Arte in guerra in Italia durante la Seconda guerra mondiale

In the spring of 1945 Italian cities looked like a stunning scenery of devastation. The apocalyptic landscape of Italy is not apparent from contemporary, very reticent, historical sources; and in the masterpieces of neo-realist cinema and in the best pages of contemporary literature only few traces remain of the sense of aesthetical vertigo induced by the war. The ravages of war, caused by Allied bombing and partly by land attacks by the occupying German army, had a devastating effect not only on houses and monuments, but also on the intangible heritage and on the identity of the nation: monuments themselves, in fact, had been emphatically enhanced as symbols of national pride by the Fascist propaganda. Testimonials and perceptual consequences of traumatic disorientation during the war years will be enquired, confirming how necessary it was to the country to identify itself with the symbolic monuments of its past: the slip, the gaps in written memoirs and oral testimonies reveal a serious wound in individual and collective memory; the repressions, the latencies in remembrances open to the materialization of ghosts, of false memories, and in general denote a real inability to retrieve in individual and collective imagination images of a painful page of recent history.

In 1950, most Italian city centres appeared to be completely rebuilt. The wounds inflicted to monuments were then speedily compensated, with the aim, explicitly and openly shared by the Italian government, to heal quickly the intangible wounds in the collective imagination.

The research proposes a survey of the traces of destructions and reconstructions of Italian monuments, which prefigures, even in terms of a methodological proposal, a “history by traces” (historia ichnographica), on a period so close to us, but, in many ways, so far, so out of our shared memory.