_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’

_____________________________________________________

The name Ghibli is most commonly associated with Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ), the Japanese animation studio whose legacy has been manipulated by AI’s “Ghibli-style” imagery. The machine-generated drawings—created with a typewritten prompt and a single click—sharply contrast the studio’s hand-drawn films that unfold profound life-lessons. In the documentary “The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness” (2013), co-founder Hayao Miyazaki discusses the studio’s formation in the 1980s, casually recalling, “Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane.” But names, especially those that travel, rarely arrive in new places without being redefined.

In Libya, ‘ghibli’ (غبلي) is known as a “sandstorm” or a “desert wind blowing from the south.” Across some parts of the Sahara, ‘ghibli’ also refers to the “wind coming from Mecca,” deriving from the classical Arabic word ‘qibla’ (قبلة), meaning “direction.” By the late 1930s, ‘ghibli’ was Latinized—rather, Italianized—when the name was affixed to a military aircraft engineered by Gianni Caproni. The Caproni 'Ca. 309' Ghibli, according to Italy’s aeronautical military archives, was a “reconnaissance and liaison” aircraft utilized in Italy’s “North African colonies.” A word once referring to a natural atmospheric phenomenon was appropriated and attached to an instrument of war, transforming wind into steel and returning its name as a weaponized gust. Was Studio Ghibli’s title drawn from the wind itself, or from the machine that carried its name?

Fig. 1 – Propeller-shaped monument honoring aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni, Arco, Italy

Fig. 2 – Garda Mountains and the Sarco River in Arco, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

 

Fig. 3 – Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare (c. 1938-41), Milan, Italy

Fig. 4 – Scene transition featuring the characters of Gianni Caproni and Jiro Horikoshi, ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013) by Ghibli Studio

I visited the monument honoring Caproni as a ‘Pioniere dell’Aeronautica’ in Arco (Fig. 1) while cycling along the paved path in the northern region of Trentino. The scenery unfolded beneath Ghibli-like clouds as I passed through the towering Garda Mountains (Fig. 2). It is easy to see how this breathtaking landscape inspired dreams of flight, especially for Caproni, who came from the region and later tested countless ambitious projects, such as a 100-passenger boat airliner. In reality, Caproni’s company significantly contributed to Italy’s Royal Air Force during military campaigns in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Libya, including across the Adriatic and Aegean Seas a century ago. As an architecture student at Politecnico di Milano, I had never considered the histories behind the marble façades and rationalist forms I passed by bike around Città Studi, like the Palazzo dell'Aeronautica Militare built in 1938 (Fig. 3). I overlooked the symbolism on the facade: the gladius sword, the propellers over the “M,” and a helmet resembling that from ‘Gladiator.’ The “Romanità” on the façade—so proudly displayed—escapes one’s notice just as everyday traffic insulates the hidden memory of Piazzale Loreto.

Studio Ghibli predominantly recasts Caproni as a reflective and visionary character in the animated film ‘The Wind Rises’ (2013). The first fictional encounter appears in the dreams of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi when Caproni leaps from a moving plane bearing the tricolor flag and lands beside a young Horikoshi as aircraft fly overhead. “Look at them,” Caproni says. “They will bomb the enemy city. Most of them won’t return. But the war will soon be over.” From a scene of destruction, the dream shifts to a passenger plane gliding past rolling hills beneath Ghibli’s iconic clouds. “This is my dream. When the war is over, I will build this,” Caproni declares. Inside, elegant curves and brightly upholstered seats furnish the interior (Fig. 4). “Magnificent, isn’t she?... Instead of bombs, she’ll carry passengers.” Caproni’s practice—designing machines for both war and transit—reveals how design moved between industrial cultures and civic life, often in tandem with the Italian Futurist movement.

Caproni’s practice most definitely shaped innovation in civic mobility post-WWI, which also echoes post-WWII innovations like Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s Arlecchino train (c. 1950s). At this year’s Salone del Mobile, the Arlecchino became the backdrop for the Prada Frames 2025 symposium at Milan’s Central Station. As curator Formafantasma noted, the train’s “exterior was informed by naval aerodynamics,” reflecting Italian design culture from fascist-era modernism and rationalism. The symposium also took place in the station’s Padiglione Reale, once reserved for royalty and fascist officials. Under the theme In Transit, it addressed “the complex relationship between ecology and design,” echoing the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale’s call for “decolonization and decarbonization.”

In practice, these venues' grandeur risked turning environmentalism into spectacle, overshadowing the ecological and historical ties within the architecture's legacy. From Venice to Milan, I looked for genuine and reparative involvement of Eritrean, Ethiopian, Somali, Libyan, Albanian, and other communities whose bodies and lands were exploited to forge Italy’s so-called “impero moderno.” Discourses advanced, yet exceptionalism merely shifted, as I saw ‘names’ performing reflection for an international stage. “Why are truly low-carbon, locally rooted practices—and the ethical inclusion of those whose histories are tied to these very structures—still so often absent in Italy?” It is a question that must be written and rewritten, not for lack of answers, but because making it clear demands so much that even the sharpest pencil dulls, worn down by the weight of explanation itself.

Passing through Milano Centrale in transit to Verona, I began to notice details I had once overlooked. Beneath the station’s vaulted ceiling, the Capitoline wolf appeared perfectly framed into the waiting hall (Fig. 5). On the platform, steel columns bore fasces with the inscription “CONSTRVI ANNO IX F.F.,” or “built in the ninth year of the Fascist Era,” i.e., 1931 (Fig. 6). These symbols, embedded into the station’s very fabric, reveals how fascism inscribed itself onto infrastructure, transforming transit into a quiet extension of state power.

Fig. 5 – Capitoline wolf seen in the waiting hall from platforms, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 6 – Detail of steel column on the train platform, Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Fig. 7 – Section of commemorative wall ‘Binario 21,’ eastern side of Stazione Milano Centrale, Italy

Even today, amidst the rush of arrivals and departures, the eastern walls of ‘Binario 21’ retain juxtaposing traces: one plaque acknowledges the station’s role, Fascist-Italy’s complicity, as a transit point for Nazi-Germany’s Holocaust, while another, just to the left of the art-deco’d “gladius” sword—commemorates railway workers who served from “1940–1945” in the Italian–Ethiopian “war” (Fig. 7). But an Italo-Ethiopian, who may be commuting to Genova, passing by this wall might ask: “What of the years 1935–36? Did they forget chemical gas was weaponized in our mountains, against our peoples, like in the Cave of Zeret?” Stones and inscriptions, even when placed side by side, expose not only the ongoing colonial absences but also the Eurocentric ambiguities that persist in public space regarding national history “d’oltremare” or “overseas.”

In April, reminders of the Partigiani’s (partisan) “resistance” and “liberation” from Benito Mussolini’s fascist state, the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), were unavoidable. While in Verona, intending to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Castelvecchio, I encountered an exhibition about the 80th anniversary of the “Liberation from Nazi-Fascism (1943–1945).” The first exhibit space was a dark room screening 1938 film clips projected beside a white bust of Mussolini. The space carried a haunting stillness. Yet what unsettled me most was not this atmosphere—so familiar from archival encounters—but the curatorial decision to include works by Italian Futurist Renato di Bosso (Renato Righetti), despite his career being steeped in aeronautical and military-oriented productions.

Fig. 8 –  Renato di Bosso aeropaintings featured in exhibit at Museo Castelvecchio, Verona, Italy

Fig. 9 – Italian futurist aeropainting depicting Italian colonial village in Libya, “Renato Di Bosso (Renato Righetti), In volo sul villaggio coloniale "M. Bianchi", 1938, oil on masonite, cm 89,5 x 100, Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura, Genova, 87.1070.5.1” (Source: courtesy of the Wolfsoniana Foundation, 2025)

The three “aeropaintings” on display in the main exhibit space (Fig. 8) reflected the dynamism of second-generation Italian Futurists. I immediately recognized Di Bosso’s work, already familiar with his “In volo sul villaggio coloniale ‘M. Bianchi’” (“Flying over the colonial village ‘M. Bianchi’”), recently exhibited at the Wolfsoniana Foundation in Liguria (Fig. 9). Though the painting does not explicitly name Libya or North Africa, the double-exposure of the built subject closely resembled one of the many standardized agricultural settlements constructed in Italy’s occupied territories. The painting, without a doubt, depicts the Tripolitanian rural center in Libya called ‘Villaggio Bianchi,’ designed by Umberto di Segni and named after Michele Bianchi, a founding member of the Fascist Party.

It is no coincidence that the painting was produced in 1938, the same year 20,000 Italians—known as the Ventimila—“immigrated” to standardized settlements along Libya’s coastline. This state-settlement program, under the Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia with the INFPS, was certainly overseen by aviator-turned-governor Italo Balbo (famous for his transatlantic flight to Chicago, noted in my first SAH report). To de-mystify sanitized memories of Nazi–Fascist entanglements—generically remembered in April—it is worth recalling that Balbo hosted Nazi-German officials in Libya during the 1930s, some of whom were tried at Nuremberg. Some scholars suggest Nazi officials observed Fascist Italy’s racial and colonial policies of “ethnic reconstruction” and “demographic colonization.” However, it may have been all but normal, highly planned state-sponsored visits that involve nothing but incredulously staged parades, many of which remain archived by Luce. Nostalgic formalism—the whitewashed rural centers and farmhouses still described as “modern” or even “metaphysical”—ultimately fetishizes what were, at their core, standardized design packages built to serve Fascist Italy’s agenda overseas.

Fig. 10 – Ex-cinema Astra facade, Verona, Italy

Fig. 11 – ‘Via Adua’ street elevation, Verona, Italy

Fig. 12 – ‘Via Bengasi’ intersection, Verona, Italy 

Fig. 13 – ‘Farmacia dell Cirenaica,’ Cyrenaica neighborhood in Bologna, Italy

Passing a former Cinema Astra (Fig. 10), I reflected on the persistence of rationalism across cities. At times, it signaled civic prominence; at others, decay. Yet it almost always reverberated the ideological legacies of fascism, where colonized places from Italy’s overseas campaigns resurfaced, their language reshaped to fit Italian speech in the streets. The phonetic flattening of ‘Via Adua’ (Fig. 11) shown in the work of Italo-Ethiopian Eritrean artist Jermay Michael Gabriel, ‘Via Adwa’ (2023), confronts this translation directly, crossing out the ‘u’ on the Carrara marble and marking the missing ‘w’ in black ink to restore its name.

I not only walked past ‘Via Adua’ in Verona, but cycled past the central station and through an industrial zone where I came upon ‘Via Bengasi’ (Fig.12). The setting felt remote, despite residences in the vicinity, and was disconnected from the city center, characterized by neglected buildings, patched walls, and overgrown vegetation. It reminded me of the enclave I had walked through in Turin. The second street sign, engraved in stone and mounted on a fence, was sub-labeled ‘Città d’Africa.’ These names—once markers of imperial claim—remain etched.

Unlike Verona and many cities where colonial-era street names remain intact, Bologna has uniquely addressed its colonial “inheritance,” acknowledged by collectives like Resistenza in Cirenaica. In the neighborhood of ‘Cirenaica,’ streets once named after Libyan cities—Tripoli, Derna, Bengasi, Homs, Zuara, Cirene—were renamed. They now have dual signs, pairing colonial names with Italian partisans’ names who resisted ‘Nazi-Fascism.’ For example, ‘Via Derna’ is now ‘Via Santa Vincenza: Caduto per la liberazione’ (Fallen for the Liberation). ‘Via Libia’ is the only sign unchanged and has remained since the 1920s, when workers settled in an enclave of the ‘old’ historic city center. Colonial names still surfaced in local businesses, including ‘Farmacia della Cirenaica’ (Fig. 13) and the ‘Mercato Cirenaica.’

Fig. 14 – Drawing by conscripted Eritrean Ascaro in Libya, Gariesus Gabriet’s “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo, 1920-30s,” April 1928, Museo della Civiltà, Rome, Italy

Fig. 15 – ‘Libia’ Metro, Rome, Italy

Fig. 16 – Street signage of clustered former colonial territories, Rome, Italy

In Rome, I encountered objects in the former ‘Museo Coloniale,’ now the ‘Museo della Civiltà.’ Among the displayed upon my visit, a 1928 drawing by an Eritrean ascaro Gariesus Gabriet, “Conquest of the Oasis of Gialo,” stood out  (Fig. 14). Riding the metro from the stone utopia of EUR to the 'Stazione Libia' neighborhood (Fig. 15), the drawing from the museum remained in mind as I walked along the streets scripted with “African” names—Viale Etiopia, Piazza Gondar, Via Libia, Via Eritrea (Fig. 16). The origin of Gabriet’s illustration is unclear—perhaps it was commissioned or solely to be collected and catalogued for the museum—but its display underscores how imperial gaze acted beyond conscription. Walking through housing blocks from the 1920s and ‘30s, threaded with familiar names, reveals how the rhythms of life soften the colonial weight inherited by the neighborhood.

Fig. 17 – Printed photograph of the typical lungomare balustrade, Darsena Toscana, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 18 – Fontana dei Mostri Marini by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Colonnella, Livorno, Italy

Fig. 19 – Monument of Ferdinand I de’ Medici, ‘Quattro Mori’ by Pietro Tacca, Piazza Michele, Livorno, Italy

Fascist-era constructions overlay earlier buildings of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in Livorno. I was drawn in by the rational forms rising across the street from walking along the Darsena Toscana (Fig. 17). Along Via Grande towards the sea, market stands filled the openings to the covered walkways, demonstrating how rational facades became seamlessly integrated and juxtaposed. A replica of Pietro Tacca’s ‘Fontana dei Mostri Marini,’ the original of which is located in Florence (Fig. 18), is situated near another work by Tacca at Piazzale Micheli. Tacca’s ‘Four Moors’ (Fig. 19) was installed on a monument dedicated to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the seventeenth century. A man, carved from Carrara marble, stands tall over four men in bronze, crouched and chained at the corners of a rectangular pedestal. A sign near the ‘4 Moor’ café describes the “moors” as “pirates mainly from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire.” The monument’s material contrasts and its composition of elevation and restraint render the disparity it represents unmistakable: a visual language of subjugation, incarceration, and hierarchies of race. I watched families and tourists pause to take photographs with the monument in the background, their casual gestures softening the edges of the scene behind them. To describe oneself as Italo-Arab or Italo-African—“African” long steeped in ongoing racial stereotypes—means, inescapably, feeling the weight this monument still pressing into the present, even as others dismiss it with a casual, ‘Ma questa è la storia della città?’