Abstracts

Franco Baldasso (Bard College, NY)

The Historical and Cultural Context: Italian Fascism and the Myth of Rome

Mussolini’s regime coalesced aggressive nationalism with the liberal secular religion of the fatherland in its ideology of national history. The myth of Rome and its Empire is the more apparent, though not the only, facet of the historical rhetoric supporting the Italian state until WWII. This session will introduce Fascist culture through its obsessions for history and modernity. Special clips from the Istituto Luce will be presented and commented by Samuel Antichi and Damiano Garofalo.

Audiovisual excerpts presented by Samuel Antichi (Università della Calabria) and Damiano Garofalo (Sapienza Università di Roma)

We are considering a few examples of fascist cinema as Scipione L'Africano (Carmine Gallone, 1937), which posits clear parallels between the Roman empire and the fascist regime, and between Scipio and Mussolini as well as Vecchia Guardia (Alessandro Blasetti, 1934) which narrates the conflict between a local group of fascist blackshirts against rival socialists. Furthermore, we are going to take into account some newsreels produced between 1928 and 1944 by the Istituto Luce (acronym for L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa), an Italian corporation created in 1924, which served as the main vehicle of information and a powerful propaganda tool of the fascist regime, advertising the image, the body and aura of Mussolini.

Samuel Antichi (Università della Calabria) and Damiano Garofalo (Sapienza Università di Roma)

The Memory of Fascism in Italian Post-War Cinema

The lesson will aim at a reconstruction of the various types of representation of Fascism in Italian post-war cinema. In a first part, we will illustrate how Italian cinema dealt with the memory of Fascism as an historical trauma. Focusing both on fiction and non-fiction productions (newsreels, documentaries, TV programs), we will see how in ‘40s and ‘50s several Italian films tried to renegotiate the relationship between national identity and historical memory through the representation of Fascist regime. In a second part, we will focus on the crucial role of the city of Rome in this topic. Following several examples, we will examine the persistence of Fascism imagery in several cinematic representations of Rome. With this aim, we will show a few excerpts from fictional films directed by famous Italian director (from Roberto Rossellini to Federico Fellini, from Luchino Visconti to Michelangelo Antonioni), and also from documentary or audiovisual sources taken from Istituto Luce audiovisual archive.

Franco Baldasso (Bard College, NY) and Franca Sinopoli (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Italian Literature from Futurism to Fascism (and anti-Fascism)

For a country like Italy that has been for centuries politically divided, literature represented the source of cultural and national identity. Few decades after the unification of the country, however, romantic patriotism turned into nationalism and imperialism. This session will explore how Italian Avant-garde and modernist literature has influenced Fascism and supported its cultural policies, from Futurism to Novecento.

The second part of this session will address the case of the Italian writer Luigi Meneghello. In his novel "Italian Flowers" (1976), Meneghello traces the fascist upbringing of his youth and the transition to an anti-fascist consciousness that will lead him to participate in the Italian Resistenza.

Riccardo Morri (Sapienza Università di Roma) and Società Geografica Italiana

Territory and Representation, the Cartography's Power: A Survey of the Italian Geographical Society's Heritage

According Franco Farinelli, the Earth's Face is the historical result of cartographic configurative acts. Both Claude Raffestin and Angelo Turco underline the complex relationship between territory and symbolic space shaping. Geography will be presented as a "science of representation" in order to highlight the necessity of maps' deconstruction but the cartographic's power in building imaginaries, too. A short exhibition of Italian Geographical Society's Heritage will end the lesson.

Carmen Belmonte (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut)

Visual and Material Culture of Fascist Empire

Arts played a key role in Fascist propaganda. Through different media, Italy staged empire and elaborated national colonialist narratives based on racist tropes and stereotypes of colonized territories and populations. During this class, we will consider fascist artistic politics and strategies of representation of Africa in colonial exhibitions, museums, and public monuments. We will also explore the postcolonial afterlife of colonial heritage in Italy, addressing questions of restitution, iconoclasm, and preservation of contested heritage.

Carla Subrizi (Sapienza Università di Roma) 

Narratives and Memories of Totalitarianism: History, Fragmentation and Remontage in Post-War Italian Art

What totalitarianism, which Alberto Asor Rosa had defined as "imperfect", prompted and produced in post-World War II art in Italy is considered in this lecture by addressing two phases, one closer to and the other at a distance, between the years after 1945 and the early 1970s. Art narrated history through processes of fragmentation, dissemination, disruption of materials and techniques, in both painting and sculpture. Both time and space, both words and images (not only through abstract art) broke conventional connections to bring out discontinuities both visual and linguistic. However, it was from a necessary temporal distance, starting in the 1960s, that some artists made the memory of fascism and war a particular aspect of their work. The relationship between art and ideology, between ideology and memory, between art and politics, became a fundamental knot through which to rethink and re-read history, which many of them experienced personally. Through assemblages, collages, writing, photographic reportage and (artists') archives, the artists rethought war, ideology, forms of power and trauma from a distance through practices of deconstruction and montage.

