Elephant & Castle

In the Sign of Continuity: rotogravures and illustrated magazines in post-World War II Italy (1945-1957)

Dario Boemia — 2025-07-21

Between 1945 and 1957, illustrated magazines became essential cultural tools in postwar Italy, navigating the tension between innovation and continuity with the fascist past. Periodicals emerged as visual and narrative laboratories, where text and image worked together to shape a new collective identity. Through periodical studies and interdisciplinary perspectives, the special issue explores changes in content, format, and language. Publications like Epoca, Tempo, Il Borghese, Grand Hôtel, and Civiltà delle macchine reflect the dynamic interplay between graphic tradition, modern aspirations, and shifting social contexts. Amid cultural revival, political reconciliation, and the resurfacing of national memory, illustrated magazines became privileged platforms to negotiate values, ideologies, and imaginaries.

Travelling cameras.

Elena Mosconi — 2025-07-21

Travel reporting received a strong boost in the periodical press of the 1950s due to an increase in travel and a new social sensibility that made the "elsewhere," the unknown, and the exotic objects of great interest. After framing the various forms of odeporic narrative (from books to newspaper correspondence and from specialized magazines to newsletters), the paper explores this genre through two popular 1950s periodicals: Epoca and Tempo. Then, the investigation is compared with the writings of Leonardo Bonzi, an explorer who traveled to Africa and China during the 1950s, whose archive contains rich documentation of these trips.
The ultimate goal is to understand the idea and image of the "elsewhere" adopted by explorators and reporters and to verify the possibility of a matrix inspired by a new form of colonialism that uses technological and visual supremacy as a filter for depicting the territories and peoples under investigation.

Magnum Photos, Epoca e il fotogiornalismo degli anni Cinquanta

Massimiliano Gaudiosi — 2025-07-21

In a famous photograph from 1950, Alberto Mondadori is immortalised in the Paris offices of Magnum Photos during a meeting with, among others, Robert Capa, Maria Eisner, Ernst Haas, George Rodger and David Seymour. The image in question perfectly renders what was the close relationship that united the most important international photographic cooperative with Epoca magazine in the post-war period. As imperfect as it was, this collaboration with the Milanese publisher was on the one hand a fundamental building block for Magnum's sales strategies on the European market, and on the other an opportunity for the remarkable development of a magazine designed on the model of Life and on quality photojournalism.
The aim of the essay is to try to reconstruct some of the steps of this collaboration, both through the reading of the documents conserved in the Magnum archive and by taking into account the reports produced for Epoca by the likes of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier Bresson and David Seymour.

Literary information as documentary and photojournalism.

Dario Boemia — 2025-07-21

This essay, through the case of Epoca (1950-1955), intends to investigate the space of cultural journalism in illustrated magazines, with the idea that the magazines are not only among the periodicals most receptive to the changes that affected literary society after the Second World War, but also represented a new actor in literary modernity. Furthermore, the mobilisation in cultural journalism of visual media drawn from other discursive contexts has important consequences for the characterisation of the critical-informative discourse, which this essay aims to begin to evaluate.

La leggenda dell’artista attraverso le pagine dei rotocalchi: "Epoca" (1950-1958)

Viviana Triscari — 2025-07-21

This paper aims to investigate a particular form of the text-image relationship at work within the landscape of post World War II periodical publishing: that is, the one aimed at the representation of visual artists (especially painters) through which a certain “iconography” of them evolves and spreads. The analysis will be conducted by perusing the issues of the magazine Epoca published between 1950 and 1958, among whose contributors art critic Raffaele Carrieri stands out. This iconography proves to be partly aimed at maintaining some of the topoi that since the Renaissance had contributed to make the artist a model of eccentricity, but it also expresses a need to “tame” his image in order to make it accessible to the new type of audience the magazine was addressing. Photography plays a leading role in this process of construction of the post-war collective imaginary, so this essay will attempt to investigate both its relationship with the written text that accompanies it and to relate it to the previous tradition on the subject, considering the impact caused by the encounter with the new scopic regime produced by mass culture.

The Right Distance.

Paolo Villa — 2025-07-21

During the postwar reconstruction Italian cities changed their faces decisively and abruptly amid new suburbs, large infrastructures, problems with managing their historic centres, and the rise of mass tourism. Reportage photography and the periodical press became primary sources for investigating the profound reconfiguration, both in material structures and social discourses, around the postwar city. From the pages of Epoca, the city emerges in a plurality of dimensions.
After tracing a general overview of the urban forms and imagery present in the magazine, the essay focuses on reportages featuring Venice, crystallized in a postcard image, and Milan, presented as the epicentre of Italian modernity. Two complementary portraits that stage the contrast between change and permanence, by translating it into the contraposition between the city as ancient jewel (which would like to modernize) and the city as a modern laboratory (in danger of losing its historical identity).

