Giuseppe Pagano

Design for Social Change in Fascist Italy

Flavia Marcello

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789381016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

Giuseppe Pagano-Pogatschnig (1896–1945) was a twentieth-century polymath operating at the intersection between architecture, media, design and the arts. He was an exhibition and furniture designer, curator, photographer, editor, writer and architect. A dedicated Fascist turned Resistance fighter, he was active in Italy's most dramatic social and political era.

Giuseppe Pagano provides a comprehensive overview of the influential architect and his contribution to the development of modern architecture. It follows a central biographical line with in-depth, mini chapter contributions on aspects of Pagano's cultural production, concluding with writings by Pagano himself and a critical bibliography to aid scholars in further study.

Chapter 1: Pagano the Young Man: The Formation of an Idealist from Poreč to Turin (1896–1926)

I have barbarian blood in my veins and I am totalitarian: I want you with me all the way even through all our defeats. After all, I am not scared of sacrifice nor of hunger. And I am 100 per cent Italian, with all my passions, all my loves and all my hates.¹²

POREČ–TRIESTE AUGUST 1896 – SEPTEMBER 1909: EARLY CHILDHOOD AND TEENAGE YEARS

The story of Pagano began in the small seaside town of Poreč in Croatia where a small boy and his father wandered along its windy medieval streets (Figure 1.1). The boy is called Giuseppe (but everyone calls him Bepi), his father is Antonio Pogačnik, his mother is Giovanna Cernivani and he has two brothers: Antonio junior (the eldest) and little Biagio (known as Zanetto). Giuseppe Pogàcˇnicˇ would grow up to become the architect Giuseppe Pagano. Antonio senior was an archaeologist working for Istria’s autonomous regional council and a founding member of their clandestine Italian Nationalist Party. Poreč (Parenzo) is on the Istrian peninsula, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Pogàcˇnicˇ family belonged to an educated middle class tied to Romantic notions of Italian-ness and politically devoted to the nationalist agenda of Italy’s unification movement: the Risorgimento. In a 1943 testimonial Pagano wrote: ‘Born in Istria from a family of steadfast Italian tradition, I was educated within the most resolute irredentista spirit of Trieste. My father […] was a perfect and continual model of the Italian cause’.¹³ Irredentism was a movement to reclaim predominantly Italian cities and make them part of the Italian State.¹⁴ It evoked the idea of the patria (fatherland) as organic and indissoluble, it was tinged with ideas of history and destiny and combined the ideal with the pragmatic.¹⁵

Pagano spent his childhood summers on the beach and went to the local elementary school where he learnt German and about Austrian history in Croatian. At home his mother prepared Italian food and his father recounted stories about Italian patriotism and the town’s Roman temples, medieval churches, Renaissance towers and Venetian palazzi. Italian culture and education are held in the highest esteem in the Pog.àčnič household and his parents did everything possible to give him an Italian humanities-based education, even if it meant sending him away from home.¹⁶

Pagano continued his secondary studies at the Dante Alighieri Lyceum in Trieste, Antonio’s alma mater (Figure 1.2). Trieste’s ruling and intellectual classes all sent their boys there; it had produced its most illustrious citizens: doctors, lawyers, engineers and our architect. The Pogačniks were friends of the Stuparič family who sometimes spent their summers in Parenzo. They agreed to take the 13-year-old Pagano into their home and send him to school with their two sons Carlo and Giani, who were a few years older. Although big on prestige and severe in discipline, the Dante Alighieri was (and still is) a modest nineteenth-century building in the centre of Trieste. Arriving from Parenzo, we can imagine Pagano walking up its marble steps and coming face to face with a bust of the great poet, greeting its formidable headmaster Cesare Cristofolini who would stand looking down at them with severity from the balustrade of the first floor and looking up its tall atrium surrounded by Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns. What was (and still is) a Classical education meant a solid grounding in Latin and Greek, a focus on history, philosophy and literature and the basics of maths and science. In the case of Trieste in the early twentieth century, a classical education was not just about being versed in the humanities – it formed a spiritual union with the Fatherland. It was about steeping its boys in ‘the ideals of that culture and civilization that had made Italy great in the eyes of the world […]’.¹⁷ It was that same flame fanned by the Risorgimento movement that had, in a sense, ‘failed’ the Italians of Trieste and Istria who had not yet joined the nation. Pagano now lived in the outpost for the defence of Italian-ness throughout the Istrian peninsula, he was immersed in a much more intense and active environment of nationalist sentiment than his small home town. Trieste was, and still is, a city of hybrid identities on the border of two countries – though it feels and looks Italian it is not unusual to overhear conversations in Croatian or Slovenian on the bus.¹⁸ With that in mind we can see why Pagano fit in so well, his teachers described him as a serious boy with a strong interest in writing and literature¹⁹ and we see how he put it all to good use in his many writings for the architecture journal Casabella that he would later direct. The city’s pre-war cosmopolitanism would continue to exert its influence on Pagano as an architect.²⁰ Writing later in 1935 he praised Trieste’s architecture for having three main characteristics that just happened to match his own beliefs. It has a unitary quality with an honest and concise take on neo-Classicism, it is highly technical and designed according to function and respect the use of local materials.²¹

