Title: Nonchalance and the Fascist Gaze

The destruction of cultural property is an international war crime, and a push has arisen to make it a crime against humanity. Cultural property destruction is also often central to transitional justice and liberation efforts. These dualities tend to be reconciled by aesthetic judgment on what is ‘ugly’ cultural property, namely, cultural property linked to oppressors, abusers, and tyrants. It is only cultural property worthy of protection whose destruction is considered criminal. In many jurisdictions – the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and throughout Central and Eastern Europe – ‘ugly’ cultural property is toppled, removed from public spaces, sequestered, destroyed, and renamed. These include Confederate monuments, statuary of settler colonialism, Nazi relics, etc. Yet this is not the only way to interface with ‘ugly’ cultural property. Italy offers a different approach. This is an approach of nonchalant integration to Mussolini-era monuments and iconography. Through a visual ethnography, this paper phenomenologically narrates this approach through the eyes of one outsider.