“What Shall We Do With It Now?”: The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana and the Difficult Heritage of Fascism

Abstract

This article uses the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (PdCI) in the Rome suburb of EUR as a case study to explore how Italians have negotiated the “difficult heritage” of Fascism since 1945. Following Sharon Macdonald, the paper understands the term difficult heritage to refer to a historically significant past that remains materially visible through sites, buildings, artworks, monuments and other artefacts, but which is difficult to reconcile with “a positive, self‐affirming contemporary identity”. The paper employs a biographical approach to reveal and analyse the post‐Fascist “lives” of the PdCI, one of the most recognisable — and, in recent decades, most admired — examples of Fascist monumental architecture in Italy. With reference also to other examples of difficult Fascist heritage in Italy, and to sites associated with the difficult heritage of Nazism in Germany, the paper offers new insights into how Italy has confronted its Fascist past and places the Italian experience of difficult heritage within the broader international context.

Lens to difficult history: Museums of Hansen’s disease in Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan

“…In Asia, in particular, heritage politics plays an influential role in the remembrance and forgetting of the colonial past in order to reflect the post-colonial present. Although scholars argue that such negotiations over memory could be seen as potential turning points in the public realm to stimulate narratives about the significance of difficult pasts and provoke visitors to reflect while creating the “heritage effect,” that is, historic sites with splendor for commendation (Burström and Gelderblom, 2011; Carter, 2020; Macdonald, 2009; Maulsby, 2019), the interpretation of difficult heritage remains problematic and challenging.…”

Teaching the difficult heritage of Italian Fascism

“…In recent years, the architectural legacy and so-called ‘difficult heritage’ of Fascist Italy has become a flourishing field of research (see Malone 2017; Carter & Martin 2019; Jones & Pilat 2020; Albanese and Ceci 2022) and has ignited numerous controversies, especially between scholars based in Italy and those working abroad (Carter 2020). These topics have also begun to make their way into the undergraduate classroom.…”