Fascist Rome (Italy)

This travel course gives students the opportunity to be embedded in the city of Rome for over three weeks. Together we will examine the history of Rome’s urban transformations from antiquity to the present through the lens of the Fascist regime’s redesign of the city in the 1920s-30s. Moving backwards and forwards across time, we will explore how the regime’s interventions manipulated the historical layers of Rome’s built environment from the city center to the peripheries. We will also consider the legacies of these interventions. Issues of demolition and reuse, restoration and appropriation, nationalism and imperialism, and displacement and resistance will guide our study of the regime’s manipulation of the city’s urban form.
The course is grounded in the careful analysis of Rome’s built environment via on-site lectures, site visits, and walks. We will be joined by archaeologist Dr. Jan Gadeyne (Lecturer in Ancient and Medieval Urban History, Cornell in Rome) for several excursions. As a seminar located in and focused on the city of Rome,
the course’s primary modes of investigation will be reading, walking, and critical looking. Photography will be our main method of documenting Rome’s urban fabric and processing our examination of its history and politics. As such, the final project for the course will be an online exhibition of these photographs, which the class will organize, co-curate, and design as a group.

Meets

Faculty

Anna Mascorella