 60, 137, 205, 212, 218, 219; an ally in the pursuit of adventure, 161; assumption of hegemony over knowledge, 218; characterized by a taste of impressionism, 77; for developing tourist industry, 219–20; grounding in Italian vernacular traditions, 205–6; and the Mediterranean, 210–12, 218; “pride in modesty” and, 82–83

modernism, 2–3, 32, 45, 53–54, 66, 138, 206, 215, 237, 239, 244, 246–47, 250; and colonization, 176, 181–85; discussions in Architettura e Arti Decorative and Quadrante, 66; as dividing Italian imperialists from African individuals, 192; in Domus, on aesthetics of, 69–70; and fascism, 7–8, 10, 64–65, 81; and futurists, 31; and gerarchia (hierarchy), 84; and the identity of Italy as a modern nation, 167, 176, 193–94; Levi’s reading of, 140; Mollino on, 133; national and international, 60; Perisco on, 82, 83, 120; Ponti’s approach to, 86, 88, 107, 206; Rava on, 85, 184, 185; and vernacular architecture in Italy, 204–5

modernist design: and deterritorialization, 196; and fascism, 3, 8; in film, 117, 128; as a form a power, 172–73, 196; and its expansive and segregating nature, 192; and national identity, 167; as a way of structuring the nation, 30

modernity, 3, 6, 7, 12, 14, 19, 44, 69, 86, 96, 119, 156, 219, 239, 244, 247; and colonialism, 162–64, 192, 193; discussions in Domus, 70–71, 86; middle class and, 96; and a sense of “adventure” and “expansion of life horizons,” 16, 161, 162, 164, 209

modernization of Italian households, as national pursuit, 106

Mollino, Carlo: background and politics, 133–34; Casa Devalle (see Casa Devalle); Casa Miller (see Casa Miller in Turin); “La casa e l’ideale: Casa in Collina” in Domus, 295n73, 295n74; Vita di Oberon, 295n68

Monza Biennale exhibitions, citizenship promoted by, 44; educational platform associated with, 54; as laboratory of “the Italian house,” 33–34; traveling displays of, 6. See also I Monza Biennale; II Monza Biennale; III Monza Biennale; IV Monza Triennale

Morelli, Lidia: contributions to La casa bella, 72; on kitchens in Dalla cucina al salotto, 98; on modern housing and furnishing tenets, 67–69, 70f2.2, 96, 98; reviewed in Domus and La casa bela, 71, 72; reviews of, 71

Mostra coloniale 1928, 167, 168f4.3; codifying for control, 170; designed by Pagano and Ettore, 167, 168f4.3; ethnographic reconstructions at the, 168, 169f4.4; furnishings and the disarticulated condition of African dwellings, 172; furnishings in East African dwellings, 169–70, 170f4.5, 171f4.6; reinforcement of racial constructs in, 172

Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale (Exhibition of colonial equipment), 178–79, 179f4.11; designs in the exhibition, 188–89, 190f4.16, 191f4.17; distinction between the “universal” and the “culture of the bazaar,” 192; expansion of the definition of the Italian “home,” 178; term attrezzatura explained, 187

Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare (Triennial exhibition of Italian overseas lands), 163; carceral habitations, 194–96, 195f4.19

Mostre coloniali 1911: aimed at creating “colonial consciousness,” 25–26; reconstruction of the Eritrean village, 165, 166, 166f4.2, 168, 169f4.4; three main parts of, 165

movie theaters, 118, 149, 150

Movimento Italiano per l’Architettura Razionale (MIAR), 60, 67

MR chair, 125–29, 126f3.7

Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, 200

Mussolini, Benito: association with key tourist destinations, 200–201, 202f5.1; declaration of war on France and Great Britain by, 197; definition of rural populations by, 223; identitarian impetus of fascism and Italian “taste for adventure,” 161; model Italian, 10; on Novecento, 42; reaction to “domestically constrained politics” (politica del piede di casa), 178; on Strapaese, 205; on unified art and unified Italian culture, 80. See also Duce/Il Duce