Umbrellas, umbrellas. A journey through seaside Italy in the pages of “Tempo” (1946-1949)

Arianna Laurenti — 2025-07-21

In the issue no. 29 dated 16-23 July 1949 of Tempo, the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section announces that Federico Patellani, a photojournalist linked to the newspaper, has begun ‘the Tour of the Beaches of Italy’. From Versilia to the Adriatic coast, Patellani produces photo-texts that investigate with insight and irony the connotations that seaside holidays took on in the late 1940s and early 1950s, between the immediate post-war period and reconstruction. Patellani's seaside wanderings would not be unique: the following year, Tempo itself entrusted Vincenzo Rovi and Carlo Cisventi with a series of photo-investigations on Italian beaches.
This contribution aims to read these beach reportages as a singular thematic articulationof the ‘Italian Journey’, as part of that phenomenon of exploration and remapping of the country present in numerous post-war Italian cultural products.

'Il Borghese' and the visual arts in the Longanesi years (1950-1957)

Laura Facchin — 2025-07-21

Scholarly studies on the role of the multifaceted figure of Longanesi in the field of illustrated publishing have privileged the experiences of Il Selvaggio (approximately 1924-1933) and Omnibus (1937-1939). Less investigated is his time at the head of Il Borghese, a magazine that Longanesi founded in 1950 and directed until his death with a policy of privileging artist graphics, starting from the cover. The contribution investigates the editorial choices regarding visual arts and the role played by the artists, first of all his friend Alberto Savinio, in the figuration of the periodical. A specific analysis will be dedicated to the iconographic and formal solutions of the covers of the 1950-1955 years, in which both graphic works by protagonists of the international artistic scene between the end of the Nineteenth century and the first half of the Twentieth century were published (Munch, Toulouse-Lautrec, Chagall), and those of contemporary illustrators and designers (Steinberg), alongside color photography.

Pencils, sor(risi) and pettiness. The genesis of "Il Mondo" di Bartoli e Maccari (1949-1950)

Emanuela Morganti — 2025-07-21

Since its first appearance on news-stands the 19th February 1949, the weekly Il Mondo proposed to the audience a large number of illustrations, photographs, art works reproduction, advertisings and satirical cartoons. Mario Pannunzio, the director, entrusted the last one project to Amerigo Bartoli and Mino Maccari, with their creations, shaped the taste of readers and readers alike, consistently puncturing current affairs, wandering from pollical to social caricature, from press news to art exhibitions.
The article examines the rich body of works realized by Bartoli and Maccari and published on Il Mondo between 1949 and 1950, with the aim of describing this production, to analyse the next artistic-editorial genesis and to offer a point of view that runs parallel with the Italian political and cultural history.

Illustration and documentation vs. exhibitions and museums: a proposal for “Emporium”, an open building site

Caterina Paparello — 2025-07-18

Coming into being during the Art Nouveau flowering years and becoming its popularizing manifesto, the magazine Emporium made the illustration-word combination one of its distinctive features. Recognizing very often more useful to see a well-done figure than to read a long chapter, the “technical reproducibility” of the work of art was assumed as the privileged medium of visual communication, also didactic and didascalic, of artistic content, museography and critical debate. On the basis of the important studies on Emporium, the contribution aims to investigate, for the years 1945 to 1957, the renewed cut of the magazine around museums, restitution exhibitions and monographic exhibitions, as examples of a international debate on the new dimension of museum that, opened between the two wars, found accomplished field of application in the season of Italian and international museography of the second half of the twentieth century.

"Civiltà delle macchine": "How will man not be dehumanised by machines [...] to make it a moral weapon of progress?"

Carlotta Sylos Calò — 2025-07-21

This contribution focuses on the first issue of Civiltà delle macchine, a corporate magazine launched in 1953, which, despite limited resources, presents itself as a publication with an international scope, characterised by a polytechnic vision. The magazine stands out for its multidisciplinary approach, targeting a wide-ranging audience and embodying a culture of industry and technology that merges technical and cultural aspects. Under Leonardo Sinisgalli's direction, Civiltà delle macchine emerged as a unique pattern or prototype of Italian modernity.

'Stile Industria' and “A Production of Quality and Style”: Design Culture in Italy through Industrial Photography

Raissa D'Uffizi — 2025-07-21

On 28 August 1954, the 10th Triennale was inaugurated in Milan. In the same year, the first issue of Stile industria, the first Italian magazine dedicated entirely to the industrial design, was published in June. The magazine, playing a crucial role in the cultural promotion of design in Italy, aims to understand and enhance the role of industrial design in society, celebrating the designer's activity, which takes on a new and decisive importance. The articles in the magazine, written by experts in the field, as well as critics, artists, graphic designers and scholars, offer detailed insights into the different forms that design can take. Through images, Stile industria documents “a production of quality and style”, with the use of industrial photography accompanying technical notions in a precise, didactic and immersive manner, with a lively and illustrated layout.
The contribution analyses the relationship between image and text within the forty-one issues of Stile industria, identifying the visual strategies and recurring codes that have contributed to the construction of the imagery of Italian design and the birth of Made in Italy.

