Response to Jeffrey Schnapp

Schnapp's tightly focused case study proves to be a formidable vantage point from which to consider, and possibly reformulate, wider questions about modern uses of the past and archaeology's role in mediating such evocations. The paper centers on an event that did not happen, as Pavia was not reconstructed in the 1930s according to the Ciocca/BBPR radical modernist and corporativist urban plan that appealed to the city's Roman past; instead it remained one of the spectacular historical medieval towns of Italy. In his investigation of this non-event, Schnapp places the modernist plan's turn to the past in a rich variety of contexts as he recounts the drawing of the proposal in the wake of the 1933 CIAM at Athens, the failure of the project at the open competition for Pavia's urban planning, the ensuing controversy and the combative exhibition dedicated to the failed plan itself. These different moments take us on an interdisciplinary ride into the culture of modernity, from the Fascist culture wars, to the novel means and arenas in which these conflicts were fought—such as the exhibition at the Galleria il Milione—and to individuals' trajectories realized against this complex background. Schnapp stimulatingly disentangles these many threads while keeping to his leading question—the tension between the radical modernist project of urban rebuilding and its appeal to the past as framed by a quotation from Livy. He resolves this tension by exposing the urbanists' mistaken interpretation of Livy's text—omnes in corpus unum fusi sunt—which was wishfully understood to resonate with modern fascist corporativism. Schnapp shows how the evocation of that past, Roman austerity and its civic and rational virtus,was put in the service of functional architecture and the new radical modernist program. This skillful analysis is not only a case study in the use of the Roman past and archaeology in Fascist culture but also illuminates broader questions about the central role of archaeology in modernity.

The appropriation of ancient Rome in modern Italian Fascism has received considerable attention in the until recently little explored field of the history of archaeology. Well before the recent efforts to understand various aspects of Fascist culture—from industrial development, economic organization and transportation to architecture, the organization of consensus and their relation to avant-gardist movements—as distorted but somewhat genuine forms of authoritarian and compulsive modernization, the idea of Rome was long considered the only cultural component of Fascist ideology even by Italian scholars who, like Norberto Bobbio, disdainfully opposed the application of the category of culture to any of the activities of the Fascist regime. ¹ Since the 1970s, moreover, the very role and work of classicists and archaeologists during Fascism has come under scrutiny, thus touching a sensitive spot for the Italian academy, which arguably displays unsettling continuities through the pre- and post-Fascist periods (for example, eight popular as well as scholarly periodicals dedicated to the ancient world of Rome were started under Fascist sponsorship, and many of them continued publication well after 1945, and some unto the present day). Luciano Canfora called as early as 1976 for both the exposure of such connections and the investigation of how such contacts influenced the content of scholarship. Debates have been harsh (most recently about the publication of some apparently "Fascist" letters by the famous ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano); Italian colonialist archaeology overseas, as well as the excavations of the Fori in Rome, much desired by Mussolini himself, have come under close investigation and strong criticism. ² But Canfora's dismissal of Fascist ideas of Rome as devoid of any historical depth needs to be further examined: we have learned much about the misdeeds of academic archaeology under Fascism, but less about the practices and cultural contexts in which to place them, thus possibly creating an artificial gap. For example, a recent article effectively shows how in the 1930s a Roman historian strongly aligned with the regime produced both propaganda for Fascist corporativism and highly...