Mussolini Cup won by Abuna Messias, 118

Muzio, Giovanni: arengario, 47; and the Novecento, 34, 36; Palazzo dell’Arte, 79

National agency for the tourist and hotel industries. See Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche ed Alberghiere (ENITEA)

National Exposition. See 1928 National Exposition in Turin (1928 National Exposition)

National Fascist Party (PNF), 9, 30, 103, 234

National Fascist Syndicate of Architects (Sindacato Nazionale Fascista degli Architetti), 9

nationalist organicism, 54

national rebirth. See cultural regeneration

national regeneration. See cultural regeneration

national unification: colonization of South by North, 7, 26; good design and, 29; TCI and, 200. See also Italian unification

Negroni, Baldassarre, 123

Neufert, Ernst: Architect’s Data, 67; rapid design, 93

New Housekeeping, The: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, 66

newspaper/s: Ambrosiano, 76; Corriere della Sera, 1, 10, 63; and fascist propaganda, 103, 106, 107; Gazetta del Popolo, 76; Giovanni Agnelli, owner of several, 76; Il Popolo d’Italia, 36, 142, 143, 272n138; Stampa, 76; and state patronage, 10, 36

Nochlin, Linda, 165–66

“nomadism”: of colonizers v. indigenous mobility, 193; in design, 189

Novecento: architecture, 34, 39; art exhibition in Milan, Mussolini on, 42; classicism and, 43, 76, 88, 210, 270n110; and the Domus Nova line, 36–38; and fascism, 64; featured in Domus, 85; furniture, 69; and hegemony of the northern bourgeoisie, 43; influence on III Monza Biennale, 34, 35f1.3, 36; v. Strapaese group, 42–43, 204–5; style and bourgeois clients, 22

Ojetti, Ugo, 1–2, 24–27; call for politicization of the decorative arts, 26, 27; on civiltà, 30; classicism and fascism, 64, 66; close ties with the fascist regime, 63–64; criticism of Lo Stile and Ponti, 238; on Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, 27; on good taste trickling down, 46; idea of models v. Ponti’s types, 90–91; idea of national culture, 27; on interiors v. exteriors, 265n37; on Liberty style, 24, 25; on the Monza Biennale exhibitions, 33; Pagano’s criticism of, 152; and Ponti, 37, 46, 52, 63, 90, 269n92, 286n138

O la borsa o la vita, 124

Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB), 201

Opera Nazionale Combattenti (ONC), 201

Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National leisure-time organization), 10, 50, 51f1.10, 201

Ordinamento Fondiario della Colonia Eritrea, 186–87

Organization of land in Eritrean colony. See Ordinamento Fondiario della Colonia Eritrea

Orientalism, 181; and “realist mystification,” 165–66

Padiglione degli Italiani all’Estero, 165

Pagani, Carlo: as chief editor of Lo Stile, 233–34; collaboration with Bo and Castiglione, 236–37; cutting ties with Lo Stile, 237; examples of small houses with Ponti, 236; furnishings with Bo, 234, 235f5.24, 236f5.25; garden designs with Bo, 231, 231f5.21; “House by the Sea in Sicily” with Bo, 230–31; on previous complicity with fascism, 244; student of Ponti at the Milan Politecnico, 230; turning against the fascist cause, 237; vacation homes and gardens, 16

Pagano, Giuseppe: background and politics, 9, 75, 237, 323n169; on bad taste, 82; on civilità, 82; contributions to/editor of La casa bella, Casabella, Casabella Costruzioni; Costruzioni Casabella, 16, 64, 72, 76, 112, 205; criticism of Ponti, 9; curator of “Rural Architecture” exhibition, 205; design of the Mostra coloniale, 167, 168f4.3; director of 1936 Milan Triennale, 75, 111; fascist, 9; and Gio Ponti compared, 112–13; on housing, 112, 152, 299n140; La Casa degli Architetti, 55, 172; modernist furnishing, 53, 55, 56f1.11; orientation to the South, 209, 315n58; part of the circle of the “Six Painters of Turin,” 76; with Ponti in creating “Invitation to Tourism,” 205–6, 208f5.5; professional focus of Casabella under, 72; projects for small houses, 152, 209–10, 209f5.6, 316n62; prototype of prefabricated systems, 186; resistance, imprisonment, and torture, 9, 237, 323n169; rural house, 208f5.6, 209, 210; on rural/vernacular architecture as model, 82, 205–6, 207, 207f5.4; on taste, 82, 84; on tourism, 207, 208f5.5, 209

