Response to Jeffrey Schnapp

Abstract

Schnapp's tightly focused case study proves to be a formidable vantage point from which to consider, and possibly reformulate, wider questions about modern uses of the past and archaeology's role in mediating such evocations. The paper centers on an event that did not happen, as Pavia was not reconstructed in the 1930s according to the Ciocca/BBPR radical modernist and corporativist urban plan that appealed to the city's Roman past; instead it remained one of the spectacular historical medieval towns of Italy. In his investigation of this non-event, Schnapp places the modernist plan's turn to the past in a rich variety of contexts as he recounts the drawing of the proposal in the wake of the 1933 CIAM at Athens, the failure of the project at the open competition for Pavia's urban planning, the ensuing controversy and the combative exhibition dedicated to the failed plan itself. These different moments take us on an interdisciplinary ride into the culture of modernity, from the Fascist culture wars, to the novel means and arenas in which these conflicts were fought—such as the exhibition at the Galleria il Milione—and to individuals' trajectories realized against this complex background. Schnapp stimulatingly disentangles these many threads while keeping to his leading question—the tension between the radical modernist project of urban rebuilding and its appeal to the past as framed by a quotation from Livy. He resolves this tension by exposing the urbanists' mistaken interpretation of Livy's text—omnes in corpus unum fusi sunt—which was wishfully understood to resonate with modern fascist corporativism. Schnapp shows how the evocation of that past, Roman austerity and its civic and rational virtus,was put in the service of functional architecture and the new radical modernist program. This [End Page 105] skillful analysis is not only a case study in the use of the Roman past and archaeology in Fascist culture but also illuminates broader questions about the central role of archaeology in modernity.