When the Italian avant-garde artistic movement burst in Milan in 1909, Rome was considered by its members as Italy's most despicable city. Rome represented everything avant-garde artists (the ‘Futurists’) were fighting against: worship of the past cultural tradition, bureaucracy and corruption, cultural laziness, religion and superstition. This city was one of the main targets of the Futurists’ battle for renewing Italy: ‘change Rome in order to change Italy’ was their motto. This challenging attitude towards Italy's dominant culture produced one of the most extraordinary seasons of Italian art, which some critics have even addressed as a ‘second Renaissance’.

My project at the British School at Rome studied this very relationship between the avant-garde movement and Rome from 1910 to 1940, focusing in particular on how avant-garde artists represented the city in their works and writings. Through concentrating on journal articles, creative texts and visual arts, I was able to trace how this representation evolved throughout these three decades, which were crucial for the formation of modern Italy, as they witnessed key events such as, amongst others, the Great War and the rise of Fascism. This research will constitute the first chapter of a monograph I am preparing on avant-garde culture and urban space in Italy. In Rome I examined the full run of four avant-garde journals of the time (Cronache d'Attualità, Roma Futurista, Noi and Dinamo, kept at the Biblioteca Casanatense, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Biblioteca di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte, and Fondazione Echaurren-Salaris), and studied Futurist artworks in a number of Roman museums, including the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, the Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale and the Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Roma. It has emerged that until 1918 Futurists represented Rome as Italy's most rotten city, using a harsh and provocative language; from the war years, however, they also started to transform Rome's cultural fibre through their artistic and political activity. From 1916, for example, artists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero started decorating Rome's theatres, galleries and bars with Futurist motifs, thus actively modifying the city's spaces. Interestingly, this activity involved also the Terme Grimane (second-century ad), discovered in 1922 in via degli Avignonesi during the refurbishment of the basement of the Futurist ‘Teatro degli Indipendenti’: for this part of my research, the expertise and advice of the BSR archaeologists were crucial.

The very relationship between the Roman avant-garde and early Roman Fascism was another emerging point of my research. I could observe how in the post-war years Futurists turned to a milder representation of Rome: language became less provocative, artworks less obscure. I interpret this sudden change as a political move performed by the movement's leaders to gather a wider supporter basis for their forthcoming attempt, in 1919, to enter the Italian political scene alongside Fascists. In 1919 Roma Futurista regularly hosted a column dedicated to the Roman section of the Fasci, from which it appears that in that year the Roman Fascio shared the same avant-garde battles as the Futurists. The Fascio became much more reactionary only from 1920, when Futurists and Fascist stopped collaborating. From 1925 Futurists were then absorbed into the Fascist cultural programme, to the extent that until the late 1930s they formed substantial sections of the regime's art exhibitions.

I have already started similar research on other Italian cities, including Milan, Naples, Florence and Venice, in order to draw a comparative map of the relationships between the avant-garde and Italian urban spaces. This monograph will represent a major contribution to the study of modern Italian culture.