Beyond Beauty: Recontextualizing Fascist-Era Architecture and Decoration at the University of Padua's Bo Palace.

This article examines the complex legacy of Fascist-era architecture and decoration at the University of Padua, focusing on the renovations of the historic Bo Palace during the rectorship of Carlo Anti (1932-1943). It situates this “dissonant heritage” within the broader national challenge Italy faces in reckoning with the prominent physical remnants of its totalitarian past. The author provides historical context on the Bo Palace’s layers of construction over centuries, then analyzes key spaces transformed under Anti’s patronage, such as the New Courtyard and the “Basilica” hall, where overt Fascist iconography and propaganda once dominated. While some elements were removed after 1945, much remains unaltered or inadequately contextualized. The article advocates critically preserving and reframing this difficult inheritance through interventions like Jannis Kounellis’ 1995 anti-monument installation. It argues universities have an ethical obligation to disrupt the aestheticizing tendencies that depoliticize these artifacts and instead activate them as catalysts for engaging Italy’s unresolved Fascist legacies. Formalistic celebrations of beauty must give way to strategies that provoke questioning and counternarratives that denaturalize the pervasive rhetoric of this “dissonant heritage.”