La représentation de l'identité sicilienne à l'époque fasciste, des bâtiments publics aux villages ruraux

In Sicily, the walls of many public buildings built in the interwar period house scenes related to official events – historical milestones for the fascist government, such as the March on Rome or the creation of the Empire, and episodes referring to the “micro-history” of the island, such as the visits of Mussolini – or which depiction realistic characters evoking the local population in their context. These murals show the dichotomy of “central power/local technocracy”, which affects the representation of local contexts, ideally placed within the national framework or, on the contrary, far removed from city centres and immersed in remote countryside. The link between the representation of the Sicilian people and the fascist ideology is expressed in images that link the figure of Mussolini to that of the crowd of peasants, fishermen, women with children or hierarchs: this is the case with the pictorial cycle by Duilio Cambellotti or the mosaic by Michele Cascella. The first decorates the official halls of the Palace of the Prefecture of Ragusa, while the mosaic decoration decorates the embarkation hall of the Messina maritime station, destined for the passage of many Sicilians: leaving their native land and embarking for “the mainland”, perhaps the departors should have identified themselves in this representation, while passengers arriving in Messina could have seen it as a synthesis of Sicilian identity. Fascist symbols, on the other hand, seem to disappear in the decorative works of the new villages created by the colonization of the Sicilian latifundium. In fact, they are not present in the pictorial decorations of Borgo Fazio, Borgo Rizza or Borgo Bonsignore, painted by Alfonso Amorelli. The aim of these pictorial decorations is to build a collective identity, based on the daily work that would have united the new inhabitants – represented in the middle of the fields or converging towards the central square, the only place of association – and not on the official ideology of the central places of power. The intervention aims to reconstruct these cases briefly in order to understand their peculiarities and impact on local society at the time, while also clarifying the current reception and the different conservation states works of art, hidden for several years or almost abandoned.