Remapping the Rural: The Ideological Geographies of Strapaese

Abstract

In 1929 the Italian critic and caricaturist Mino Maccari published a characteristically polemical woodcut in his journal II Selvaggio (“The wild one”)—the mouthpiece of the fascist cultural movement of Strapaese (“super-country”). Here, Maccari pictures an imagined landscape in which (super)city and (super)country are diametrically opposed, separated by a purgatorial river in which—according to the accompanying caption—the undecided drift aimlessly in leaking boats (Figure 10.1).¹ The super-city, this caption tells us, is defined by child-unfriendly Rationalist architecture and its cosmopolitan intellectual inhabitants: F. T. Marinetti dressed in the attire of the Royal Academy of Italy, and the monocled critic Ugo Ojetti catching a ride with the beret-wearing writer Massimo Bontempelli.² By contrast, the caption tells us, the super-country is populated by pregnant women and playing children, surrounded by a hilly, tree-rich landscape. The focal point of this clash of geographies and cultures is the collision between Bontempelli’s Fiat 509 and an oak tree, perhaps an ironic reference to the crash described by Maccari’s eyewitness Marinetti 20 years earlier in his “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”.³ In a reversal of Marinetti’s regenerative collision, which inaugurates the Futurist rejection of the past and celebration of the machine, Maccari casts the symbol of organic longevity as victor over contemporary automotive technology.