Palazzo dell’Arte, 178–79

palingenesis, 65, 84. See also cultural regeneration

Papini, Roberto, on the Domus Nova furnishings, 42

Parpagliolo, Luigi, 215

Parpagliolo, Maria Teresa, 5, 214, 215, 229, 230

Patatrac and its architecture, 155, 156f3.24, 157f3.25

Paulucci, Enrico, 76; set design for Patatrac with Levi, 120, 121, 121f3.3, 125f3.6, 155, 156f3.24, 157f3.25

Pavari, Graziella, 169–70

Pavilion for the Colonies, 181–83, 182f4.14

Pavilion of Italians Abroad. See Padiglione degli Italiani all’Estero

Payne, Alina, 88, 199

peasant, 26, 32, 33, 42, 60, 265n31. See also minor; rural; vernacular

Peressutti, Enrico, 66, 212

Perriand, Charlotte, 13, 19, 125

Persico, Edoardo: analysis of Casa per le Vacanze and Sartoria, 64–65; on architecture and decoration “as a mirror of human affairs,” 81; background and political affiliation, 9, 75–76; and cilivtà, 81; collective nature of artistic creation, 77; conflict with Rava’s position, 9, 185; contributions to/editor of La casa bella, Casabella, 64–65, 71, 71f2.3, 72, 73f2.4, 75–76, 83–84; on designs by Albini, 77; construction for the Plebiscite with Nizzoli, 123, 124f3.5; on interiors, scenography, and film, 119–20, 121, 123, 129, 130; on interiors and furnishing, 77, 81, 155; on modernism, 82, 121, 128; Parker shop, 121; part of the circle of the “Six Painters of Turin,” 76; on Ponti’s work, 82, 86; on rationalism and the problem of modernity, 133, 295n65; review of Mies’s chair in Casabella, 125–26, 126f3.7, 127–28; Sala delle Medaglie d’Oro, 121; “Stile” (Style), 71–72, 71f2.3; on taste, 64–65, 75, 84, 108; on the works displayed in the 1933 V Triennale, 81–82

photographs, role of, in Domus and Casabella, 78, 78f2.6, 85

Piacentini, Marcello: as architecture faculty in Rome, 205; on architecture in film, 156–57; founder, Architettura e Arti Decorative, 66, 314n41; on Larco and Rava’s and work for the Pavilion for the Colonies, 183, 306n91; member of the executive committee for the 1940 VII Milan Triennale, 186; on minor/vernacular architecture, 183, 204, 210; proposal for a general regulatory plan for Ethiopia, 186; the single type of building in the colonies, 186

Piazza Colonna, 176

Piazza del Duomo, 21, 45, 47

Pica, Agnoldomenico, 79, 80f2.7

Pica, Vittorio, 23

Piccinato, Luigi, 184, 189, 237

Piedmont, Piedmontese, 5–6, 31, 35f1.3

Pittini, Ettore: La Casa degli Architetti, 55, 56f1.11, 172; Mostra colionale, 167

PNF. See National Fascist Party (PNF)