Carmen Belmonte (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut)

Legacies of Italian Fascism and Colonialism at the EUR

with a visit to the storages of the former Colonial Museum in Rome

The on-site seminar will explore the EUR district in Rome, originally built to host the Esposizione Universale di Roma, a world fair that Benito Mussolini and his administration planned for 1942, to celebrate twenty years of Fascist rule in Italy. The exposition never happened due to the intervening of World War II, but the district still preserves the legacies of one of the most spectacular projects of fascist propaganda. The seminar will address the urban plan, architecture, and monumental art of the EUR, paying attention to ruptures and discontinuities in the afterlife and reuse of the district. We will also visit the storages of the former colonial museum in Rome, now acquired by the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome. It will be the occasion to investigate, in dialogue with the curators, the ethnographic and artistic collections of the central museum of Italian colonial propaganda, long inaccessible.

Riccardo Capoferro with Tiziano De Marino and Paolo D'Indinosante  (Sapienza Università di Roma) 

From Imperialism to Totalitarianism  

These three interconnected lectures will explore the connections between Fascism and British imperialism. Riccardo Capoferro will focus on the practices and attitudes of British imperialism that paved the way for the ethos and the racial ideology of Fascism, and Tiziano De Marino and Paolo D'Indinosante will focus, respectively, on British responses to Fascism and on the impact of Rudyard Kipling's work in Fascist Italy.

Eliana Billi and Laura D'Angelo (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Sapienza University Campus Tour

The Fascist Regime affirmed itself with a revolution and was then consolidated by a dictatorship: two souls, one rebellious and the other conservative, who gathered around Fascism both artists animated by a desire for innovation and experimentalism and authors convinced that tradition could still express the values ​​of contemporary civilization.

The University City is an exemplary case of the Regime's patronage. The itinerary is aimed at deepening the Fascist style’s double register, where classical and modern forms live together as the whole La Sapienza complex indeed shows, starting from the layout studied according to a classic basilica scheme that collects a series of elements and buildings different from each other. In this path we will visit: The Rectorate as an expression of the Piacentinian vision, cited by Mario Sironi in his fresco as the most representative image of Fascist architecture. Giuseppe Pagano’ s Faculty of Physics, that it is instead characterized by formal simplicity and perfect integration with the landscape. Giò Ponti's School of Mathematics, whose monumentality is achieved through an essential style and a play of chiaroscuro; Opposite to this and next to the Rectorate, we will see Giovanni Michelucci's Faculty of Mineralogy whose facade comes alive in the alternation of solids and voids. We will conclude with the Propylaea by Arnaldo Foschini in Piacentine style.

Visit to Mario Sironi's Italia tra le arti e le scienze (1935)

In 1933 Mario Sironi, one of the most important Italian artists under the Fascism, was commissioned by Marcello Piacentini to paint a giant fresco for the University’s main Hall: the Aula Magna. The artwork will be entitled “Italia tra le Arti e le Scienze” (Italy between Arts and Sciences”, representing the University manifesto, symbolizing Fascist Italy while is offering knowledge to the new generations. The preliminary phase of his work, as shown by cartoons, sketches and projects, was very long while the actual painting was completed in three months only. Looking at the painting today, after a long restauration (2015-2017) it is possible to understand his original iconography and reconstruct the difficult history of the mural from its creation to today.

Caterina Romeo and Giulia Fabbri (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Processes of Racialization in Colonial and Postcolonial Italy

In this seminar, we will introduce Italian colonial history and examine how the encounter with the colonial “Other” has shaped the construction of Italian national identity. After examining what constitutes the “Italian Postcolonial”, we will introduce how processes of racialization were developed in colonial Italy and how the legacy of those processes is still visible in the present, especially in the multiple ways in which non-white subjects are racialized and excluded from the dispositif of citizenship. Finally, we will read some texts of Italian postcolonial literature and scrutinize how, through their counternarratives, these authors contribute to the rewriting of Italian history and culture.

Gabriele Guerra and Giulia Iannucci (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Totalitarianism in Europe: Nazi Germany

“Denkmäler der Schande” as Strategic Awareness of the Past. Visible Traces of the Victims of Nazism in Modern Germany

Through the lens of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘dealing with the past’) historical process, this contribution investigates to what extent the erection of monuments to the Holocaust victims in modern Germany contributed to the Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (‘reprocessing the past’) of the German memory. Indeed, the human monumentalization and musealization have eventually endowed visibility and empowerment to the invisible victims of Nazim within the German cultural heritage. 

Maybe Esther and the dealing with the past in the transnational “fiction”

Katja Petrowskaja's 2013 nonfiction novel, Maybe Esther, focuses on the story of the author's family from Ukrainian Jewry, which was exterminated during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. The author, who lives in Germany since 1999, writes her book in German. She mixes the story of her genealogical research with her family memories, which constantly intertwin the great and tragic history of the 20th century, and at the same time engages an intense confrontation with the German language and the German culture.

