An exhibition of photos by the celebrated Hungarian-American war photographer Robert Capa at the Villa Mussolini in Riccione, near Rimini, has sparked controversy, with critics arguing that the former summer residence of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is an inappropriate venue for the show.
Born in Budapest to a Jewish family in 1913, Capa documented 20th-century conflicts including the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, gaining fame for his photos of the D-Day landings and the allied invasion of Sicily. By the time of his death in 1954, when Capa stepped on a landmine in Thái Bình province in former French Indochina, now Vietnam, he had become known as one of the greatest combat photographers in history.
The exhibition, Robert Capa: Retrospective, which opened in November (until 1 April), includes more than 100 black-and-white photos by Capa provided by Magnum Photos, the photographic co-operative he co-founded in 1947. Thirteen thematic sections dedicated to Capa’s work and life are distributed across all three floors of the villa, from which Mussolini once conducted government business during the summer months, arriving from Rome on a seaplane.
The exhibition, which is promoted by the municipality of Riccione and was organised by Civita Mostre e Musei, aims to promote Capa’s legacy in Italy, where the photographer is little known, Roberto Mutti, a photography critic who has conducted tours of the show, tells The Art Newspaper.
After Rachele Guidi, Mussolini’s wife, bought the 19th-century villa in 1934, the couple and their five children spent their summers there until July 1943, when the fascist regime fell as allied forces swept through Italy. By that time, the dictator had already excluded Jewish people from most professions, seized and liquidated their property and prohibited sexual relations and marriages between Jewish people and gentiles.
Roberto Matatia, a regional councillor for the town of Faenza, near Ravenna, who is from a Jewish family, suggested that the exhibition could have been organised at the Palazzo del Turismo—a large, fascist-era exhibition space in the town—rather than the Villa Mussolini. “Organising the exhibition in a place that bears the name of Mussolini is a bit strange, a bit disconcerting,” he says.
Much of the controversy has centred on the villa’s current name. Originally known as the Villa Margherita, the residence became state property after the war and was bought by the Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini bank in 1997, which entrusted the property to the municipality of Riccione. After a major renovation, the villa was reopened by left-wing councillors as a venue for exhibitions and events with the new name Villa Mussolini. A number of political groups and local associations have since called for the property’s original name to be reinstated.
‘Who knows what Capa would have thought?’
Writing on Facebook, Valter Vecellio, a former deputy news editor for the Rai 2 television channel, said that organising an exhibition of works by the “anti-totalitarian” Capa in a “place that bears the name of Il Duce [Mussolini’s nickname]” was “paradoxical”. Alessandro Fulloni, a reporter for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, asked in a separate Facebook post: “who knows what Capa, a Jew and anti-fascist, would have thought of that exhibition”.
The villa was Mussolini’s summer home until 1943, and became a venue for exhibitions in 2005
Photo: Matrixmorbidoso
Matatia said that his own family history made the question of the villa’s name especially sensitive. Nissim Matatia, Roberto’s uncle, a Turkish furrier who had emigrated to Italy in the early 20th-century, bought land near the Villa Margherita in 1930, building a house in which he later lived as neighbours of the Mussolinis. Nissim Matatia, his wife and three children were deported to Auschwitz between 1943 and 1944, Roberto Matatia says. None of them survived.
The municipality of Riccione did not respond to The Art Newspaper’s requests for interview or comment. However, Roberto Mutti claimed that the spacious villa was an ideal location for the exhibition because its three floors allowed for the show’s thematic sections to be easily distributed. “The name of the villa is a bit embarrassing,” Mutti conceded. “Certainly, if it had been called the Centre for Photography there might have been less controversy.”