The Architecture of the Case d’Italia and the Construction of Fascist Italianness: the Corpus of Clemente Busiri Vici between Comparative Variations and Post-War Fates

Maria Stella Di Trapani, Ph.D.

The project continues and expands the research carried out during the previous fellowship (2025) on the Case d’Italia designed by Clemente Busiri Vici (1887-1965) for the General Directorate of Italians Abroad, outposts of cultural diplomacy that projected an image of Fascist Italianness onto emigrant communities. The completion of the digitisation of the Busiri Vici fonds at the Central State Archive will allow the systematic cataloguing of the corpus to be completed, including numerous hitherto inaccessible cases, and the exploration of the architect’s family private archive, complemented by research at the Historical Diplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in further periodicals, bulletins and newspapers of the period. The research will explore, among other things, emblematic examples such as Canton Ticino, between cultural irredentism and anti-fascist resistance, and the never-realised Casa degli Italiani all’Estero at Porta San Paolo in Rome; a comparison with other protagonists of Fascist architectural diplomacy, above all Florestano Di Fausto; and the post-war fate of these buildings, through the case of Port Said, today threatened by decay and damnatio memoriae. More broadly, the project aims to restore to the Case d’Italia their status as instruments of soft power, drawing also on interpretive categories such as imagined communities and difficult heritage, for a critical reflection on their architectural and identity-related legacy.