Versari’s essay examines three recent books on Italian visual culture, investigating how totalitarian regimes shape individual identity.
Professor Maria Elena Versari recently published Fascist by Design, a comprehensive review essay in the October 2026 issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Examining three recent books on design, visual culture, and Fascism, the essay asks how current scholarship understands the ways totalitarian regimes shape not only political belief but individual identity — how citizens see themselves and position themselves in the world. Versari also takes up a longstanding question in the field: did Fascism derive its power from a monopoly over aesthetics?
To explore this question, Versari brings together and critically evaluates Ignacio G. Galán’s Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy, Ara H. Merjian’s Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde, and Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida’s edited volume Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today. Addressing the tension running through current scholarship and exhibitions, Versari examines “how the act of viewing a show about the history, politics, and art of fascism could simultaneously feel so pleasing and so troubling.”
The Journal of Modern Italian Studies is widely recognized as one of the leading English-language forums for interdisciplinary debate on the political, cultural, and social history of modern Italy.