900 and Quadrante: Theorizing an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic Model The metaphor of construction, and of the artist as constructor, enjoyed considerable currency in the Fascist period and marked many artists' and critics' vision of art and of the creative process (see Cioli 2011, 204-07; Salvagnini 2000, 30-32). Art critic Mario Tinti, for instance, had in 1927 heralded a 'new architectonic era' ('una nuova era architettonica'), calling for 'an art of the people, monumental and religious' ('un'arte del popolo, monumentale e religiosa') (cited in Salvagnini 2000, 30). The Fascist artist par excellence, Mario Sironi, took architecture and the figure of the architect as the subject of several of his paintings, and subsequently theorized mural painting (Sironi 1932; Sironi et al. 1933), establishing both an intellectual and a practical bond between painting and architecture. He conceived of the role of the artist in a collectivist society such as that envisioned by Fascism, as akin to that of a constructor, building on the solid cultural traditions of the nation, work and the family (Salvagnini 2000, 31; Pontiggia 1990). Our argument here, then, is that architecture and the novel intersected and developed in particularly close conjunction as intertwined aesthetic projects grounded in a set of common principles, and working to support the Fascist political project. In the journals 900 and Quadrante, they found two crucial platforms for expression and

The Regime and the Creation of an 'Arte di Stato'

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, we discuss those broad issues concerning cultural exchanges as they developed in the Italian context. The six articles here collected address both the transnational dialogue between intellectuals inspired and maintained through the periodical press between 1940 and the late 1950s, and how periodicals engaged nationally with the cultural challenges posed by the reconstruction and the post-1948 cultural politics of the Republic. As in other European countries, if, in Italy, the urgency for cultural reconfiguration was felt after geopolitical crises of the magnitude of the end of the Second World War and the 1956 Hungarian crisis, the periodical press also had to respond to nationally-specific political concerns, such as the establishment of a new state system after the fall of the Fascist regime, the negotiations with consolidated superpowers (U.S.A. and the Soviet Union), and the 1948 elections, which significantly determined the future polarisations within the political arena. By looking at the interconnections amongst several journals, we argue that from 1940 to 1960 Italian periodicals played a significant role in reflecting, activating and developing central debates around leadership and the new core values of intellectual communication, which had the specific function of transgressing boundaries between aesthetic practices and political praxis. Such boundaries marked a set of cultural and ideological propositionsranging from Crocianesimo to realism and dialectical Marxismwhich Italian intellectuals and writers felt had to be renegotiated by creating fresh interpretative synergies and cross-cultural pathways. Thus in this special issue we demonstrate the vital role played by Italian journals in producing national and transnational discourses, which were fundamental in the consolidation of postwar Italian culture. This edited collection follows an established and ongoing trend in periodical studies in so far as it looks at periodicals as culturally embodied agents of transformation (Binckes 2010; Rogers 2012; Thacker-Brooker 2013). However, it challenges recent work, which either neglects to account for the diverse intellectual forces engaged in the genesis of a periodical or places excessive emphasis on typologies which tend to neglect the intrinsic peculiarities and nuances of any cultural object both from a national or a transnational perspective (Lathan-Scholes 2006). Our work aligns