Orietta Ombrosi (Sapienza Università di Roma) 

Hitlerism, Antisemitism: The Different Approches of Levinas, Horkheimer and Adorno

Levinas’s reflections on Hitlerism and on anti-Semitism took on a very different tone and approach to Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis on anti-Semitism. This different tone is due to the different source and school that these authors draw on, and highlights not only a thematic difference, but also a quite important temporal gap between the analyses developed by one as early as the 1930s, in particular in the text  “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1933) and by the others during the 1940s, in particular in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, and published in 1947). Far from being an analysis of the “philosophy” of the Nazis and also far from the socio-psycho-political approach of the Frankfurt School, Levinas analyses the phenomenon of “Hitlerism” from a philosophical point of view and following a phenomenological technique where the use of this term indicates distancing from the political event, and where the “ism” does not constitute an ideologization of Hitler’s thinking, but rather the collective dimension of the phenomenon. Differently – but maybe also similarly – the chapter dedicated to anti-Semitism of Dialectic of Enlightenment, signed by Horkheimer and Adorno, shows that the authors are not interested in the reactions of anti-Semites, but in considering “the reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism.” They confront and encounter the difficulty of understanding the link between this aptitude for the domination of reason and anti-Semitism as the “limits of Enlightenment.” In the days of triumphant anti-Semitism, during the great persecutions that devastated Europe, these authors attempted to identify, perhaps without completely succeeding, the complicity whereby “anti-Semitism and totality have always been profoundly connected” and a “tendency toward self-destruction has been inherent in rationality from the first".

Mario Caramitti (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Soviet Totalitarianism: a Never-Ending Story

Stalin’s death on March 5th, 1953, is a breaking date in modern Russian history. Whatever followed, in society, culture and in common sense, may be considered part of a never accomplished process of distancing from an evil past. The deepening or slowing of destalinization is therefore a focal parameter of the level of totalitarianism in Soviet/Russian society, and runs through high rates (Khrushchev’s Thaw, Perestroika and early post-Soviet period – 1953-1964 and 1985-1999) and low ones (Brezhnev’s Stagnation and Putin era – 1964-1985 and 1999-present day). The swinging totalitarian orientation of society will be analyzed also on the basis of peculiar cultural and literary patterns.

Emmanuel Betta (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Anti-Semitism and Racial Laws in Italy

The aim of this lesson is to discuss the presence of antisemitism and cultures of race in Italy during the fascist regime, with a particular attention to the cultural and political process that produced the racial laws in 1938 and the launch of the “Race Manifesto” in July 1938. This analysis will discuss Italy’s role in the persecution of the Jews and in the Shoah, aspects neglected both by historiography and public debate for years.

Giuliano Danieli (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Totalitarianisms and Diaspora: Jewish Musicians from Europe to Hollywood

The course aims at discussing some aspects of musical activities under totalitarianism in Europe (particularly in Italy) and the impact of this political regime on musicians’ creativity and style: music for state propaganda, governments’ attitude towards avant-garde, discrimination and persecution of dissident artists. A particular case study will be the diaspora of musicians of Jewish origin from Europe to the United Stated where they created the sound of the Hollywood film.

Bibliography:

Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1987

Roberto Illiano (ed.), Italian Music during the Fascist Period, Brepols 2004

Gary Marmorstein, Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and Its Makers, 1900 to 1975, Schirmer Books, 1997

Giuseppe Motta (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Jewish Diaspora. The Experience of Refugeedom and the Shaping of Human Rights Before and After WW2 

The new settlement emerging after the Russia Revolution, the spread of nationalism and the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism represented under many aspects a fertile ground for the rise of Nazism. In this context, substantial flows of Jewish refugees left their countries East-Central Europe as a result of increasing discrimination. Among them, many outstanding figures of intellectuals who greatly contributed to the general advancement of studies in their respective fields of interest. Some jurists of Jewish origins, in particular, focused attention on the emerging problems of international law and in a time of growing antisemitism contributed to animate interesting transnational debates about the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty and the role of individuals in the international system. It is this debate that preceded the definition of the human rights regime and the shaping of a new international context after WW2, with the Nuremberg Trials, the Human Rights and Genocide Convention.

Franco Baldasso (Bard College, NY)

Antifascist Resistance and its Postwar Memory: from Literature to Memory Sites

Postwar Italy has celebrated Antifascist Resistance as the collective event that legitimized the new Republic. During the last decades, however, political and popular debate argued for a more problematic assessment of its memory. How did Italian literature contribute to the establishment and the critique of Antifascist memory? The session will explore the opposite case studies of Primo Levi and Curzio Malaparte.

Federica Perazzini (Sapienza Università di Roma)

Writing, Memory and Forms of Resistance in Orwell's 1984

The lecture will explore how Orwell’s 1984 uses writing as a primary trope of resistance and counter-narrative construction. In fact, as the official and self-serving agenda of the totalitarian regime gradually subjugates the population, the act of writing can become Winston's quest for recovering a fading identity and reconnect to a sense of humanity in an ever more oppressive and homologated society. The course serves as an introduction to the visit to the Museo della Liberazione where inmates’ personal objects and pieces of writing are preserved to revive memories of anti-fascist resistance.