Before Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (MoMA, 1964), there was Giuseppe Pagano’s Exhibition on Rural Architecture, held at the VI Milan Triennale in 1936.⁠ Built around an unprecedented photographic campaign of rural dwellings across Italy, much of it shot by Pagano himself, the exhibition was long hailed in historiography as an “anthropological inquiry,” a paradigm shift away from style, received canons and capital “A” architecture, towards the humble, largely overlooked built environment of the countryside. After 1945, this reading intensified as interpretations of the project became closely entwined with Pagano’s own tragic trajectory: his break with fascism in 1943, his participation in the Resistance and death in Mauthausen in 1945. Seen through this redemptive lens, leftist postwar scholars reappraised the rural exhibition as a profoundly ethical endeavor—a realist search for the collective reasons for architecture, as an antidote to fascist bombast, and as a precursor to later neorealist sensibilities.⁠ These readings collectively contributed to elevating Pagano and the rural project into figures of critical resistance, a narrative this essay seeks to complicate.

In light of renewed interest in the so-called “vernacular” and in rural contexts, this essay reconsiders Pagano’s influential exhibition and catalogue through a different and lesser-known lens: his 1939 photographic series and photobook Il Covo, depicting Mussolini’s editorial office, “the lair,” the mythical birthplace of fascism as a movement. When considered alongside Il Covo, Pagano’s celebrated “anthropological” inquiry appears as a more ambivalent aesthetic, a double movement combining equal parts realism and myth. A close reading of his photographs, his writings in Casabella, and the exhibition catalogue Architettura Rurale Italiana suggests that Pagano’s realism tended to abstract fragments of the real from their social and historical conditions, erasing conflict and contingency to produce archetypical, almost mythical forms and gestures. This reframing complicates the presumed continuity with the postwar Neorealist aesthetic and situates Pagano’s visual practice within a broader reflection on fascism’s capacity, in recent philosophic scholarship, to transform “reality” through myth.⁠

MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A MYTH

Milan, 1939. Giuseppe Pagano enters the courtyard of 35 Via Paolo da Cannobio, also known as Il Covo—“The Lair”—of Benito Mussolini, former headquarters his newspaper Il Popolo D’Italia. Rolleiflex in hand, he shoots a dozen photographs, as if rapidly ascending the somber early-twentieth-century building. The first image frames the wrought-iron gate, open, with barbed wire perched in the foreground, and beyond it, the frosted French windows inscribed with “The People of Italy.” The camera advances into the courtyard, frames the balcony balusters, the French windows, points to up the narrow shaft where a cluster of flags dangles, and then climbs the dim stairwell, shooting obliquely into the interiors of the courtyard. On the first balcony: a small door to the editorial office, commemorative plaque. The doors open onto a short flight of stairs. Beyond is Mussolini’s editorial office; through a semi-closed door, the camera focuses on the desk: light from a window to the left spills across a crumpled issue of Il Popolo, a hand crank telephone, an inkwell, a hand grenade. On the back wall is a black pennant with a skull gripping a dagger between its teeth. The camera then turns to nearest window and looks out. The window opens slightly, then fully, the camera frames the roofs above, the terracotta tiles, gutters, a balcony with flowerpots and kitchen towels hanging to dry, a sliver of sky.⁠

The photographs Pagano took in 1939 were made more than two decades after the events they sought to commemorate. Starting from 1914, the building housed the editorial offices of the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, founded by Mussolini after his dramatic break from the Avanti! of the Italian Socialist Party.⁠ The movement first coalesced around these cramped rooms in Milan’s working-class Bottonuto quarter, described as a place of poverty and marginality—“One has to pinch their nose….It’s a sewer, a cesspool…Filth seeps from the walls.”⁠ The building doubled as a militarized “den,” as the newspaper-movement enlisted the armed assistance of WWI shock troops, the arditi, [the daring ones], who would launch attacks against socialists and defend the premises, camping out in the basement, a dark cave-like room stashed with rifles and covered with macabre mottos and graffiti.⁠

By 1920, however, Il Popolo had already left Via Paolo da Cannobio. As soon as the movement gained momentum—and crucially, funding, from landowners and industrial elites—its self-styled anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment newspaper relocated to an elegant neoclassical palazzo at Via Lovanio 10, in the decorous surroundings of Via Moscova.⁠ Pagano himself redesigned the new offices in 1934 into a modern newsroom of linoleum floors, built-in storage, sleek wooden desks, and tubular-steel chairs.⁠ Meanwhile between 1919 and 1939, the original rooms at Via Paolo da Cannobio were turned into an open air shrine of fascist lore. Mussolini’s former office was fully reconstructed, with all its symbolic paraphernalia—the telephone, papers, inkwell, pistol, hand grenade—first at the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (1932–34) and later in the Galleria D’Arte Moderna in Rome (1937).

