L’Università di Roma e le riviste degli anni Trenta e Quaranta: costruire l’identità culturale attraverso la comunicazione visiva

The aim of this paper is to put forward some reflections on the relationship between the construction of the Italian cultural identity and the rhetoric of communication, as seen in the presentation of both new buildings and artworks in magazines and other periodicals of the years 1930-1940. What emerges is a striking juxtaposition between the players involved – the calibre of whom revealed an Italy ready to take its place within the broader context of European modernism, from an artistic and architectural point of view – and the rhetoric of fascism, which pressured these innovative figures to represent its own ideology. This juxtaposition has prevented us from fully grasping the stylistic and formal innovations of Italian art in this artistic and architectural period, which can only be understood as being consequent to the cultural policies of the regime.