What role did religion play in Italian Empire-building? How was the past mobilised under fascist imperialism? The seminar seeks answers in the built environment.
Speaker:
Tommaso Zerbi
In a world increasingly marked by secularisation and modernisation, the rise of Fascism in Italy was accompanied across the country’s overseas territories by a striking prominence of both religion and the medieval past. Sacralisation and medievalisation converged in one of the most extensive programmes of church-building of the 1920s and 1930s. Stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean Basin, missionary architecture materialised the parallel expansion of and evolving relationship between the Italian State and the Catholic Church. It charts the passage from the distance separating the two institutions—both uniquely based in Rome—to their apparent convergence and, ultimately, to the attempt to subsume religion within fascist universalism. The seminar traces these developments alongside the advent and crisis of the displacement of the Middle Ages in the material and ontological fabrication of the Italian Empire. By examining the configuration of multiple temporal horizons and their dynamic interrelations, it problematises future- and antiquity-oriented characterisations of the fascist regime. Crucially, medievalism is recognised as a critical framework through which religion, nationhood, and empire were negotiated. The medieval past thus emerges as generating a trans-Mediterranean condition, which recoded the sea from a barrier to a conduit—symbolically drawing the colonies closer to the metropole and the Church closer to Fascism.
The seminar draws on a book project provisionally titled The Colonial Middle Ages and funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of Edinburgh, with additional support from the British School at Rome.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Tommaso Zerbi is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. He is an architectural historian specialising in responses to the past in the modern world, with an emphasis on entanglements with empire, religion, and nationhood.
Registration:
Register below, or via email to website@sahgb.org.uk.
What role did religion play in Italian Empire-building? How was the past mobilised under fascist imperialism? The seminar seeks answers in the built environment.
Speaker:
Tommaso Zerbi
Event listing: https://www.sahgb.org.uk/whatson/fasces-and-missions
Location
This SAHGB - IHR seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and in person at Senate House.
Institute of Historical Research, N203 (3rd Floor, North Block of Senate House, London WC1E 7HU).
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