In Fascist Italy the urban environment served as a critical cultural reference from which artists, architects, politicians, and planners sought to fashion a new Italy. This conference asks the question of why the city exerted such a powerful influence over contemporary artistic practice and what were the consequences. While scholars have documented many of the major urban interventions in cities such as Rome and considerable attention has been given to the new towns founded by Mussolini, recently historians have begun to look at other models and examples that enrich and complicate our understanding of Fascism’s interest in cities and towns.

We invite papers dealing with a broad range of concerns, such as colonial town planning, the fabrication of collective memory through monuments, ideologically selective archaeology and preservation, the Italian translation of CIAM principles, and the intensely politicized nature of urban interventions in the period of Fascist rule. We encourage papers from the broad range of disciplines that have contributed to modern Italian architectural history, including anthropology, geography, history and literary criticism.

To be considered, please submit an abstract (300 words, maximum) and a brief c.v. by December 15, 2006 to Andrew Manson at ajm56@columbia.edu. Complete papers will be due in March 2007, and are expected to be approximately 25 minutes in length. Graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty are particularly encouraged to apply. The conference is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the Italian Academy.