Pollini, Gino, 57, 59f1.13, 60, 85, 87f2.9

Ponti, Gio. Abitazione Dimostrativa (see Abitazione Dimostrativa [Demonstration house]); Albergo di San Michele (see Albergo di San Michele); Albergo Paradiso del Cevedale (see Albergo Paradiso del Cevedale); on applied arts and industry, 53–55; and art and industry, 54; background and politics, 4–5, 9, 17, 36–38, 37f1.4, 239, 240fC.1, 241; on the Casa del Dopolavorista, 57; and Casa e Giardino, 94f2.14, 231, 232f5.22; Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house) (see Casa per le Vacanze [Vacation house]); and civilità, 79–80, 81; collaboration with Albini for ENAPI, 93; collaboration with Lancia, 21, 37, 39f1.6, 40f1.7, 41f1.8, 50, 56, 58f1.12, 64; collaboration with Lancia and Buzzi, 37; contributions to Aria d’Italia, 223; contributions to Corriere della Sera, 63, 101, 103, 104f2.21, 105f2.22, 106–8; contributions to/shaping of Domus, 21, 52–53, 69–71, 72, 79, 80–81, 84–85, 88, 91–93, 92f2.13, 96, 98, 99, 209, 213, 220; contributions to/shaping of Monza Biennale and Milan Triennale, 21, 34, 36, 42, 53–55, 79–80, 186; contributions to/shaping of Lo Stile, 4, 16, 197, 206, 207, 233–34, 238, 239, 322n152; correspondence with Le Corbusier, 275n179; designs of, 15, 37, 53, 75, 88–90, 89f2.10, 89f2.11, 93, 94f2.14, 94f2.15, 97f2.17, 231–32, 233f5.23; on the development of types, 90–91, 93, 101; Domus Nova (see Domus Nova); family house Via Randaccio, 37, 39f1.6; and the furnishing and architecture of the house as a national project, 52–53, 81, 84, 90–91, 93, 96, 103, 106–8, 111; furnishings of, 231, 232, 232f5.22, 233, 321n145; on hotel architecture, 223–26, 229; hotel for Cap d’Antibes, 225–26, 320n128; on hotel infrastructure, summer camps, and tourism, 206, 220, 223, 224, 229, 236, 319n116; houses and housing of, 37, 39f1.6, 101, 102f219, 103f220; la casa all’italiana (the Italian house), 4, 52–53; on La Casa degli Architetti, 55; on the Mediterranean and tourism, 197–98, 198, 206, 209, 212, 213, 216–17, 220, 223–26, 228–29, 237–38; on modernism, 69–71, 79–80, 81, 84; and Novecento, 34, 36; and Ojetti, 36, 37, 46, 52, 63, 90, 269n92, 286n138; and Pagano, 9, 112–13; and Persico, 64, 82, 86; and propaganda, 111; and Richard Ginori, 36–37, 38f1.5, 75; “A small ideal house,” 220, 221f5.14, 222, 222f5.15, 223; university professor in Milan, 101, 230; urban plan for Addis Ababa, 113, 174, 176f4.8; vacation homes by/promoted by, 16, 198, 209–10, 212–13, 218, 220, 222–23; Villa Marchesano in Bordighera (see Villa Marchesano in Bordighera). See also Domus; Lo Stile

popular culture, Gramsci’s idea v. the regime’s of, 83

portability, 189, 199. See also mobility

Portaluppi, Piero, 47, 212

post-impressionist painting. See “Six Painters of Turin”

press, key channel for propaganda, 101–3

“pride in modesty,” 82, 210, 296n84, 316n62

print, drawing of furnishing types, 91, 93, 94f2.14, 94f2.15, 95f2.16

Problemi d’arte attuale, 69

production of locality, 14, 262n85

propaganda, 110

Quadrante, 66, 127f3.8, 280n46

question of taste (gusto). See taste

race, 5, 30, 45, 161, 183, 192, 194, 204; civiltà and, 79–81; in the colonies, 172, 174, 176, 188; as the Italian “new men,” 172; Rava about architecture of the Italian, 153

racial lines: in Addis Ababa, divisions along, 174; furniture used to divide imperialists from indigenous people along, 192