On November 1, 1939, the site was formally entrusted to the School of Fascist Mysticism, founded in 1930 by university activist Niccolò Giani. Initially marginal, the school gained traction in the late 1930s, when fascism, at its apex of power, sought to revive its own revolutionary mythology. Pagano served as the school’s artistic director and taught courses on the socialist and revolutionary foundations of fascism; his commitment was such that he volunteered for war service in 1941 alongside his colleagues.⁠ On occasion of the handover, Pagano designed Il Covo, a commemorative photobook, today extremely rare and known mostly among antiquarians. The book reconstructs, according to the fascist narrative, the six-years between November 15, 1914—the founding of Il Popolo d’Italia—and November 15, 1920, the creation of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento.⁠ Pagano not only took the photographs but also designed the graphic and typographic layout. Thus, Il Covo shares several hallmarks of his modernist publications, from Casabella to the Quaderni della Triennale: square format, spiral binding, fold-out sheets, bold typefaces and a continuous text-image layout. Issued in 400 copies as a strenna [gift] for the regime’s closest supporters, the book has a studied coarseness: doubled “Japanese style” pages, exposed twine stitch binding, a rough hemp slipcase emblazoned with the fasces symbol, and—in the second edition—a white cover is stamped with a hand-drawn skull and dagger echoing the basement graffito “Me Ne Frego” [I don’t give a damn].⁠

Pagano’s photos of “The Lair” are entirely unlike the images of the official exhibition reconstructions: not stiff nor didactic, but cinematic and vivid. As Tim Benton notes, the photographic sequence is a promenade architecturale that emphasizes the revolutionary character of the space.⁠ Through oblique angles, tilted views, and harsh contrasts, Pagano’s sequence appears to have been shot live while the original events were unfolding, or, as Benton remarks, “It puts you in the mind of Mussolini, what he saw from the window, how he arranged his work space…”⁠ It is striking, therefore, to find out that the shoot was anything but spontaneous. As Franco R. Gambarelli, who assisted Pagano, later recalled, the architect’s intervention had gone so far that “it was difficult to identify how much of it was authentic and how much was procured for the occasion,” in terms of the furnishings, the objects, and even the smallest details. “The architect had taught us to age the papers with tea, because they looked too new.”⁠ The result was no objective documentary, but, as Giorgio Grillo observed, a partial mise-en-scène, a staged reconstruction of a historical episode, artfully made to feel current and alive. The disjunction becomes even sharper when set against the political and urban transformation of the intervening years: Mussolini’s office at the time, far removed from those cramped and dimly lit rooms, then occupied the monumental marble-clad interiors of Rome’s Palazzo Venezia;⁠ while the surrounding dense historical fabric of the Bottonuto quarter was being dismantled under the regime’s program of urban renewal and large-scale sventramenti [clearings].⁠

Like the photographs, the book itself constructs a rhetoric of realist marginality. The spaces are described as “bare and wretched,” “humble,” and “humid and narrow.”⁠ At the same time, the book elevates these spaces into the setting for heroic origins: full-page historical photographs, bold red captions, handwritten letters, newspaper clippings, portraits of protagonists depicted injured or dead, and macabre memorabilia, such as the backpack of a fallen ardito. In the expanded 1940 edition, the final pages reproduce reconstructed floor plans of the basement, ground floor, and first floor. By omitting the thickness of the party walls and rendering the interior outlines, the plans read like the burrowed chambers of a cave or catacomb. Contemporary newsreels announcing the official transfer of the premises reinforced this aura. Amid fanfare and crowds, announcers emphatically described the “Covo” to be both “newsroom and trench,” a place where “ink pen and weapons stood equally ready.” These “bare walls,” viewers are told, “speak of memories enhancing the raw solemnity of rooms, now sacred to the eternal reverence of Italians.”⁠