Figure 1.1 // Pagano’s home town of Poreč (Parenzo), 2017. Top row: Entry to Euphrasian Basilica and view from its bell tower. Bottom row: Bas-relief of the Lion of St. Mark, Renaissance tower and Temple of Neptune. Photographs by author.

Figure 1.2 // The Dante Alighieri Lyceum, Trieste, 2017. Photographs by author.

Pagano may not have seen much of his family after moving to Trieste but he would have still spent Easter and Christmas holidays with them and of course three full months of summer enjoying the sun and the beaches. As he matured, he was particularly inspired by his philosophy and Italian teacher Ferdinando Pasini who made no effort to hide his intense patriotism, anti-Austrian sentiment and avant garde views. Pasini became a sort of father figure to young Pagano and when Pasini later volunteered in World War I and joined the Fascist movement thanks to his nationalist connections, the teacher’s influence on his young student was clear.²²

How did the outbreak of World War I affect nationalist sentiment in Trieste? Who knows what the teenage Pagano felt when the bodies of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie von Hohenberg were carried through the city streets on their way from Sarajevo to Vienna? We do know that a possible state of war between Italy and Austria transformed the romantic cultural ties that Italian Triestini may have had to their homeland into a desire for political action.²³ Socialists, left-wing liberals, republicans, Christian democrats, nationalists, conservatives – no party could agree whether Italy should enter the war. Its people and its politicians fell into three broad groups. The pacifists, mostly socialists and catholics, that wanted to remain neutral while the interventionists, mostly imperialists, nationalists and splinter socialist groups, and the Irredentists, mainly intellectual nationalists and Italians living outside the national borders, who wanted to go to war. For Irredentists, World War I would allow them all to belong to a single nation. Italy did eventually go to war but not with its original allies, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Prime Minister Antonio Salandra signed the Treaty of London, a deal with the Triple Entente to declare war on Austria in exchange for the unredeemed lands as spoils of victory.

Figure 1.3 // Map of Pagano’s World War I adventures. Drawing by Ben Chaves & Jayden Ryles-Smith.

The decision to go to war after ten months of neutrality was imposed by a governing elite to legitimize popularist sentiments for intervention being whipped up in the piazze (town squares) by the young socialist journalist Benito Mussolini and the nationalist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. By entering what was thought to be a quick and decisive war, Italy was convinced it would revive industry, marginalize traditional socialism, remove itself from the sphere of Austrian influence and become a great power like Britain and France. These outcomes were achieved but, as it turns out, not by the government of the time – but by a government led by that young socialist journalist mentioned above. The majority of Italians felt they were going to war for the sake of the terre irredente (lost territories) and did not identify with, nor believe in a war to crown nationalist ambition. It was a war for signori (the upper classes) like the Pogačnik family and usually from the North, not for peasant conscripts, that were usually from the South and who were more bound to the actual earth they tilled and thought little about land as spiritual ideal.²⁴ Pagano, and many others like him – including his father, volunteered so they could convert the nationalist sentiments they had been brought up on into action. Pagano was an individualist whose primordial sense of ethnic identity underpinned the values of an Italian state he longed to be part of.²⁵

PAGANO THE SOLDIER AND THE ‘ADVENTURE’ OF WORLD WAR I

When the war broke out between Austria and Serbia in July 1914, Pagano was still a month shy of his 18th birthday and as a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he would have had to fight on the side of Austria. In his heart and mind he knew that, when Italy would enter the war, he needed to fight for his true homeland (Figure 1.4). The news came on 23 May 1915: Italy had declared war on Austria, the very next day he enrolled as a volunteer in the Italian army. He chose a new name, an identifiably Italian one: Pagano. Now he could express his nationalist sentiment with a name that matched his internal identity and he could blend in better with his ‘real’ compatriots. So why Pagano? Literally translated it means ‘pagan’, but he may have chosen it to honour the Risorgimento hero Mario Pagano, or it may have been a simple Italianization of Pogàcˇnik.²⁶ It was a name with the advantage of many resonances.

