Associate Professor Flavia Marcello's book about the life of Italian architect Giuseppe Pagano was released in mid-January this year. Marcello is a researcher at Swinburne's Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. She is an expert on the architecture and cultural production of the Italian fascist period.
"The story of Pagano's life is also the story of Italy. In less than fifty years, it went through two world wars, three wars of colonisation and a civil war of resistance. It is the story of Italian fascism, that went from a revolutionary movement grounded in socialist ideals that [Pagano] firmly believed in, to a repressive, imperialist and anti-Semitic regime allied with Nazi Germany that he could not bring himself to support. It reflects the experience of many Italians born at the turn of the twentieth century" explains Professor Marcello.
Because Giuseppe Pagano-Pogatschnig (1896 -1945) was a polymath and a 'Renaissance' man of the twentieth century, Professor Marcello has structured her book thematically and enriched it with critical essays, in-depth information about Pagano's major buildings and projects and an anthology of his writings.
Bocconi University, Milan, Giuseppe Pagano and Giacomo Predaval, 1941, with bas relief by Leone Lodi, photography by Flavia Marcello.
"In the spirit of 'Pagano the collaborator', five fellow 'Paganisti' joined me in writing the book. Italy's foremost Pagano scholar, Professor Cesare De Seta, wrote the foreword, Professor Tim Benton, from the Open University, contributed a chapter on Pagano's photography and film scholar Noa Steimatsky reflected on Pagano's links to the Italian neorealist movement. Claudia Cagneschi and Caterina Franchini are two up and coming scholars who composed the Building Information Sheets," Marcello says.
In Giuseppe Pagano - Design for Social Change in Fascist Italy, Marcello paints a personal and professional portrait of Pagano without the help of his original archives, now in private hands. She researched documents, unpublished projects and letters in books, architectural journals and monographs by Italian scholars.
Marcello searching for documents about Pagano in the National Library in Rome, image by Flavia Marcello.
She visited Pagano's buildings and the places where he lived and died (Croatia, Italy, Austria) to give an auto-ethnographic dimension to the book and to "sew together the tapestry of his life".