In this light, the bareness of the Il Covo photographs can be read not as a sign of Pagano’s growing disenchantment with fascism but, following Tim Benton, as a sincere appreciation of the “revolutionary” early days.⁠ Their fusion of avant-garde technique and hieratic austerity recalls the aesthetic forged two decades earlier, during Gabriele D’Annunzio’s “Impresa di Fiume” (1919–20), long understood as an ideological laboratory for fascism.⁠ Pagano, an eighteen-year-old Istrian-born irredentist and war veteran, participated directly in that episode, joining D’Annunzio’s convoy of rebel soldiers in the occupation of the city.⁠ An experience that, as Cesare De Seta notes, shaped his intellectual and political formation.⁠ In the Charter of the Carnaro—half-constitution half-artistic manifesto—D’Annunzio set out an architectural ethos in §63, “The Aediles,” calling for a return a to the simplicity of “the old days,” the “somber elegance of our fathers” found in humble tools—“the simplest sign passed down from generation to generation engraved or painted on the cradle, the loom, the spinning wheel, the chest, the yoke,” objects that carried for D’Annunzio, “religion,” “human mystery,” and “the imprint of man’s life.”⁠ At the same time, the charter called for the construction of “a new architecture” in iron, glass, and concrete.⁠ Seen in this light, Il Covo—part modernist reportage, part ancient reliquary—crystallizes the contradictory fusion at fascism’s origin: suspended between Futurist modernity and mythic-archaic aura.

AGAINST THE CANON:

POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF THE RURAL HOUSE

Milan, 1934. Five years before photographing the Covo, Pagano, newly appointed director of Casabella, was actively involved in the debates that pitted modern “Rationalism” against the pseudo-classical architecture of architects such as Marcello Piacentini and Gustavo Giovannoni. Defending modern architecture against accusations that it lacked historical grounding, Pagano’s early writing argued that antecedents of functionalism were clearly discernible even in the ancient past. In 1931, he exhorted readers to look beyond the “well-preserved basilicas,” to the humbler insulae of Pompei and Ostia where a clear functionalism was at play.⁠ In 1932, he railed against Piacentini’s historicist reconstructions of Via Roma in Turin and praised instead the ruins of Porta Palatina—Roman military architecture, which he describes as a rhythm of “stones upon stones,” solemn yet not grandiose, no-nonsense, “structural like a clenched first,” and “like homemade rye bread, with no icing sugar.”⁠ In another article that year, he polemicized against the canonical works of architectural history—“the usual export partridge sauce with the great Palladios and Michelangelos and Sangallos and Sansovinos…”—and outlined instead a new constellation of references: late-Medieval and Romanesque works, all monolithic, tectonic, and unadorned.⁠ His polemic charged these contrasts with moral value: against deceitful ornamentation he opposed frank simplicity; against aesthetic whim, the virtues of need and function. Pagano’s search for an anti-canonical paradigm culminated with his research project on rural dwellings, begun in 1934, crystallized in 1935 in the pages of Casabella, and materialized in the 1936 sixth Milan Triennale Exhibition of Rural Architecture [Mostra dell’Architettura Rurale].⁠

The exhibition’s central claim was that rural architecture across the peninsula embodied a primordial functional clarity and could serve as the foundational precedent for modern Rationalism. To demonstrate this, the Mostra, co-curated with Werner Daniel, assembled one of the most comprehensive photographic records of rural buildings produced in 1930s Italy, largely based on Pagano’s own photographs and supplemented by regional collaborators.⁠ Foregoing chronological order, the display grouped building typologies into climate-zone clusters: Alpine, Apennine, Southern, and Insular.⁠ The core of the display consisted of four vertical panels on the right side of the room; each panel carried twelve square black-and-white photographs arranged in a gridded formation, with only minimal accompanying text. The installation was notably restrained: white walls, a repetition of square prints; a gridded layout, mounted on slender metal uprights, produced a unifying visual framework across highly diverse regional material.⁠ The accompanying catalogue, Architettura rurale italiana (Hoepli, 1936), followed the same visual and typological logic: a square book with seventy-three pages presents dense gridded sequences of square black-and-white photographs, with a running text below.

