Stellenangebot vom 26. Oktober 2026
How does a national identity take shape in architecture and images in places where the state exercises no sovereignty, but only soft power? And what remains of those forms once the regime that willed them collapses? These questions are not confined to the Italian case: they recur wherever a state has built for communities it did not administer, and whenever a political rupture has left those buildings impossible to claim or difficult to remove. The workshop addresses both through the Case d’Italia and the institutions that grew up around them wherever Italians had emigrated, and puts two working hypotheses to the test.
If italianità (Italianness) was not codified at home and then applied, but produced in negotiation between the centre, local patrons and building trades, and the communities that funded the buildings and put them to uses of their own, then it remains to be established how much of the repertoire – building types, idioms, iconographic programmes – originated elsewhere, and on whose initiative. The very distance from Rome that weakened directives would also have opened up commissions and careers inaccessible at home, especially to women.
And if, from the Second World War onwards, what survived was above all what lent itself to reinterpretation, what became of those buildings can be read as the measure of their initial ambiguity, and of how emigrant communities, and the societies that hosted them, have dealt with the Fascist past.
The buildings that Fascism promoted between the wars for Italians abroad had multiple ambitions. They were to provide welfare, sociability and a sense of belonging, but also to project the image of a modern and authoritative nation in host countries. Together with schools, children’s holiday camps, consular and Fascio premises, dopolavoro (after-work social clubs) and cultural institutes, the Case d’Italia formed a transnational network: a 1937 survey recorded 216 Case d’Italia in operation worldwide. Through this network the Direzione Generale degli Italiani all’Estero (DGIE, Directorate General for Italians Abroad), headed by Piero Parini, pursued what he himself termed “italianità integrale”, the fusion of national belonging with allegiance to the regime (Pretelli 2008; Cavarocchi 2010); in his conception, culture was to become an “industrious instrument of political expansion”.
The workshop sets out to examine the architecture, artworks and images called upon to represent italianità beyond national borders, the relations these established with the urban fabric and with the communities for which they were intended, and the lives they have had since the fall of Fascism. Particular attention is given to so-called peripheral settings – emigrant communities, borderlands, contested territories – where Italy had to make itself legible without being able to impose itself. In host countries, in the absence of Italian sovereignty, public buildings, monuments and decorative schemes contended with master plans, building regulations, local trades and political sensibilities, as was not the case at home or in Italy’s colonies (Fuller 2007). These works thus oscillated between engaging with local architectural traditions and asserting a recognisably Italian idiom, inflected through romanità, rationalism and mediterraneità.
The genesis of each project depended on a web of agents: the Directorate in Rome, consuls and local Fascio secretaries, emigrant committees and their benefactors, designers and local contractors. Their relations, often conflictual, could make each building the outcome of a negotiation rather than the implementation of a directive. That negotiation also involved the communities themselves, who were far from passive: they inhabited, reinterpreted or rejected the spaces assigned to them (Franzina and Sanfilippo 2003). In host societies, and among antifascist exiles, the presence of Italian institutions elicited adherence, mistrust or outright opposition.
The life of those buildings also depended on women – members of the Fasci femminili, teachers, artists and decorators – to whom the regime entrusted a decisive role in language teaching, education and the transmission of models of family and nation. Distance from the homeland could loosen the gender norms prevailing in Italy and open margins of professional autonomy otherwise unavailable. Studies of the colonial setting have begun to bring this process into focus (Barrera 2002); it merits testing in contexts of emigration as well. Recovering the complexity of these dynamics – institutional, social and gendered – and the forms of soft power at work within them calls for a multidisciplinary approach, one that interweaves architectural and art history with political and migration history, gender studies and cultural and visual studies.
The war and the collapse of the regime redrew balances of power, functions and meanings. Confiscated, sold, demolished, forgotten or converted, the buildings followed divergent trajectories. A comparable fate befell the inscriptions, emblems and decorative programmes they bore: some effaced, others resignified, others still surviving in indifference. The result is a “difficult heritage” (Macdonald 2009; Malone 2017; Belmonte 2023), whose stewardship involves institutions and communities and calls into play practices of conservation, interpretation and public communication. Contemporary art and culture are responding to this heritage with new narratives that interrogate how younger generations relate to the regime’s visual legacy and to the very idea of italianità.
