Futurist mediterraneità between Emporium and Imperium
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP"In the golden years of rationalist architecture, Mediterranean-ness became our polar star" (Carlo Belli, cited in Danesi, 25). Thus architectural and art critic Belli recalled in 1976 the key role that the idea of mediterraneità (Mediterranean-ness) had come to play for both avant-garde Italian artists and rationalist architects in the early 1930s. Whether identified with a modern sense of the "classic" intended as an art of "intimacy cum narrative depth"—which accommodated equally the abstractism of Milanese painters, the "scuola Romana" of Giuseppe Capogrossi, Emanuele Cavalli e Corrado Cagli, and "les Italiens de Paris" united around Giorgio De Chirico—or with the "solar-ness" of Italian-rationalist architecture, Mediterranean-ness became the most effective line of defense in the Italian-modernist town (Vescovo 24). It allowed Italian modernists under Fascism to unify around a common discursive strategy in order to simultaneously distinguish themselves from their Northern European rivals, and to fence off the increasingly worrisome accusations of esterofilia (love of everything foreign) levied against them by the ever more vocal proponents of an official fascist style responding to the idea of romanità (ancient Roman-ness) (Benzi 30).
Already between 1928 and 1929, Italian emigré painters in Paris, from the ex-futurist Gino Severini to the sui generis novecentisti Massimo Campigli and Filippo De Pisis, gathered around De Chirico, father of the most intuitively Mediterranean style in painting (metafisica), to combine "magical realism" and "abstract classicism" in order to create a Mediterranean alternative to the Surrealist "appeals to the unconscious, unexplored lands, and elementary forces"(Benzi 31).Similarly, in 1931, [End Page 25] the rationalist architects known as Gruppo 7 began their polemic against the "cold rationalism" and "socialistic" tendencies of Bauhaus architecture, opposing to it the "solar" and "spontaneous" rationalism of Southern Italian and Greek islands architecture (Danesi 25). Pointing to the geographical consistency of the connection between sun, Mediterranean sea, and white walls-architecture, and linking it to the diachronic consistency of climate and natural landscape across the Mediterranean area, the adherents to the most foreign-inspired modernist trend—rationalist architecture—could thus construct, a posteriori, a most convenient national-natural foundation for their daring architectural choices. Modern architecture was projected to be a natural outgrowth of Mediterranean climate and that had always been there in the combination of solar whiteness and sezione aurea (Golden section), characterizing even the so-called spontaneous architecture of Mediterranean islands. But was mediterraneità anything more than a politically convenient strategy for carving a vital space for the avant-garde under Fascism, while at the same time continuing to feed the cultural mill of Italian-ness? Did, for example, Malaparte-Libera's architectural masterpiece in Capri, or the villa Oro (Golden villa) by Luigi Cosenza in Naples, share substantial traits with both the centuries-old spontaneous architecture of the Corricella harbor in the island of Procida and the "marine landscapes" that became a statistically relevant reality of Italian-modernist painting in the second half of the 1930s? (Vescovo 20).
To these questions, Belli's friend Edoardo Persico responded throughout the 1930s from the pages of the influential journal Casabella with a resounding "no." For Persico the idea of mediterraneità was as vague, rhetorical, and banal as its more official and conservative counterparts such as romanità, latinità, italianità. Worse still, a serious brand of Latin-Mediterranean modernist architecture existed, but not in Italy. It was, of course, Le Corbusier's (Danesi 25). Surely Persico's opinion was just one. But even if one were to connect more architectural and artistic dots than he was prepared to recognize as avant-garde, would the mediterraneità of Italian rationalism and metafisica amount to much more than a certain suggestion of the naturalness of the classic, an idea of natural purity distilled from the sea and bathed in light, an abstract genealogy without the burden of history? Where, in other words, was the "modern" element in this Mediterranean-ness? This question was never addressed by Persico, nor by champions...