racism, 172

rationalism, 34, 57, 64, 65, 66, 72, 75, 83, 85, 130, 133, 139, 154, 183, 205

Rava, Carlo Enrico: on the architecture and furnishing of film, 129–30, 131f3.9, 132, 135, 142, 153, 234; architecture for film, 117, 129, 132; architecture in the colonies, 183–84; “Architecture of the Italian Race,” 190; background and politics, 4–5, 9, 17, 130, 162, 163f4.1, 230, 241, 256n20; on the colonial “adventure,” 161, 164; on colonial architecture, 181, 182f4.14, 183 184–85, 186, 212; on colonial equipment, 162, 173, 176, 177f4.10, 178–80, 185, 186–88, 189, 190f4.16, 192, 193f4.18, 233 (see also Mostra dell’attrezzatura coloniale [Exhibition of colonial equipment]); on the colonies and colonialism, 179, 180, 180f4.12, 181, 181f4.13, 185, 189; criticism of Fondra, 178; on the “expansion of life horizons” of modernity, 161–62, 193, 209; furnishing projects, 50, 53, 176, 177f4.10; with Gruppo, 7, 60, 85, 130, 167; with Gruppo 7, 60, 85, 130, 167; with Larco, 50, 53; on Mediterranean and Latin spirit/character, 184, 210, 213, 233; on minor architecture in the colonies, 183, 184, 212, 50, 53; on modernism and rationalism, 85, 133, 154, 161, 183, 192; Pavilion for the Colonies (see Pavilion for the Colonies); Persico on, 9, 185

Rava, Maurizio, 130, 162, 163f4.1, 167, 183, 192

“realist mystification,” 165

Reggiori, Ferdinando, 34

Renaissance, 28

Richard Ginori, 36–37, 38f1.5, 75, 88, 244

Rifkind, David, 119, 126–27

Righelli, Gennaro: director of Hanno rapito un uomo (They’ve kidnapped a man), 142; director of Patatrac, 120, 121f3.3, 125f3.6, 156f3.24, 157f3.25; white telephone films, 123

RIMA Exhibition, 243

Risorgimento, 5, 6, 11, 29, 44, 164, 178, 200, 241, 244

Rogers, Ernesto Nathan: definition of a house, 245–46; editor of Domus in the postwar period, 17, 243, 245, 246, 325n20; life and politics, 243, 325n9; part of the BBPR group, 66, 226 (see also BBPR); return from internment in Switzerland, 243, 325n9

Royal Industrial Museum, 23

Royal Palace, 30, 39, 47, 53, 61

Rudofsky, Bernard: Albergo di San Michele (see Albergo di San Michele); as author of “Invitation to Tourism,” 213, 317n79; background and politics, 213–14, 219–20, 317n80; contributor to Domus, 218, 318n92, 19f5.12; house in Procida, 218–19; Villa in Posillipo, 215, 217f5.11; Villa in Positano, 215, 216f5.10

rural: agenda of the regime, 128, 199, 202–3, 205, 223, 237, 270n108, 313n32; architecture, 16, 82, 120, 172, 199, 209–10, 215, 230, 237, 323n170; architecture show at the VI Milan Triennale, 82, 205–7, 207f5.4, 209, 209f5.6, 215, 223; bourgeoisie, 128; homes/households, 26, 50, 96, 98, 120; house, Pagano, 209–10, 209f5.6; locations, 232, 233, 234; population, migration of, 3, 6, 14, 16, 46, 147; populations, illiteracy of, 223; populations, Mussolini on, 223; South and conflict with urban North, 12, 26, 128, 172–73, 270n109; vacation homes and reverse migration, 16, 199. See also minor; peasant; “pride in modesty”; vernacular

Sabatino, Michaelangelo, 26, 205

Said, Edward, 65, 162

Saletta in Stile Futurista, 31

Sarfatti, Margherita: and the art council of III Monza Biennale, 36; on D’Annunzio, 44; and Novecento, 34, 43, 270n110; personal interest in Ponti’s work, 268n85

Sartoris, Alberto, 34, 277n196; on the Casa Elettrica (Electric house), 57

Schnapp, Jeffrey, 65

Schuldenfrei, Robin, 129

Scuola Superiore d’Arte Applicata, 29

simultaneity, 151–53

Sironi, Mario, 39, 53

“Six Painters of Turin,” 76, 120

“social politics,” 106

Société des Artistes-Décorateurs, 13

Somalia, 162, 168, 178, 179, 183

Songa, Arturo, 42, 57

Sottsass Sr., Ettore, 31

spirito (spirit). See Latin spirit/heritage; Mediterranean spirit/character

Stampa, 76

Strapaese: group, 11, 42–43, 204–5; v. Novecento, 205, 314n45

subaltern, 12, 84

swimmers at the beach, Romagna, 203f5.2, 204–5

taste: Bourdieu on, 128; formation of, 65, 75, 82, 84, 130, 153, 245, 246; Gramsci on, 82–83; of impressionism, 77; Levi on, 138; Pagano on, 82, 83; Persico on, 64, 81, 83–84, 108, 120, 126, 129; Ponti on, 53, 80, 81, 84, 108; Rava on, 130, 142, 153, 161; “synthesis of collective taste,” 30, 31, 36; Venturi on, 75–77