Pagano was not alone in this interest. Attention to rural dwellings had been rising across Europe in the early 1930s. Avant-garde architects and artists, such as Josep Luís Sert and the Spanish GATEPAC group, brought the Ibizan farmhouse to the center stage as early as 1932, praising its functionality, logical adaptation to use, and the standardization of its forms. In 1934, Sert himself called them “houses without style and without architects,” built not by design, but by use, shaped by climate, material and custom.⁠ The abstraction and clean lines of its white cubic masses appeared strikingly contemporary, an ideal a-stylistic, a-historical precedent for modern architecture, so much so that in 1935 the mouthpiece of the Spanish Rationalist group, AC: Documentos de Actividad Contemporanea, dedicated two entire issues to rural houses and crafts. The same impulse was visible in the French modernism scene: the 1935 issue of L’Architecture D’Aujourdhui featured essays Charlotte Perriand defining “the peasant house” as “the direct extension of the daily gestures, without intermediaries.”⁠ Across Europe in the early 1930s, as avant-gardism encountered increasing resistance and crisis, the rural house emerged as an attractive paradigm, at once archaic and modern. Pagano, as director of Italy’s leading modernist journal, was likely aware of these debates, yet his own research took on a far more systematic and operative register.

Already in 1935, in his first article on the topic, Pagano framed the interest in rural houses in explicit political terms. In “Case Rurali” [Rural Houses], in the February 1935 issue of Casabella, he wrote that the topic had become urgent after Mussolini, at the 1934 Quinquennial Assembly of the Regime, declared the state of rural houses “a highly important problem of national interest,” calling for state intervention on four-million farmhouses he claimed were in a state of decay, needing repair, reconstruction, or demolition. “It is time to take care of the farmers’ homes,” Mussolini proclaimed, “if we want to keep them working on the land.” Repairing or rebuilding rural houses was framed as the only means to halt what he termed “nefarious urbanization” and to bring back those “deluded and disappointed by the mirage of urban wages and easy entertainment.”⁠ Thus, beyond an avant-garde fascination, Pagano’s project was responding to a large-scale governmental program of ruralization. Between 1931 and 1935 ruralization and major investment in public works had been the regime’s attempt to counter the violent economic recession sparked by 1929 economic crash and related housing crisis. Central to this effort was the bonifica integrale, the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes; and—after “draining off the muck,” as Ezra Pound put it—the rapid construction of new towns, such as Littoria, Sabaudia, Pontinia, and Aprilia on reclaimed land.⁠

This political program was given strong visual form by the propaganda campaign, the “Battle for the land,” in which Mussolini appeared directly participating in agricultural labor bare-chested at the threshing machine, scythe in hand, or driving a tractor to trace the boundaries of a new town.⁠ Rural life, its events, products, and buildings were turned into highly charged political and rhetorical arenas. Yet, “regrettably but not surprisingly,” Pagano remarked, “architects are considered too proud for such trivial matters.”⁠ The vast program of repair and re-building had fallen almost entirely on the geometri [surveyors] and engineers who, Pagano complained, treated the problem as purely technical, neglecting its inherent aesthetic and formal dimensions. Architects, he argued, had to set aside their pride, if only to offer the geometri “an education in simplicity” and guidelines for intervening in a “world so delicately artistic,” which would otherwise be left to “just a vulgar use of mortar and cement.”⁠ His project sought to wrest this task away from technocratic management and reposition it as a legitimate architectural problem—and for that, he needed a compelling narrative.

LIKE A DIET OF SIMPLE FOODS

To ground his argument, Pagano provides a sweeping anthropological narrative. Rural architecture, he suggests, by virtue of its functional and utilitarian character, provides a record of human civilization from its primordial beginnings.⁠ By examining dwellings, one could read the “milestones of human civilization,” a literal index of the shifting relations between materials, needs, and forms. Hence, rural structures appeared to him as living fossils, preserving “building habits that can date back to the age of the palafittes or the feudal Middle Ages.” In this unchanging state of necessity, the rural house occupied a dimension suspended from history. He writes: “What stands out the most in rural construction is its abstraction from a chronologically defined time according to stylistic attributes.” For Pagano, this timelessness turned the rural house into an “architectural fact,” spontaneous, utilitarian, and devoid of theory or styles, preserving a “naiveté, freshness, and sincerity over the centuries.”⁠ As Antonio De Rossi notes, Pagano “extracts rural architecture from the flow of time” and turns it into “an attitude, a tendency that, while starting from practical purposes, transforms itself in a transcendental act,”⁠ a mystical condition in which form and life coincide beyond history; history is flattened into one anthropological continuum in which the only truth is necessity.