Just three months after joining up, Pagano’s leadership skills became apparent and he was made sub-lieutenant of the 53rd Infantry, he was thrilled to be finally on the front and part of the violent battles in the no-man’s lands of the Dolomites on the Austro-Italian border. Its motto, ‘Sento in cuor l’antica Patria’ – ‘I feel the ancient fatherland in my heart’ was entirely appropriate for a young man who felt it there from a very young age.²⁷ Pagano was amongst scores of very young soldiers fighting at Cima Lavaredo and Monte Piana during the summer of 1915 in the fourth Battle of the Isonzo.²⁸ Pagano was twice wounded earning him a bronze medal for bravery (Figure 1.3).

Once recovered from his wounds Pagano asked to be part of the 1st Battalion of the 58th Infantry who were about to go to Gorizia, where Italian troops were holding the main front along the banks of the Isonzo River. Their mission: to expand the Gorizia corridor in order to take Trieste – his adopted home town. Victory was seemingly in their sights and in the days following they attacked once more along the Carso advancing towards Mount Hermada when they were stopped by Austrian counter-attacks on 6–8 June. Pagano was amongst 157,000 men killed, captured or wounded.²⁹ On the long march from Gorizia to Ljubjiana military jail, he was allowed one last view of his unredeemed city from the edge of the Carso where his heart was filled with emotion at the sight of its white houses, still and lifeless as if kneeling on the edge of the sea in a long, silent semi-circle. It was the dead city anxiously pushed out along the blue plate of the Adriatic with no plumes of smoke and no sails. A shroud of Asiatic sleepiness weighed on the whiteness of that city that had been smacked by the sun and by its destiny.³⁰

Figure 1.4 // Gabriele d’Annunzio (centre) with some legionaries (components of the Arditi department of the Italian Royal Army) in Fiume, 1919. Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57161886.

It was 1st June 1917 and Pagano had just spent what would be his last night on the frontlines for some time. The atmosphere was dark, tired, opaque, lifeless as his boots squelched though a gelatinous sludge of reddish mud towards the Austrian trenches surrounded by tangles of barbed wire. With a surge of faith in his own good fortune he irrupted into a den of Austrians and flung himself into hand-to-hand combat.³¹ Only the certainty of being hanged as a traitor gave him both the serenity and the cunning to pass himself off as an Italian. The next day he was taken prisoner in Ljubjiana’s fifteenth-century castle and subjected to horrifying ordeals. He found camaraderie amongst his fellow Italian who knew that he was actually an Austro-Hungarian citizen but they liked him too much to betray him.

On the 16th, Pagano was sent along with a group of other officers to Terezín (Theresienstadt) in what was then Bohemia. The fortress town, built in the eighteenth century to protect Prague from possible Prussian attacks had two fortresses – the large one was known for its use by the Nazis as a concentration camp, the smaller one had been a prison since the nineteenth century and was used during World War I for political and military prisoners like the assassin of Archduke Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip. In October, Pagano heard of the famous defeat of Caporetto, the disastrous battle that sounded the death knell for the Italian campaign to capture land around the Carnic Alps above Udine. Rather than making him give up hope, it spurred a desire to get back into the fray and in the Spring of 1918 he planned the first of wha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Frontispiece
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: A Rebel with a Cause
• Chapter 1: Pagano the Young Man: The Formation of an Idealist from Poreč to Turin (1896–1926)
• Chapter 2: Pagano the Architect: Architecture as a Force for Social Change (1927–1941)
• Chapter 3: Pagano the Writer: The Voice for an Alternative Modernism (1930–1943)
• Chapter 4: Pagano the Exhibition Designer: Art in the Service of an Idea (1928–1940)
• Chapter 5: Pagano the Photographer: Snapshots of the Real Italy (1935–1943)
• Chapter 6: Pagano The Fighter: The Life and Death of a Partisan From Milan to Mauthausen (January 1941–April 1945)
• Chapter 7: Giuseppe Pagano, Polemical Photographer
• Chapter 8: Elemental Housing: Giuseppe Pagano’s Neorealist Ethos
• Building Information Sheets
• Anthology of Writings
• List of Illustrations
• References
• Filmography
• Endnotes
• Index