<i>La macchina da scrivere</i>: The Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome and Italian nationalism

Dickie, John

doi:10.1179/ita.1994.14.1.261

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…To play down the importance of the study of tropes in nationalist discourse, merely because they are not particular to nationalism, is to commit an a priori distortion of one's object of study. The same could also be said of the repertoire of human emotions which identification with the nation can involve: love, hate, empathy, ,disgust, embarrassment (Dickie 1994 : 266-73), hope, fear, etc. Until we have understood (and historicised) these emotions we will not have understood nationalism in its situationally specific manifestations (Finlayson 1998;Jenkins 1995).…”

Section: Reflections In Conclusion: the Normative And Hypostatising Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sententiousness and Nationalist Discourse: The Case of Alfredo Rocco

Dickie

2000

Nations and Nationalism

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This article considers the normative and hypostatising functions of nationalist discourse, and the necessity of rhetoric to nations and nationalism. It does so on the basis of a case study of sententiousness in the thought of Alfredo Rocco. Rocco was one of the most important Nationalist and Fascist intellectuals and the legislative architect of the Fascist state. His political thought is analysed by taking as a starting point a quirk of the historiography on Rocco, which insistently attributes a dangerous 'rigour' to his texts, and in particular to the punchy, sententious quality of his style. A close reading of Rocco's nationalism, using Flaubert to understand the rhetoric of sententiousness, reveals a systematic pattern of contradictions between normative and hypostatised definitions of the nation. Aspects of these findings, it is argued, can potentially be extended to embrace all forms of nationalism.

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Section: Reflections In Conclusion: the Normative And Hypostatising Mmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sententiousness and Nationalist Discourse: The Case of Alfredo Rocco

Dickie

2000

Nations and Nationalism

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“…Within four months, a commission had been established by the infant state to raise a monument in his memory. An international competition was won in late 1881 by the French architect Paul-Henry Nénot, although the controversy attending his victory ensured that his scheme would never be realized (Dickie 1994). Amid accusations of plagiarism and political interference, the competition was reopened with a new range of criteria in late 1882.…”

Section: Geographies Of the Monument: Embodying Italymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One of the key stipulations of the second competition to design the monument was that the site had to be the north-facing slope of the Capitoline Hill. The symbolic significance of this location-against the mythical acropolis upon which Rome was founded-was by no means accidental (Dickie 1994). The Capitoline Hill had been the site of the short-lived Roman Republic that, in the mid-fourteenth century, had resisted the rule of the Papacy (Hibbert 1985).…”

Section: The Urban Spatialities Of the Vittorianomentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation, and Empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870–1945

Atkinson

Cosgrove

1998

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

160

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This essay examines the monument constructed by the Italian state in the center of Rome to commemorate Vittorio-Emanuele II, first king of united Italy. Opened in 1911 and constructed in the Beaux-Arts architectural style popular at that time as appropriately "imperial" for urban monuments throughout the West, the Vittoriano's symbolism and iconography produce a "memory theater" through which the official rhetoric of a united and imperial Italy was intended to be conveyed to the nation.Yet despite attempts by succeeding governments to promote it as a dignified and sacred center of the city, the nation, and the short-lived Italian empire, the monument has been derided throughout its history. Concentrating on "official culture," we analyze the form and iconography of the monument, trace the various planning interventions made by both Liberal and Fascist governments between the wars that emphasized the Vittoriano's centrality within urban space and Italian territory, and comment on its use by the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, to promote an imperial spatiality through his performative rhetoric, which often unfolded while facing the monument in the Piazza Venezia. While urbanistic and territorial interventions emphasized horizontal axialities, burial and construction of a crypt for Italy's Unknown Soldier at the monument produced a vertical axis that linked military sacrifice and past heroism to aerial flight and future victory within the Fascist cult of male youth.

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“…Finally, the meanings of monuments and archeological sites are never finally fixed and unambiguous, whatever the intentions of their builders and excavators. Take, for example, the case of the Vittoriano, the great white "Altar to the Nation" in Piazza Venezia, developed as a sacred site for nationbuilding by both Liberal and Fascist regimes (Dickie, 1994). In his well-known book, The Italians (1964), Luigi Barzini concluded that the bulk and bombast of the monument reflected the anxiety and ambivalence that accompanied the process of national unification.…”

Section: The Power Of the Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impossible capital: monumental rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870‐1943

Agnew¹

1998

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

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Every nation‐state has a capital city from where the central government's institutions operate and where the past of the nation is remembered monumentally. Following unification in 1870 Rome became the capital of the new Italy. Turning it into a singular site to represent the aspirations of the regimes that came to power, however, proved an impossible task. Not only did the Liberal and Fascist regimes of the period 1870‐1943 have contradictory intentions and goals, they also ran up against the complexities of Rome's own history in trying to establish their own. This paper contends that there are important similarities between the two regimes in their approaches to making Rome a capital for the new state and that contemporary cultural analysis of the Fascist regime misses this continuity when it takes the regime's claims to aesthetic novelty and architectural innovation at face value. In the end, Rome resisted attempts at using its monumental space to symbolically unify a country that remained materially and culturally divided.

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La macchina da scrivere: The Victor Emmanuel monument in Rome and Italian nationalism

Cited by 7 publications

References 2 publications

Sententiousness and Nationalist Discourse: The Case of Alfredo Rocco

Sententiousness and Nationalist Discourse: The Case of Alfredo Rocco

Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation, and Empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870–1945

The impossible capital: monumental rome under liberal and fascist regimes, 1870‐1943

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