TCI. See Touring Club Italiano (TCI)

Terragni, Giuseppe: Benita and Lariana chairs, 126–27, 127f3.8; Casa del Fascio, 108–9, 126–27; connected to international modernist developments, 212; holiday house proposal with Como group, 212; Sartoria (Tailor’s shop), 53, 64

Third Reich, 168

Tiburtino Terzo, 147, 149f3.22

Togliatti, Palmiro, 19

“tools of the empire,” 187

Touring Club Italiano (TCI), 200, 312n16

tourism: and the Elba Island, 226, 229f5.20, 320n130; Italian nation’s coming into being, 199–200; promoted by Mussolini, 201, 202; relationship between tourism, state control, and war, 198

transportation: ease of, 231; networks of, 48, 201. See also mobility; portability

Tripoli, 25, 165, 167, 179, 183; Trade Fair, 164, 183

Tripolitania, 162, 168

Turati, Augusto, 103

Turin World’s Fair (1911) (International Exhibition of Industry and Work). See 1911 Turin World’s Fair (International Exhibition of Industry and Work)

“two Italies,” 26

type/s: African housing, 168–69, 169f4.4, 170f4.5, 171f4.6; and industrialization, 13; Ponti’s, for furnishing, 92f2.13, 93, 101, 102f2.19, 103f2.20; Ponti’s, for houses, 101, 102f2.19, 103f2.20; Ponti’s concept of, 90–91; in print media, 91, 93, 95f2.16, 96

Ulrich, Guglielmo, 189, 224

Union des Artistes Modernes, 13

Università delle Arti Decorative (University of the decorative arts), 29, 54

UPIM (fixed-price store), 48, 173

urban: bourgeoisie, hegemony of, 11; bourgeoisie and films, 117, 123, 152; centers, migration of rural populations to, 6, 14, 46, 147; elite and tourism, 201; elites and taste, 72, 128; industrial development, 28; migration and housing shortage, 46; North and conflict with rural South, 12, 26, 47, 128, 172–73, 270n109; standards for housing, 50; Strapaese group on vernacular traditions v., 204; vacation homes and reverse migration, 16, 199, 228–29

vacation homes, 16, 56, 64, 101, 102f2.19, 198–99, 212, 213f5.8, 220, 223, 228–30, 234, 244. See also Casa per le Vacanze (Vacation house); Villa Marchesano in Bordighera

Vaccaro, Giuseppe, 113, 174, 176f4.8, 241

Valle, Cesare, 113, 174, 176, 189

van der Rohe, Mies, 13

Venice International Film Festival, 118

Venini, Paolo, 34

Venturi, Lionello, 82; background and politics, 75–76; and Gramsci, 82, 83; influence on Persico, 77; on Le Corbusier’s notion of tradition, 77; notion of taste, 75–77

vernacular: architecture, relation to classicist and modernist trends, 204, 314n40; architecture and tourism, 206, 209, 210; in the colonies, 183–84; cultural motifs, 223; Giovanni Michelucci interest in, 205, 206f5.3; Griffini and, 67; heritage and fascism, 204; and Mediterranean architecture, 16, 199; mobilized for reclamation of the territory, 210; and preservation, 204; tradition as a model for modern architecture, 204–5, 210, 215, 222, 224; tradition as a model for national architecture, 11, 205, 225, 243. See also minor; peasant; rural

Veronesi, Giulia, 72

Vers une architecture, 76

Viaggio a Tunin. See Ai margini del Sahara (Viaggio a Tunin)

Villa Marchesano in Bordighera, 198, 220, 221f5.13, 221f5.14

Visentini, Gino, 154

Vitruvius and Vignola, 24

weekend break, 201, 313n22

white telephone films (cinema dei telefoni bianchi), 117, 119, 123, 128, 141, 144, 291n4

Wiener Werkstätte, 13, 31, 53

“work environment, the,” 187

World War I, 7, 27, 28, 29, 36, 44, 75, 167, 198, 200

World War II, 133, 158, 186, 194, 196, 197, 220, 228–30, 234–8, 239, 241

Zanini, Carla, 186–87

Author Biography

Ignacio G. Galán is assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Barnard College, Columbia University. He is coeditor of After Belonging: Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit and Radical Pedagogies.

