Abstract
When Italy’s Fascist regime redesigned Rome, it celebrated the “Italianness” of the city’s ancient, medieval, and Renaissance heritage. Rome’s Baroque past, however, held a paradoxical status: It could be interpreted as either Roman or foreign. This article examines the regime’s fraught approach to the Baroque through the case of Santa Rita da Cascia, the seventeenth-century church designed by Carlo Fontana. Demolished in 1928 during the renovation of the city center, Santa Rita was then reconstructed by the regime more than a decade later. Merging issues of style, restoration, and urban renewal, Santa Rita’s destruction and resurrection reveal how the significance of the Baroque remained fluid in Fascist Rome to meet the regime’s shifting aesthetic, nationalistic, and racial aims. This article uses administrative reports, architectural drawings, and period publications to illustrate the debates over Santa Rita and the Baroque more broadly and to demonstrate how Fascist racial ideologies shaped both architectural discourse and restoration practice.
University of California Press