The Brooklyn Rail

If you grew up in Italy, like I did, or visit often, you’ve got a jar full of Euro coins somewhere. You always forget to bring them with you on your next flight, so they pile up useless each time you come back with more. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that truth itself is like a bunch of coins (“a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms”) so worn out that no one can tell what their “effaced obverse” was supposed to mean anymore. If the Italian coins in your jar aren’t quite that worn yet, you’ll see monuments, poets, and works of art stamped upon them. You may notice that most of those symbols are way older than the nation they stand for, that some pre-date the Italian language itself, and that none represent the culture of the Italian Republic. Italy was unified as a kingdom in 1861 and became a democracy in 1946. In between, it turned into a racist empire, gave birth to fascism, and lost a World War under Mussolini’s dictatorship.

The most common coin in my jar is the 50-cent piece. Its face is stamped with a Roman landmark: the Piazza del Campidoglio, with its flower of travertine lines converging on the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The same Piazza was on my grandmother’s 10,000 lira bills and is printed on each page of my passport. It literally represents “Italianness” in the document that certifies it, and its image is woven into an endless catalogue of visual identities—from the Italian pavilion at the 2015 Expo to the Capitoline Museums. Michelangelo famously designed that geometric paving, which became an emblem of the Italian Renaissance. However, if you visit the Piazza today, neither the statue nor the paving you’ll see have much to do with the Renaissance. The original statue, cast more than twenty centuries ago, was moved indoors for restorations in 1981. In 1997, it was replaced with an astonishingly faithful replica. But at least it used to be in the Piazza (though against Michelangelo’s wishes) since the sixteenth century. The paving did not.

Wikipedia has a whole page (in Italian) devoted to paintings of the Campidoglio. None of them include Michelangelo’s paving. It was not there in the seventeenth century, when Artemisia Gentileschi’s rapist and other local mannerists, along with Baroque painters from the Flanders and Prussia, portrayed the Piazza. It’s not in Canaletto’s or Panini’s vedute from the following century; it’s not in the watercolors and etchings of the Neoclassicists and Romantics who visited Rome in the age of the Grand Tour. Not even Fujishima Takeji, who painted the Campidoglio in 1919, could have seen Michelangelo’s design as you see it today in Rome, in my passport, or on one of your coins. And that’s because the Piazza was not finished under a Pope, or a king. It was finished under a duce, at the height of fascism’s imperial delusions, in 1940.

Mussolini, not Michelangelo, built the Piazza that, today, means “Italianness.” Or better, he commissioned its completion to Antonio Muñoz, an architect of Catalan descent who could not base his project on Michelangelo’s plans, because they were lost centuries ago. He resorted to an engraving, printed a few years after Michelangelo’s death by a younger follower, Étienne Dupérac, who visited the Papal court from Paris. Unlike Dupérac, I was born and raised in Rome, went to school there, and got two degrees from La Sapienza. Yet, until I moved here and started accumulating Euros in a jar while studying the modern afterlife of the Renaissance, I had no clue that the Piazza where my parents got married was a fascist project. A bit like Elsa in Frozen II, or Thor in Ragnarok when Cate Blanchett reveals the genocidal foundations of Asgard, I have been wondering: Can I feel both anti-fascist and still a direct heir to what Michelangelo drew, even if fascists built it? Or am I to burn my passport, empty my coin jar, and demand a demolition of the Campidoglio? If so, shall I come up with entirely new symbols, obliterating what the darkest chapter of Italy’s history did to its supposed golden age?

My job as an Italianist is to worry about such questions. But also to remind myself that, whatever “Italianness” is, it is not inscribed in geography or genetics. It is not even about a shared history. It is written, if you ask me, in the texts (and drawings) of those who imagined it, like Michelangelo. The hands that contributed to this exercise in fiction and divination come from all over and, among them, there are not only those of people like Michelangelo—or Dante, who was an exile and refugee in places that, today, we call Italy. There are also the hands of fascists, who tried (and still try) to colonize the future by appropriating the past.

Rather than defacing the coin that bears the image of a fascist success, Italians and Italophiles who are also anti-fascists (which should be the same thing) need to remember that fascism, sometimes, dresses up like the Renaissance, and even promises to make Italy great again like it supposedly was back then—though of course, back then, it didn’t even exist, if not in drawings, blueprints, poems. They should make the most Roman of gestures: tossing that coin into a fountain and wishing for a return in the future, rather than a return to the past.