This logic demands an archetypical definition of the rural house. Pagano rejects all modernized or hybridized forms—no “houses for agricultural firms” or “pseudo villette for land-consortia members.” The rural house, he insists, “is the house of the peasant who works the land.” He depicts this world as: “alive, raw, sometimes generous, sometimes harsh, and often savage.”⁠ Not bucolic or picturesque, but elemental: “a refuge, an embryonic workshop, a cell of life and civilization in constant and direct struggle with the most mysterious and powerful forces of nature.” Borrowing from emerging human geography, he defines it as “a work tool; the most important and most visible work tool that the farmer’s spirit builds.”⁠ Like the tool, it obeyed an economy of necessity: “nothing is useless, nothing is superfluous, everything is born out of necessity.” Every form could be traced back to need, and where need disappeared, forms persisted as habits.⁠ Every element, from “fountain, a seat, a canopy,” arose through “calm and rough simplicity,” “embryonic but sufficient,” making rural architecture “a book of honest construction, full of lessons.” Contemporary interventions, he argues, should emulate this “brazen ease, an air of improvisation,” the new buildings should “identify with the land,” accommodate “accidents of stains, the most unexpected additions,” achieving a condition halfway between the human and the natural: “harmony between the house, the countryside, and the farmer.”

Later that year in “Documenti di architettura rurale,” in Casabella, Pagano returned to his polemic against the “aulic” tradition of architectural history—its “temples, churches, palazzos.” Anticipating the forthcoming Triennale exhibition, he argued that this newly examined rural world, long dismissed as folklore, offered documentary proof that in the shadow of those monuments, a more prosaic building environment had always existed, one that satisfied the “simplest and least vain needs of man in a spirit of wonderful ‘primitivism.’” For Pagano, the modernist quest was nothing but the rediscovery of a functionalist ethos of a primeval past. Recovering this spirit, he wrote, was like a cure, “like going on a diet of simple foods for those who have been spoiled by the patisseries of the caryatids.” Building on these moral metaphors of “honesty, clarity,” he added somatic associations with healthfulness, in line with the thriving Naturist ideology of time, “like a clenched fist,” “like homemade rye bread,” against “patisseries,” and “export partridge sauce.” This search for renewal, a new salute edilizia [building health], moved through a cleansing and a stripping away of all excesses, of style, of theory, and ultimately of history itself.⁠

THE ETERNAL PRESENT OF THE RURAL HOUSE

Pagano’s use of photography for the rural exhibition mirrored his attitude and theorization of the rural house itself. The process, as he recounted it, was nothing short of revolutionary, a revelation of material long ignored by intellectual elites and cultural institutions. With the backing of the Triennale, he approached regional superintendents, asking them to photograph, all expenses paid, the most interesting farmhouses, rural dwellings, and villages in their regions, but the responses he received were “discouraging, absurd and implausible….even the Superintendency of Tuscany replied that there was nothing interesting to photograph in those countryside areas.”⁠ Forced, as he put it, to “do everything myself,” he turned to photography as the only medium capable of “rapidly gather[ing] large quantity of documentation material on the subject,” unlike sketching, which he deemed “too slow, too subjective, and not very scientific.”⁠ His turn to photography thus acquires the same mythic contours of the exhibition itself: against the scorn of the “chorus of pessimists” and out of sheer necessity, Pagano proceeded to wander across the peninsula almost single-handedly gathering this unprecedented material.⁠

The photographic style he adopted was equally polemical. Pagano did away with the traditional single-point perspectives, frontal framing, and even the lighting and elevated viewpoints of academic architectural photography. As film director Luigi Comencini later put it, Pagano “destroyed Alinari photography.”⁠ His casual framings, from exaggeratedly low or high angles, and highly abstracting close-ups aligned him with the “New Vision” of avant-garde artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and with Le Corbusier’s photographic experiments of the early 1930s. Italo Zannier describes Pagano’s avant-garde use of the Rolleiflex as emblematic, in particular his “bold techniques that were unusual, especially in professional photography: diagonal horizons, strongly anamorphic perspectives, and then details of materials and architectural elements.”⁠ This novel approach Pagano would later describe as a search for realism. He called it “a hunt for live impressions” meant to capture something “more real and more life-like than the cold archive of stereotypical academic images.”⁠ Yet, despite these claims to a study of objective reality and life-like realism, as Cesare De Seta notes, his photography “always tends towards an abstract transfiguration of reality.”⁠

