California Italian Studies

Caput Mundi, Città Eterna, Theatrum Mundi: Rome as the Head of the World, the Eternal City, the stage upon which the world’s drama was set. These aphorisms speak not only to the centrality of Rome across European and even world history, but to the perennial pretention of the Eternal City to signify far more than its mere self: to be a holy city, a world-historical city, the fountainhead of Western or at least of Italic culture. This latest thematic issue of California Italian Studies, entitled “Italy and the Eternal City: Rome in History, Memory, and Imagination,” explores how the city and its representations have been continually shaped and reshaped over the centuries by a conviction that the indispensable significance of Rome extends beyond its local time and space, as well as by the time-honored habit of perceiving the city as a layered palimpsest of past Romes, all somehow vital and available in the present.

In 1662, Roman editore Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi published an updated version of Antonio Tempesta’s famous 1593 bird’s-eye view of Rome. In many ways, this move was standard practice: important images of the city were commonly copied or reprinted, and Tempesta’s original had been reissued multiple times. De’ Rossi’s version of 1662 was more than an incrementally revised restrike, however. In the title, he claimed it to show Tempesta’s prototype “recut, embellished, and enlarged” (rintagliato, abbellito ed accresciutto), and for once this language seems to reflect more than a rhetorical flourish. This essay shows, rather, that it was a meaningful reflection of process—one that leads, in turn, to many new questions. What was the lasting value of Tempesta’s view: what made it worth painstakingly refashioning for the present? Where did resemblance leave off and rupture begin? This essay seeks answers to these questions in interfamilial feuds and in the cut-throat world of Roman publishers as they sought novel ways to hitch their own reputations to that of their city. Among other challenges, they had to balance Rome’s illustrious antiquity with its shape-shifting modernity, and to attract an increasingly international market while catering to their local patrons and protectors. Ultimately, the significance of Tempesta’s image transcends any original author and moment. Its complex afterlife suggests a web of competing interests, as well as a cycle of decline and renewal, very much like that of Rome itself.

In the summer of 1627, a series of violent conflicts erupted between the papal police, colloquially called the sbirri, in Rome and soldiers and servants of the Spanish ambassador. The epicenter of this violence was the Piazza della Trinità dei Monti, the location of the ambassador’s palace that soon gave its name to the square. After the initial skirmish between the police and Spaniards took place in late June, the next months witnessed daily street battles between the two sides with the ambassador’s men patrolling the streets that opened out from the Piazza della Trinità dei Monti all the way to the Corso, a huge swath of urban territory. Calling this area, “il Quatiero degli Spagnoli” (the Spanish quarter),  the Spaniards robbed passersby and prevented the police and other papal officials from carrying out their duties in the area. The ambassador himself was quite active in defending his embassy and the surrounding area. His majordomo, his son, and other important members of his household led the attacks against the police. Moreover, he also secretly brought Spanish soldiers into Rome via the southern gate of the city and the River Tiber. This episode in Rome’s history demonstrates how important controlling its urban space was to Spanish ambassadors, especially during the Thirty Years War and the pontificate of Urban VIII, a partisan of France. Through violence, the ambassadors defended their rights and visibly asserted the will of their king. Moreover, papal government proved ineffective at quelling the violence of ambassadors as other clashes in the 1630s and 1640s reveal.

Although the 1527 Sack of Rome by the German, Spanish, and Italian troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V shocked Europe, a violent invasion of the Eternal City had long been anticipated in prophetic, historical, and literary texts alike. These works envisioned a dramatic contest at the city’s gates and subsequent carnage within its walls. While the brutality of the historical event matched—or even surpassed—these expectations, contemporaries were dismayed by the weakness of the city’s defense and by the speed with which Rome was taken. This article traces the relationship between earlier compositions, which cast the Sack as catastrophic but inevitable, and the production of historical and poetical texts in the Sack’s aftermath detailing the progression of Charles’s armies across the Italian peninsula and into the streets of Rome. The invasion opened the floodgates to murder, kidnapping, torture, sexual assault (of men and women alike), theft, sacrilege, and destruction for much of the populace during months of occupation, while the curial elite instead largely fled to safety. Comparisons of Rome’s fate to those of biblical sites like Babylon and Jerusalem as well as to “epically” destroyed cities like Troy and Carthage circulated widely, once again making Rome’s fall literary in nature. Figures such as Francesco Guicciardini, Luigi Guicciardini, Pietro Aretino, and Benvenuto Cellini, among others, developed a common language to interpret the imperial march toward Rome and its dire consequences as the product of both providence and poor leadership. Notably, their works also presented the event as a tragic visual spectacle from which their readers could varyingly draw important historical-military lessons, experience awe, and even be pleasurably entertained. This essay explores the tensions in their works representing the gravest threat in centuries to the very eternality of Rome.

