Romano Romanelli designed the Monumento ai caduti d’Africa at Siracusa in 1938 to commemorate the Italian colonization of East Africa. The structure was originally intended for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but it was never constructed within the colonial capital. After the fall of the regime and the collapse of Italy's colonial program, it was eventually installed in Siracusa, a Sicilian port city once considered a springboard for the fascist colonies, in 1968. The bronze statuary and marble relief panels combine to create an artistic program that continues to valorize colonialism and debates surrounding the monument remain unresolved. This paper considers the controversial history of the Monumento ai caduti d’Africa in relation to Italo-African colonial narratives and legacies. I propose the practice of artistic intervention as a potential solution that could neutralize or counter the fascist signification of this structure.
In 1953 Nathan Cummings purchased six paintings from Giorgio de Chirico. Accompanying these works was a letter from the artist indicating the dates and titles of the paintings. Cummings nevertheless came to question the authenticity of the dates of these works. While it may seem odd for an artist to be challenged on the dating of his own work, in de Chirico’s case the doubts raised by Cummings were not without precedent. From the 1920s, de Chirico, frustrated with the art market’s rejection of his later work, created copies or ‘verifalsi’, which played off the compositions and themes of his earlier style and bore dates from his Metaphysical period in the 1910s. There is little doubt that de Chirico backdated the paintings sold to Cummings. The correspondence between the artist, Cummings and James Thrall Soby, the leading authority on de Chirico’s works, reveals much about de Chirico’s reasoning and the treatment his later output received in the art market.
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