The photographs in the exhibition reflect this double movement of realism and transfiguration. The houses are captured in isolation, framed by a foreground of land and a terse background of sky, shot from a point of view that is nearly always exaggeratedly low, which gives them a dramatic standing. The horizon line is also pushed to an extreme, either very low or very high in the square frame, so that most of the image is filled with either an imposing ground or sky, and the dwelling appears as a hinge, a solitary mediator between crops and clouds. As critics have noted, the focus of the photographs falls almost exclusively on the house: outbuildings and other infrastructures and inhabitants are under-represented or absent.⁠ At times, a lone tree appears next to the house, like an alter ego, another domesticated form. Other photographs feature close-ups: a repetition of arches, of stairwells, rooftops, chimneys, and vents rendered in heavy contrast, framed in such a way that the plastic, sculptural qualities are emphasized. What emerges is a sense of essentiality or, in the words of contemporary architecture historian Roberto Pane, that the rural house, “with the bareness of its structural elements, is timeless, ancient of a few years or several centuries.”⁠

The catalogue’s running texts provide a theoretical narrative for this visual timelessness. Pagano describes rural architecture as a styleless background environment governed by “that eternal law” linking utilitarian purpose and relative form—a law “as natural as gravity.” In the running text of the catalogue, he proposes an evolutionary theory, beginning with the haystack and advancing through a chain of necessary transformations. “The haystack was created,” he writes, “from the primary need to store the harvest and protect it from the elements.”⁠ From this cylindrical mass of piled straw, the hut emerged by hollowing out a void; two circular huts merge to create an ellipse: “the creation of the ridge.” The ellipse, needing enlargement, becomes a square. In Puglia, the sequence is re-enacted in stone: the straw hut becomes the trullo, its cone “nothing more than the petrification of the circular hut.” ⁠From trullo to dome, from dome to pavilion, from pavilion to vault, the evolution continues until it reaches the terrace roof, “the greatest technical achievement in construction.” This sequence of linear cause-effect relations becomes the only history worth attending to, as inexorable as destiny. The “anonymous” rural houses full of “proud modesty,” he writes, “teach us to overcome time.”⁠

The theory of evolution did not go unquestioned by contemporary critics, who noted how the sequence proposed was too simplified, too deterministic, too linear.⁠ In particular, a very interesting commentary comes from Raoul Hausmann, former leading figure of the Berlin Dada, who spent his years in exile on the island of Ibiza (1932–36) deeply engaged in architectural-anthropological study of the rural Ibizan finca, producing in the same years an extraordinary body of photography and writing. In 1944, he would discuss at length Pagano’s exhibition catalogue, praising it for the “dazzling” presentation, but he criticized the proposed model as being “too specifically Italian,” unable to account for “mixed forms” and “parallel indigenous developments” produced by migration and cultural exchange. Hausmann insisted that dwelling forms arose from “occupations, human activities, and gestures” and not from a single logic of necessity.⁠

This sense of essentiality underpins Pagano’s broader photographic practice, some 3,275 images produced between 1934 and 1944. In a 1939 article, he describes this work as revealing an “undiscovered Italy” made up of “rural and heroic horizons, strange contrasts, revelations full of modern resonance, courageous poverty, and dignified restraint. An Italy of scant words…provincial and rough.”⁠ He archives his vast photographic production, grouping photographs under abstract keywords such as smiles, sea, clouds, trees, and stone, and he spoke of this subjects in similarly absolute terms: “clouds, plants, farmhouses, ruins, wide horizons of lonely valleys, the portrait of a presumptuous tree…the gesture of a reaper in Romagna…the transparencies of a wave in Murano.” This tendency is clearest in a small book he published in 1939, titled Sassi [Stones], which gathers, by analogous association, an atlas of all kinds of “stones,” natural and man-made, ancient and modern: the Sassi cave dwelling of Matera, the bugnato façade of a Renaissance palazzo, ancient Roman road paving, pebbles at the beach, Etruscan steps—the story of human building across all times and spaces.⁠

