What's wrong with the Rural House? Fascism and Myth in the Photography of Giuseppe Pagano

In 1939, Giuseppe Pagano, leading figure of Italian Rationalism, took a dozen photographs of Mussolini’s former editorial office, known as “Il Covo” or “the lair.” The sequence offers a compelling and unexpected lens through which to reconsider Pagano’s long-celebrated "Exhibition on Rural Architecture,” held at the 1936 Milan Triennale, and praised in historiography as an “anthropological inquiry”—a paradigm shift away from style and received canons in search for truth in the humble, everyday rural environments. Yet, when read alongside his portrayal of Mussolini’s lair, Pagano’s rural images appear far more ambivalent— a visual mode, as Devalle suggests, that combines equal parts realism and myth, whose tendency toward abstraction erases contingencies and class struggles to produced archetypical forms and gestures. This reading complicated the dominant historiography on Pagano’s photography, especially his status as precursor to Neorealist sensibilities, and situates Pagano’s visual practice within recent philosophical reflections on fascism’s capacity to transfigure “reality” through myth.