Iris Pupella-Noguès. Université Paris-Est & Università di Trieste
Fascist monuments and their divided memories in Trieste and Bolzano Fascist Italy is the state that has the most politically invested architecture in Europe. Fascist architecture is an instrument of power from which the consensus of masses is reached and it participates to the totalitarisation process of society. In the cities of Trieste and Bolzano (annexed by Italy just after WWI), architecture and monuments were used to “italianise” urban spaces, to create a national collective identity at any cost (such as exploiting the WWI memory). The “Monumento alla Vittoria” of Bolzano or “Monumento ai Caduti” of Trieste, for example, became “national” monuments as they incarnated the victory of Italy over the Habsburg Empire and were used as symbols to represent the two cities to the rest of the country. During Fascism, cultural minorities (slavic, germanophones) were victimised by the regime, but they kept fighting, often targeting monuments to express their struggle (from “little gestures” such as graffiti on monuments to bombing attacks). After the fall of Fascism and after WWII, monuments (which remained in the urban landscape also due to the absence of a specific policy to eliminate traces of the dictatorship) were still targeted as they incarnated the oppression experienced by cultural minorities during the regime. Yet, this war issue dynamic and the management of remains of Fascist monuments are radically different in Bolzano and Trieste. Comparing the two cities allows us to understand how important power relations between cultural communities are. How destroying, changing or even blending Fascist monuments into the urban landscape by depolicising them, contributes to modify the cities' identities at local and national levels. By analysing local public debates and public history projects created in the two cities from the end of the WWII until today , this paper wants to discuss the (in)visibility of Fascist monuments in the urban landscape, the “divided memories” they generate among the inhabitants of these border regions and the role of historians in the memory-making processes.