Constructing the Dream Villas on Display in Italy in 1933 & 1964

The increasing interest in the concept of the so-called ‘escape’ from the city, fueled by the recent pandemic, puts the holiday villa at the centre of research attention. In the collective imagination, the villa is a manifesto of 'the good life’, often representing for architects a laboratory for stylistic experimentation, as an exception in their portfolio. The fate of the villa in contemporary architecture and research culture reflects its very own position: outside of the ‘urban’ centres of knowledge and critical inquiry, it is still abundantly present as an unexamined source of architectural intelligence, history and ideology. This situation is particularly applicable to Italy, the birthplace of the villa: in histories focusing on Italian post-war architecture, this type of building is strikingly absent despite a revival of this building type in this period. This presentation, focusing on one chapter of a larger thesis, wishes to examine the role that exhibitions and publications, held in Italy between 193X and 196X, had in constructing and reproducing the dream and ideology of holiday villas in Italy. These moments are understood as part of a larger implicit project defined by the author as villa-mania, which saw its peak in the post-war period and which ultimately changed the Italian landscape irreversibly.