Color Plates

Plate 1. Covers of Domus 34 (October 1930) and 94 (October 1935). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Plate 2. Gio Ponti, House for a large family, winning competition entry for the Istituto per le Case Popolari di Bologna, 1934. Domus 78 (June 1934). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 3. Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, ENAPI notebook, Quaderno 1: Sedie, Cucine, Armadi, circa 1933. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 4. Gio Ponti, studies for the furnishing of an apartment, 1938. Domus 124 (April 1938). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Plate 5. Gio Ponti, furnishing types. Domus 73 (January 1934). Copyright Editoriale Domus S.p.A.

Plate 6. Franco Albini, view of the living room, including a freestanding book shelf for his own apartment, Milan, 1940. Domus 163 (July 1941). Courtesy Fondazione Franco Albini.

Plate 7. Gio Ponti, living room and dining room for a rental apartment, Milan, 1932. Domus 56 (August 1932). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 8. Gio Ponti, Abitazione Dimostrativa. Featured on the cover of Domus 103 (July 1936). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 9. Gio Ponti, Villa Marchesano, Bordighera, 1938. Cover of Lo Stile 7 (July 1941). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 10. Gio Ponti, Villa alla Pompeiana, 1934. Domus 79 (July 1934). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 11. Bernard Rudofsky, House for Berta Doctor, Procida, 1938. Domus 123 (March 1938). Copyright 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bildrecht, Vienna.

Plate 12. Gio Ponti, interior perspective of the Small Ideal House, 1939. Domus 138 (June 1939). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 13. Gio Ponti, “Mediterranean Law: Everything by the Sea Should Be Very Red,” 1940. Aria d’Italia: Estate Mediterranea (Summer 1940). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 14. Gio Ponti and Bernard Rudofsky, floor plans of the Room of the Palms (left) and Room with a Belvedere (right), Albergo di San Michele, Capri, 1938. Lo Stile 8 (August 1941). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 15. Gio Ponti and Bernard Rudofsky, topographic elevation (above) and tourism plan (below), Albergo di San Michele, Capri, 1938. Archivio Gio Ponti, Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma. Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Plate 16. Carlo Pagani and Lina Bo, drawings of furnishing and interior design for Lo Stile 22 (October 1942). Copyright Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

Plate 17. Carlo Pagani and Lina Bo, “Tents and Cabins,” 1941. Lo Stile 8 (August 1941). Copyright Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro.

Plate 18. Gio Ponti, cover for Lo Stile 8 (August 1941). Courtesy of Gio Ponti Archives.

Figure Description

The cover includes the publication title and edition information in Italian: “Collection of Craftsmen Booklets: Booklet 1. Edited by Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, Architects. Chairs, Kitchens, Wardrobes.” The page to the right includes Italian text that reads: "Fascist Autonomous Federation of Italian Craftsmen. National Organization for Craftsmanship and Small Industries (ENAPI)."

Figure Description

Typed text in Italian reads: “To Study your furnishing.”

Figure Description

The image includes a typed title in Italian, which reads “Annotations of the Architect.” Blocks of text accompany each of the illustrations.

Figure Description

The cover includes typed text in Italian for the magazine title, which reads: “The Style in the house and furnishing.”

Figure Description

The image caption, in Italian, reads: “…the entrance and the painted wardrobe door: the patio: the sea.”

Figure Description

The drawings are identified with text in Italian that reads: “The Ligurian way; the Roman way; the Sicilian way.”

Figure Description

The cover includes typed text in Italian for the magazine title, which reads: “The Style in the house and furnishing.”