Italy’s finest poet at the twilight of the Renaissance, Torquato Tasso (1544–95), has long been cast as the lionized icon of lonely genius, absorbed into a Romantic fantasy of torturous exile and withheld community. The figure of “mad Tasso,” however, misses key points in the historical poet’s dynamically social literary career, in which Tasso’s immersion in poetic communities prompted novel reflections about history, place, time, and belonging. Rome uniquely served as a catalyst for Tasso’s reflections on these very themes. A new kind of patria to which to direct the encomiastic voice of his late literary production, Rome became the subject of much of Tasso’s writings in the final three years of his life. With an eye toward the city’s classical heritage, Tasso composed a series of lyric, dialogic, epistolary, and epic experiments designed to immortalize the image of “Roma celeste” (celestial Rome) and the urban renovation projects that redefined its cityscape. This essay analyzes the forms of accoglienza Rome extended towards Tasso, outlined in the twinned lights of literary hospitality and readerly patronage, particularly as they evoke the poet’s collaborations with the Aldobrandini family and its Vatican literary academy.

In October 1867, Giuseppe Garibaldi and his revolutionary forces attacked the city of Rome. As Garibaldi advanced on the city, a small group of Romans organized a simultaneous uprising in Trastevere but were brutally crushed by the Papal Zouaves. One of the most remembered casualties of this day was Giuditta Tavani Arquati (1830–67), who was killed fighting alongside her husband and child. For many left-wing Italians, Tavani Arquati served as a powerful model of female emancipation and anti-Catholic patriotism in the new nation. Following a brief overview of the connections between nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and women’s emancipation in mid-nineteenth-century Italy, this article examines the various novels, histories, memorials, and processions that drew upon Tavani Arquati’s legacy from the moment of her death until the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the conquest of Rome in 1895. In doing so, it highlights an often-understudied figure and offers a gendered analysis of anti-Catholic rhetoric. In opposition to the widespread belief that women supported the Catholic Church while men fought for a secular public sphere, Tavani Arquati is a notable example of a woman who fiercely combatted the church and its control over Italian society. The celebrations of Tavani Arquati thus challenge this binary of male secularism and female religiosity and demonstrate how many Italians believed that women, and mothers in particular, could be allies in the battle against the Catholic Church. They also illustrate the intersections of the feminist and anti-Catholic movements, revealing how each group wielded an ideology of motherhood to promote political agendas.

The entrance zone to Rome has, for millennia, been the setting for entries and marches, welcomed or contested. It is a symbolic precinct, and a palimpsest of toponyms, extant or remembered, connected with Augustus, Constantine, Pope Leo X Medici, and Mussolini. Drawing on new material from private archives, this article traces the interwar development of this zone, revealing an unknown story of the synergy among several projects: the restoration of Villa Madama (Raphael’s villa and papal welcoming center for the Medici), the coeval construction of the neighboring Foro Mussolini, and the siting nearby of the Palazzo Littorio (conceived as the Fascist Party Headquarters but subsequently realized as the Foreign Ministry). Fascist planners conceived this forum as a new gateway to Rome, and a staging ground for Fascist ideology and mass spectacle. It emerges that Raphael’s villa was a significant node of the plans; its site, form, function, and symbolism were tied to the forum, which grew to englobe the villa and the Ministry palace within a verdant park. Moreover, the appropriation of the so-called Renaissance garden as an emblem of italianità provided the context for both the re-creation of the villa’s gardens and the design of Mussolini’s forum—itself presented as an Italian garden, an unexplored instance of the mythologizing and manipulation of Renaissance heritage by Fascist ideologues establishing the Third Rome.

