The recent Giorgio Morandi exhibition, so artfully installed in the Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, was for many an opportunity, perhaps for the first time, to discover a surprisingly unfamiliar Italy—not the Italy of Roman antiquity, nor the Italy of the Renaissance city-states, not even the Italy of Baroque splendor—cultural landscapes with which an American public is reasonably enough acquainted. With Morandi, instead, we entered a far less well-traveled territory: the Italy dating from the threshold of the twentieth century through the end of the Second World War. It was a period during which, for more than twenty years of Fascist government, the country existed in a self-inflicted isolation willed by a purposeful, nation-obsessed, but fundamentally provincial, regime that is euphemistically referred to as the ventennio (twenty-year span). This, of itself, would have been reason enough for our Anglo-American culture to pay ...

This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchase