Published: Croci e fasci – Italian church architecture during fascism

Croci e fasci
Der italienische Kirchenbau in der Zeit des Faschismus
GERMAN | ISBN: 9783422980501 | >>

Brief presentation in English.

Scheda riassuntiva in lingua italiana.

This book is the essence of many years of research on Italian architecture of the first half of the 20th century, related to church architecture of the interwar period. It is based on the author’s dissertation presented at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2017 and published digitally in the same year.

The period from 1919 to 1945 in Italy was characterized by the political and social struggle for a new order. In the process, the ruling practice of the fascist regime installed by Mussolini in 1922 proved to be the metric of developments. Despite its heterogeneous ideology, Mussolini’s fascism succeeded in establishing and consolidating a new reality that included an mutual understanding with the Catholic Church. This understanding, in turn, created the conditions for an ecclesiastical expansion unprecedented in the Italian unitary state. At the same time, the debate about contemporary representative architecture determined both the building policy of the regime and that of the church. In the field of tension between heated debates, progressive and tradition-bound ways of thinking, the eventful history of the search for a new church building architecture finally unfolds as a process of search that would be able to overcome the church’s typical sensitivity to tradition and which could be read today as a mediator between the continuity of centuries-old traditions and the liturgically motivated awakening of the 1950s and 1960s.

Based on an approach that analyzes the history of architecture as well as weighing it critically, taking into account socio-political and organizational conditions, this book makes the great mass of church-building phenomena of the interwar period tangible and places them in a comprehensible, assessable context.

Croci e fasci – Der italienische Kirchenbau in der Zeit des Faschismus
Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin / München 2021, German, 784 p., 330 b/w ill., 10 c. ill., ISBN: 9783422980501.

The research was funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Bonn and the printing was sponsored by the Verein Ausstellungshaus für christliche Kunst e. V. Munich.