The development of this zone constitutes a kaleidoscopic case study for the construction of political and cultural identity through urban design and landscape. Dismembered and partially neutralized post-war, the area currently represents a challenging entanglement of memory, heritage, politics, and aesthetics. And though the function and meaning of a city gateway have fundamentally changed over time, the long history of this topography—both real and metaphysical—is ingrained in the identity of modern Rome.

The Kingdom of Italy’s capture of Rome, on 20 September 1870, signaled the end of the Catholic Church’s temporal power and the completion of the Risorgimento, but the day is no longer officially celebrated and has been largely forgotten by the public except for its prominent use in street names. The political and cultural amnesia surrounding the significance of September 20^th to national unity reflects the unresolved challenges that Prime Minister Camillo Cavour had articulated when advocating for a free Church in a free State in 1861. Declared a national holiday by Francesco Crispi’s government in 1895, Mussolini stripped the date of its status to enhance his own in 1930. Postwar efforts to elevate its official standing have all failed, and the date’s significance has been marginalized across the political spectrum albeit with dissenting voices. Paradoxically, since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has reinterpreted its loss of temporal power as a providential act and, thus, Pope Francis emerged as the leading public celebrant of the sesquicentennial anniversary of September 20^th in 2020. This article examines the historical events surrounding Rome’s capture and the subsequent treatment of those events in various understudied materials including those of journalists (e.g., Ugo Pesci, Roberto Stuart), patriotic painters (e.g., Carlo Ademollo’s La breccia di Porta Pia, Michele Cammarano’s Carica dei bersaglieri alle mura di Roma), contemporary photographers (Gioacchino Altobelli, Lodovico Tuminello), encomiastic writers (e.g., Raffaele Cadorna, Edmondo De Amicis), and television/films (e.g., La presa di Roma, Superfantozzi). This cultural documentation also exposes inconsistencies (e.g., the circumstances surrounding the death of the decorated Bersagliere, Major Giacomo Pagliari) that challenge the hegemonic narrative. The article’s analysis of material representations of September 20^th is complemented by a reconstruction of both the political and religious responses to the date’s significance from 1870 to 2023. September 20^th speaks to the unresolved issues identified by Cavour, and, hence, its contested interpretation remains relevant to current discussions of Church-State relations in Italy today.

Mussolini and his supporters regularly invoked the Roman Empire to justify the Fascist regime’s colonial projects in North and East Africa and the racist policies that accompanied them. But they also used the idea of Rome to justify anti-Semitic measures on the Italian Peninsula during the late 1930s.  In the pages of his political and cultural journal Critica Fascista, Minister of National Education Giuseppe Bottai used the concept of Rome, primarily the idea that the Fascists were constructing a modern “Third Rome” after the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes, to mobilize support for the regime’s infamous “Racial Laws” among the Italian intellectual class. Bottai—who lived all his life in Rome, led a squad division during the 1922 March on Rome, served as Fascist mayor of the city in 1935–36, and was a key exponent of “Roman studies”—united the idea of Rome with Fascist anti-Semitism to sway Mussolini away a biological definition of race and the faction within the regime that supported a close alliance with Germany and an aggressive foreign policy.  Instead of achieving his goal, however, he provided the cultural space in his journals Critica Fascista and Primato for young intellectuals and artists to participate in Fascist race propaganda.  Inserting the Fascist Racial Laws into pre-existing cultural traditions provided Bottai with justification for his own removal of Jewish professors, teachers, and students from the public school system.  Using Bottai’s articles in Critica Fascista, his diary entries from 1938, and official government documents, this article analyzes how Bottai used the idea of Rome to justify the anti-Semitic policies of the regime and the ways in which he applied these policies to the school system. Finally, it considers whether Bottai himself was a committed anti-Semite and what his case reveals about the complex legacy of Fascist anti-Semitism and the city of Rome.