Pagano’s fascination with mythical imagery was shared by several Italian intellectuals, even by those who in the postwar period would play a major role within the cultural left. For example, a similar emphasis on archetypes can be found in the contemporary work of renowned Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese. Rooted in his pioneering translations of North American authors such as Steinbeck, Melville and Dos Passos, Pavese developed what critics describe as an experimental mode in which realism and myth operate simultaneously.⁠ This is already explicit in his first major work, the collection of poems Lavorare Stanca [Hard Labor] (1936). While writing in completely novel verse about completely novel subjects (such as gas pumps and mechanical workshops in the outskirts of Turin), Pavese remains uninterested in the here-and-now but rather seems to be constantly trying to grasp a latent dimension, something “beyond.” Phenomena are not treated as singular events, but as absolute figures—dawn, death, God, “man”—described without adjectives, like “fulgurations.”⁠ This archetypal register intensified across his short novel Paesi tuoi [The Harvesters] (1941), built on symbolically charged oppositions between countryside and city, old and young, men and women. This tendency culminates in his works Dialoghi con Leucò [Dialogues with Leucò] (1947), La casa in collina [The House on the Hill] (1948), and La luna e i falò [The Moon and the Bonfires] (1950). Significantly, while writing these last novels, Pavese had struck up a collaboration with anthropologist Ernest De Martino and the pair had begun to co-edit the Einaudi series La Collana Viola (The Purple Series), publishing texts by Frobenius, Eliade, and Frazer.⁠ But their collaboration soon turned toward contrast, as De Martino came to insist on the need to historicize their fascination for myth and openly criticized Pavese for indulging in a notion that was too irrational, abstract, and politically ambiguous.⁠

BETWEEN REALISM AND MYTH

These tensions between realism and myth are discussed by Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito in his recent book Fascismo e noi [Fascism and Us] (2025).⁠ Esposito argues that fascism cannot be understood as an isolated parenthesis in twentieth-century history, nor can it be understood only in terms of violence, repression, deceit, and terror. Were it only that, it could not have endured two decades, nor cast such a long shadow across Europe, nor would it have survived its own death and reached us now. Esposito argues that it should be understood instead as a form of culture that endures among us. The defining characteristic is its functioning like a complexio oppositorum, a machine able to collapse and absorb opposing impulses, neutralizing them in the process: blending left- and right-wing ideals, revolutionary and reactionary impulses, rural nostalgia and industrial modernity, thereby turning contradiction into hegemony. For Esposito, the engine that drives the “machine” is myth. But unlike the more-or-less spontaneous “traditional” myths that create an imaginative distance from the real, the fascist “mythological machine” actively produces a new reality. Mussolini had theorized this himself in his 1922 speech, declaring that “Fascism is both creation and resurrection of myth.” In this sense, this particular form of myth does not simply belong to history but rather re-writes it.

Seen in this light, Pagano’s Il Covo participates in a similar dialectic. Though presented as documentary, his reconstruction was, as seen, more of a reenactment carefully staged. Through artful framing and studied austerity, the camera resurrected the atmosphere and events of two decades earlier, attempting to make a mythical past, newly present. The images gain emotional charge by collapsing opposites—violence and intellect, sacred and profane—and in the process class is aestheticized and marginality becomes material for morality. A similar double movement underlies the Exhibition on Rural Architecture (1936), suspended between claims to objective empirical study and a universalizing, mythic narrative. Regional farmstead types, such as the masseria in the South, the cascina in the North, and the casale in central Italy, are presented as timeless “architectural facts,” rather than the products of centuries of land colonization, concentration of holdings, and exploitative systems of labor. The fortified masseria in Puglia, for instance, far from spontaneous or “natural,” encoded the latifundist order in the south, preserved, often through violence, well into the post-unification period.⁠ In Pagano’s photographs, however, this social dimension remains muted; farmers, sharecroppers, tenants, are largely absent from the frame, while buildings are recast as anthropological constants, rather than historically produced conditions.

The mythicizing tendency becomes very clear when set against Walker Evans’s contemporaneous photographs for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). In 1936 Evans was tasked, along with several other important photographers, with the documentation of rural conditions following the implementation of the New Deal reform policies. His series in Hale County, Alabama, published together with an essay by James Agee in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) depicting the life of three sharecropper families, offers a revealing counterpoint to Pagano’s project.⁠ Here there are no dramatic low-angle shots, no sculptural shelters, no rugged lyricism. Instead, there are unsparingly close portraits of family members, interspersed with views of their surroundings, and above all gestures and names: Mrs. Frank Tengle washing clothes in a tub on a bench; Lucille Burroughs picking cotton; Mrs. Floyd Burroughs taking in the milk mule in the barnyard. Evans frames not just the “house,” but a whole ecology of labor: the tool house, chicken house, barn and outbuildings, the cistern and rainwater trough, the cotton fields, the gourd birdhouses; and then interiors: the porch, the kitchen corner, the washstand and dog-run, the bed. Rural life appears not in archetypical terms but as a lived, material, historically specific condition.

