Italy Goes East. Cultural and Technical Exchanges with European Socialist Countries during the Cold War.

The project will provide the first comprehensive and comparative account of the transfer, discourses, influences, competition, attractions and cooperation in architecture and urbanism between Italy and the East European socialist countries during the Cold War. It aims at analyzing and comparing the discourse around the broader term of design culture, that embraces design and construction at all scales. The geopolitical context of the analysis comprises different socialist countries of East-Central Europe, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, during the stages of their political transformation from Stalinist dictatorships to liberal democracies, seen through the lens of the role and the influence that Italy played as their partner or, simply, as a point of reference. This approach will combine competencies and concepts deriving from the theory and history of architecture, art, civil engineering and design, together with economic and cultural history. Merging these different but congruent intertwined perspectives will represent the crucial tool in order to deepen our understanding of the generally known “Made in Italy” phenomenon. Its systemic character, that has been up today analyzed exclusively through Italian Western, North Atlantic connections, will be therefore (thanks to our historiographic perspective) subject of a redefinition, if not revision.