In May 1923, women from more than forty countries descended on Rome to promote, articulate, and celebrate women’s global fight for suffrage and equal rights. The previous fall, board members of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) had traveled to Rome to oversee progress on the congress. Little did the organization’s American president Carrie Chapman Catt or the local Italian planning committee know that they would soon witness the Fascist seizure of power in Italy. For members of the Federazione Nazionale Pro Suffragio Femminile, the IWSA’s Italian affiliate, and the Egyptian Feminist Union, the Rome 1923 congress presented a pivotal moment to gain support in the aftermath of regime change. While the IWSA sought the participation of all women irrespective of their geography, race, and religion, its majority Protestant North Atlantic membership consistently marginalized Italian, Egyptian, and other Mediterranean women based on ethnoreligious and Orientalist prejudices and stereotypes. Often these views about Catholicism and Islam did not align with Pro Suffragio’s and the Egyptian Feminist Union’s views of themselves and their countries. Both Italian and Egyptian figures involved with the congress would engage with rhetoric about antiquity and modernity, whether from the IWSA’s leadership or as part of their own self-representation. Despite achieving some successes in Rome, Pro Suffragio and the Egyptian Feminist Union would remain marginalized within the international suffrage movement.

Towards the conclusion of the film La grande bellezza (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013), the protagonist, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), responds honestly to the question of why he never wrote a second novel: “Io cercavo la grande bellezza. Non l’ho trovata” (I was searching for the great beauty. I never found it). Sorrentino’s entire film, however, disputes Jep’s claim. Once viewers reach this point, they have already spent an hour feasting their eyes on the visual spectacles that Jep’s journalistic vocation and Rome’s nightlife have to offer. While most of these spectacles are just that—shows empty of significance, magic that is “solo un trucco” (only a trick)—other moments, often the most banal, become marvels, creating a transformative experience for the protagonist and other characters, Romans and tourists alike. In so doing, Sorrentino taps into the great tradition of Rome’s constant search for beauty and artistic creation that go beyond human abilities, a quest that found expression in both ancient poets and Renaissance authors. Indeed, Sorrentino’s oneiric digressions and depictions of transformation evoke the imagery and language of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose many characters equally find themselves transformed and transported when confronted by visions of the divine. Similarly, Jep’s multiple encounters with scenes that themselves are the intersection of art and the ineffable, recall Vasari’s ekphrastic language in his Lives, specifically those moments in which the artistic creations of his illustrious artefici reach the sublime.

It is the purpose of this paper to examine Sorrentino’s film La grande bellezza and its visual discourse on the gaze, spectacle, and transformation, by putting the film in dialogue with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Vasari’s Lives. Of the countless authors who have treated this subject during Rome’s (and Italy’s) illustrious history, these two in particular put the same emphasis on artists or creators as heroes, underscoring man’s ability to surpass nature and rival the divine in his creative process. Both authors, however, offer different perspectives on art and the gaze that Sorrentino echoes within the film. The connection between physical dangers and the act of looking stem from Ovid, while the attention to artists’ abilities to both trick the eye and rival God in their creations, are evocative of Vasari’s rhetoric in his Lives. Ultimately, this discussion of La grande bellezza in the context of the Metamorphoses and the Lives enriches the visual text and confirms that Sorrentino’s film is as much a reflection on Rome’s mythos as it is the personal journey of the protagonist.

This paper, part of a larger project on unconventional forms of historiography, investigates a handful of cinematic and literary representations of life in Fascist Italy against the background of the March on Rome and, more in general, of Rome as the stage for the public display and embodiment of Fascist rhetoric. These texts can be grouped in three categories: 1) Fascist-era texts by supporters and opponents that express fear and pride; 2) later texts by march participants that express disappointment in the experience and the outcome of the march; and 3) more recent re-scriptings of the march as farce. The paper focusses particularly on the work performed by the second and third categories. These are not histories in the conventional sense but rather what we might call, with Edward Hallett Carr, “imaginative structures” through which unexpected and unexamined aspects of the past emerge, and in which memory works at once with and against history. Taking as a point of departure the idea that political history changes when we consider subjectivity, and that psychological elements are inextricable from the historical realm, I argue here that we have not fully understood the march until we take into account its experiential or affective qualities, which are most accessible to us through these unconventional sources. The insistent diminuzio anti-aulico of these texts—moving from the sublime to the disappointing to the absurd—marks their engagement with the notion of contingency, through which disappointment emerges and becomes operative. The paper argues that the march and its aesthetic iterations posit disappointment as an epistemological category—the way disappointment reinstates not simply experience but a very specific form of experience, as a way of knowing.