The transformation of realist art through the analysis of the first two series of “Il Contemporaneo. Weekly of culture” (1954-1957)

Livia Garomersini — 2025-07-21

Founded in 1954 and later downgraded to a supplement of Rinascita in 1965, Il Contemporaneo deserves thorough analysis as the primary cultural magazine of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). While it served as a mouthpiece for the party’s cultural sector, it also marked an early attempt to engage with perspectives beyond strict party lines, reaching a broader audience than just communists. This makes it essential for a conscientious examination of the destalinization years. This study will particularly focus on analyzing the images and illustrations published in its first two series, notably those created by Renzo Vespignani for the front page. Through this lens, we aim to trace the evolution of realist poetics from the national-popular, predominantly rural context of the early 1950s, to an increasingly urban and existential character. This will be contrasted with other party publications (Rinascita, Vie Nuove, Il Calendario del Popolo), where such transitions occurred much more slowly.

"He wrote me and that's enough". "Noi donne" and the author's reportage

Emma de Pasquale — 2025-07-21

The collaboration between 20th century women authors and Noi donne represents an interesting lens through which to investigate the cultural dynamics that led women writers to “approach journalism with new determination” (Ghilardi 2004: 165) after the Second World War. In these years, the periodical of the Unione Donne Italiane offered a lot of space to women writers' reportages, in which an original ‘amphibious’ style was experimented (Chemello-Zaccaro, 2011: 11) and a polyvalent relationship was established between text and photographs: the images accompanying the articles - mostly portraying female subjects and in line with the political battles undertaken by the UDI - in fact provide a new look at the socio-cultural reality of republican Italy. Analysing the author's reportages published in the magazine between 1945 and 1956 - signed, among others, by Ortese, Lussu, Cialente and Masino - the essay investigates the relationship between text and images as a reflection of the history of Noi donne, a periodical still capable, even today, of combining the political objective with some effective formulas of the consumerist periodical press.

At the roots of “fotoromanzo”: the comics romance novel of “Grand Hôtel”

Giuliano Cenati — 2025-07-21

The weekly magazine Grand Hôtel, published in Milan by the Del Duca brothers beginning June 29, 1946, is known to be the flagship publication of Italian “fotoromanzo”. The breeding ground for the “fotoromanzo” is set up by adjuvant mixed genres, including the drawn romance novel. Precisely in Grand Hôtel, between 1946 and 1970, the drawn romance novel proceeds to an appropriation of cinematic narrative and imagery, recoding them through the formal and expressive resources of comics. It is a verbovisual invention that represents one of the most astounding manifestations of Italian reconstruction, in which entrepreneurial ingenuity, unprejudiced artistry and the pedagogical inclination to integrate a wide sector of the citizenry into the horizon of national life show to converge. For the first time, in such an unambiguous and massive way, comics are targeting young adult women from both working-class and middle-class backgrounds. This article outlines the series of graphic novels that intertwines, on the pages of the magazine, with the series of “fotoromanzi”: the specificity of the comics’ contribution to the new editorial product and to the new formula of mixed narration emerges.

The Nine of the "Orsa maggiore"

Gabriele Landrini — 2025-07-21

The editorial practice of the cineromanzi became widespread in Italy at the beginning of the 1950s: lesser siblings of the better known photoromanzi, these magazines offered readers comic-strip transpositions of contemporary films, using stills and still photographs. Although most of the cineromanzi of that decade are aimed at a female audience, promoting melodramatic and sentimental film transpositions, some magazines differ as much in the content they propose as in the target audience. Among these, a significant case is that of Orsa Maggiore. Fotosettimanale di film per la gioventù. The periodical, published for only nine issues between April and June 1956, has in fact the merit of rethinking the format of the cineromanzo, in the light of an anagraphically defined target audience, namely the young. This essay aims to reflect on the publishing adventure of Orsa Maggiore, focusing on three aspects. Firstly, we investigate the policies guiding the selection of the transposed feature films, which emphasise the desire to address a different audience through stories devoted to adventure. In a second moment, the adaptation strategies guiding the transition from screen to paper are examined, which place greater emphasis on morality. Finally, we reflect on the accompanying columns which, in a sort of virtual counter-song, offer a real (or presumed real) look at the audience.

Magazines of the Italian Diaspora. An ethnic way to modern magazines?

Martino Marazzi — 2025-07-21

The study of the very articulated press of the Italian diaspora worldwide has finally produced, in recent years, a number of works of reference. Their approach has highlighted, in most cases, the sociohistorical and political aspects of that journalism. Our aim here is expanding this quest analyzing the interaction between, on the one hand, the impact outside the peninsula of Italian popular magazines of the 20th century, and on the other, the specificities of Italian popular culture in its diasporic, immigrant, component – in so doing, trying to shed light on the meaning, precisely, of its “Italianness” and of its “modernity”. In this context, the Italian American popular slick magazine Divagando acts as a litmus test for a reassessment of immigrant culture – poised as it is between new communicative codes and content-related proposals, and loyalty to an “ethnic” interpretation of American society, analysed through the lenses of new Italian fiction and of hard-boiled photostories.