From this perspective, we can begin to complicate the reading of Pagano as a precursor to Neorealist sensibilities, a view advanced by several scholars, notably Manfredo Tafuri in his 1985 essay “Architecture and Realism.”⁠ Early Neorealist films, however, present a markedly different visual language, in the opening scenes of Rossellini’s Roma Città Aperta (1945), for example, stark contrasts, a defined horizon, and formal hierarchy give way to a confusing montage of close-range shots of roofs, corridors, stairwells, a shabby aesthetic in muddied shades of grey; or in the last episode of Paisà (1946) shot in the Po Valley, where Rossellini abandons dramatic angles and sweeping views for a flat, bleak expanse—an architecture and landscape without form or qualities.⁠ The periphery becomes a key vantage point from which to grasp this shift. Compare Mario Sironi’s Outskirts (1922), where abstracted housing blocks rise with the hieratic presence of an Assyrian city, with Renzo Vespignani’s Periphery with Gazometer (1946), whose dense, informal and textural grain capture the unsettled fabric of the postwar city.

But perhaps the sharpest counter-paradigm is offered by Alberto Lattuada’s photographs of Milan in 1938–39, contemporaneous with Pagano’s Il Covo. Then a young architecture graduate, soon to be a renowned filmmaker, Lattuada captured peripheral and marginal moments of the city. The most striking are those of people living in make-shift homes, constructed around the perimeters of abandoned eighteenth-century gasometers between via Tueliè and via Bligny.⁠ Stones prized off the crumbling walls of the gasometer were stacked against the perimeter walls to build shelters. One shot from the gasometer series shows a man crouched near a small cavity that forms the entrance to a structure barely large enough for one person; in another, a man is washing his clothes in a basin amid debris; a woman stands in profile next to a single kitchen ladle hanging from a nook in the self-made stone wall. Later republished under the title “troglodytes in the former gasometer of Milan,” these scenes could not be further from Pagano’s photograph of the cave dwellings of Matera, his celebration of “stones upon stones,” or his anthologies of beach pebbles, marbles and building materials.⁠ Here the subject is not a universal story of human building, but a specific historical condition, most likely wrought by the sventramenti: the large-scale urban clearances that displaced thousands into make-shift settlements, the beginnings, for instance, of Rome’s borgate.

Scholars have often read an affinity between Pagano and Lattuada, as sharing a non-heroic, non-rhetorical gaze, an impression reinforced by their contemporaneous photography of Milan’s Sinigaglia flea market.⁠ Yet their approaches diverge. Amid the crowds and the heaps of discarded parts and second-hand items, Pagano’s eye is drawn to patterns, isolating formal recurrences: rows of bicycle saddles, spiraling coils of metal, dense ranks of packed shoes. Lattuada’s photography, by contrast, even at its most abstract, remains more historically contingent. One sequence shows a garage filled with cars draped in grey sheets and lifted on trestles to preserve their tires while, mysterious and compelling, the huddled, cloaked masses point directly to the fuel shortages gripping the country as it entered the war. In 1941, when Lattuada published Occhio Quadrato [Square Eye], a minimalist booklet of twenty-six square photographs, he was summoned to the Milan police headquarters and asked: “Why is it, Lattuada, that while we are building the E42, the urban renewals, all you see are poor people and peeling walls?”⁠ He got away, replying that his was only a formal study with a small print run.

Under Lattuada’s burgeoning Neorealist gaze, there is no moralizing lesson of “courageous poverty and dignified restraint,” but instead a lot more resignation and an unflinching view of the changes at play. One photograph seems to capture this reversal: a shot by Lattuada frames the gasometer pit, a make-shift shelter within, with the end of the city beyond, petering out into an open countryside dotted by a few chimneystacks. Just on the edge of the frame is a half-completed multi-story building still in scaffolding—less than a stone’s throw from the new Bocconi University complex, whose iconic rationalist cornerstone on Via Sarfatti 25 Pagano designed, and which was inaugurated in 1941.⁠ Everything about this photo speaks to a singular and transitional moment in the city’s rapidly shifting landscape. Here, Neorealism, as it takes its first steps, seems intent on jolting the gaze away from an impossible “beyond,” and back to the here-and-now, to begin disentangling the mythic construction of reality from reality as such.

AUTHOR

Jolanda Devalle is an architect and PhD candidate at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (TPOD lab). Devalle has coedited, with Pier Vittorio Aureli, Theodora Giovanazzi, and Marson Korbi, Order and Disorder: Selected Essays and Interviews by Manfredo Tafuri 1964–1994, (forthcoming, spring 2026). Her ongoing thesis research critically examines how “anthropological turns” have informed modern architectural thought and practice.