Existing scholarship has concentrated chiefly on the ephemeral architecture of international expositions and on building production in the colonies, while Italian institutions abroad have largely been addressed through isolated case studies (Pane 2012; Gatani 2016; Corrêa Dutra 2022; Gallicchio 2023). The workshop seeks to bring these cases into comparison and, to that end, welcomes contributions on the Case d’Italia and the bodies attached to them, as well as on monuments, exhibitions, artworks, the press, images and practices that contributed to the construction and representation of italianità, from the years of the regime to the present.
Preference will be given to proposals that start from concrete cases – a building, a decorative programme, a press campaign, an afterlife – and use them to build a broader argument, whether methodological or comparative. Proposals grounded in first-hand sources (archives, period press, visual materials, oral testimony) will also be favoured. The aim is to arrive at a first comprehensive reading of this network, from which a collective publication may proceed.
The thematic strands that follow – indicative rather than exclusive – set out the workshop’s principal areas.
- Italianità and cultural diplomacy. Which political uses of the concept of italianità guided the work of the DGIE and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and how were they translated into the names, programmes and activities of Italian institutions abroad? What part did consuls, Fascio secretaries, emigrant committees and benefactors play in funding and promoting them, and how far did architecture count in winning prestige in host countries?
- Designing the nation elsewhere. Who awarded the commissions, and through which professional networks? Which functional programmes, models and variants recurred, and which idioms were held fit to represent Italy? What latitude did designers have with respect to directives from the centre, and how much did patrons, local trades and building cultures weigh when a design originated far from the site?
- Arts, symbols and iconographic programmes in the buildings. Who devised the decorative schemes – mural painting, sculpture, mosaic, furnishings, inscriptions and emblems – and with what content? How were they received by those who used these spaces? Under what conditions did the artists called to work there, both women and men, operate, and what comparisons can be drawn with the colonial territories?
- Images in circulation. How did the press for Italians abroad – Il Legionario among them – together with architectural periodicals, photography, cinema and exhibitions, construct and circulate the image of Italy? Which figurations of nation and alterity took shape there? Which models of femininity and masculinity, and which exoticising gazes, did they convey, and how were these received?
- Communities, consent and dissent. How were these spaces actually inhabited, as sites of welfare, education and sociability? To what extent did communities act as co-authors rather than mere recipients, appropriating, negotiating or contesting them? How did host societies and antifascist exiles respond, and what can oral sources and family memory tell us?
- Spaces, gender and the professions. How were women’s and men’s uses of the Case d’Italia and of other spaces of official representation distributed? What role did women’s organisations play in teaching and welfare? What opportunities for training, commissions and careers opened up, far from the homeland, to women architects, artists and educators? And how far could those settings become, for them, transformative spaces?
- Legacies and rereadings. What became of the buildings and their decorative apparatus during the Second World War and after the fall of the regime, amid seizures as enemy property, sales, demolitions and conversions? Who decides today how they are to be conserved, musealised and narrated? How do contemporary artistic and cultural practices reread that legacy?
Comparative contributions are equally welcome, whether addressing architectures of power within Italy and in the Italian colonies, or similar strategies of cultural diplomacy pursued by other states in the same period.
The workshop is organised by the Weddigen Department of the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.
The call is open to scholars at every stage of their career, with particular attention to doctoral candidates and early-career researchers. Papers will be 20 minutes in length; the working languages are Italian and English.
Proposals, in Italian or English, should be combined in a single PDF and comprise:
- a title and an extended abstract of 1,000–1,500 words;
- a brief note on sources and a short bibliography (maximum 10 titles);
- a biography of no more than 150 words.
The PDF should be sent to Maria Stella Di Trapani (mariastella.ditrapani@biblhertz.it) by December 5, 2026. Applicants will be notified by December 15, 2026. Publication of a selection of the contributions is envisaged.
The workshop aims to minimise its carbon footprint and therefore discourages air travel. Online participation will be offered.
Scientific Organisation: Maria Stella Di Trapani (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Weddigen Department), research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture: From Nation Building to Now.