'Il Fascismo È Una Casa Di Vetro': Giuseppe Terragni and the Politics of Space in Fascist Italy

Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime

“…The common principles they shared, as outlined in our first three chapters, were 'constructive' effort, the rationalization of aesthetic forms, the 'return to the real', the moral dimension of art, the establishment of a relationship between artists and the masses, and the collective and anti-individualistic meaning of art. The relationship between the novel and architecture under Fascism has received a certain degree of scholarly attention in relation to Bontempelli's thought (see Longatti 1969;Scarsella 1993;Tentori 1996;Storchi 2012;Sinopoli 2017). In this book, however, and in this chapter specifically, Bontempelli's crucial theoretical contribution is related to, and contextualized within, broader aesthetic projects which sought to establish structural links between the architectural and novelistic artistic fields with respect to their interaction with the Fascist regime.…”

“…In his opening editorial, Principii, Bontempelli wrote that 'today […] the expressive centre of our life is architecture' (Bontempelli 1933a, reprinted in Bontempelli 1974[1938, 75), reaffirming architecture as the crux of an interdisciplinary paradigm of aesthetic modernity, and a metaphor for a necessary renewal of the processes of artistic creation, of engagement with the public, and of the place of the arts in a modern society (see Storchi 2012). He qualified the architecture 'that matters' ('che conta') with the adjectives 'rational' ('razionale') and 'functional' ('funzionale'), and gave a definition of this new interdisciplinary aesthetic modernity which was premised on the deliberate intermingling of images drawn from the fields of architecture and the novel:…”

Sexual identity and Fascist space in Milena Milani's Storia di Anna Drei

“… 7. Many scholars have examined the role Fascist architecture played in constructing a sense of national identity. Simona Storchi (2007: 245), for example, looks at the architect Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio as an attempt to “provide a definition of a space able to contain, shape, describe, and celebrate the collective life and identity of the Fascist subject.”…”