‘A Home for Everybody?’: Design, Ideology and the Culture of the Home in Italy, 1945–72

Abstract

The concept of the ‘home’ has played a crucial cultural role in postwar Italy. On both a material and on an ideological level, the home has encapsulated a number of the period’s dominant themes, related both to the life-styles of the mass of the Italian population, and to the self-image that the country has projected abroad. Linked to traditional values, in particular that of the family, and yet susceptible also to the pull of ‘modernisation’, the postwar Italian home has served both as an anchor with the past and as a means of demonstrating Italy’s will and ability to become part of the twentieth century. In the period 1945–72, however, the concept of the modern Italian home severed its links with the social idealism that underpinned it in the immediate postwar years and became, complete with its interior components, a subject more for the glossy magazines aimed at international markets than a genuine possibility for the majority of the population.