Architecture as Ethical Terrain
Carmen Belmonte’s edited volume A Difficult Heritage. The Afterlives of Fascist-Era Art and Architecture is less a catalogue of monuments than a meditation on what happens when ideology hardens into stone. For those of us trained to read architecture not only as form but also as cultural instrument, the book offers a compelling window into how the built legacy of Fascism continues to unsettle, provoke, and—unavoidably—structure Italian cities.
What struck me most in the essays is the constant oscillation between two poles: the impulse to erase and the inevitability of endurance. Murals and mosaics survive because they are literally embedded in public buildings; stadiums and piazzas continue to function because they remain integral to civic life. Architecture proves far less malleable than ideology, and the book demonstrates this with case after case where attempts at censorship or iconoclasm collide with the stubborn durability of materials.
From my perspective, one of the most urgent questions raised here is not whether we should preserve these works, but how. Conservation in this context is never neutral: to restore a fascist-era mural is already to choose a frame of meaning, to decide whether it is history, art, propaganda, or all three at once. The contributors show convincingly that preservation always implies reinterpretation—a point highly relevant for contemporary architectural practice in heritage contexts.
The comparative essays—with reflections on Germany and the U.S.—highlight how Italy’s approach is distinctive: neither the radical removal of symbols nor the complete musealization of sites, but rather an uneasy cohabitation. For an architect, this makes Italy a laboratory of sorts: spaces of everyday life continue to be structured by buildings with compromised origins. Walking through them, one experiences a palimpsest of layers—past ideology, present use, future uncertainty.
The volume is significant not just for historians but for practitioners. It forces us to recognize that architecture is never free of political charge, and that our own interventions into the built environment—whether through reuse, conservation, or adaptation—carry interpretive weight. As I read, I kept returning to a paradox: the very qualities we often admire in architecture—its durability, monumentality, spatial clarity—are the same qualities that can bind us to uncomfortable pasts.
A Difficult Heritage is therefore not simply a book about fascist-era art and architecture. It is about the dilemmas of architecture itself when confronted with history’s darker legacies. For anyone engaged in designing, teaching, or theorizing about the built environment, it serves as a reminder: every building outlives its ideology, but never escapes it entirely.
Luigi Monzo 