Historians of architecture are attending to a wider geography, more complex cross-section of cultures, and a richer range of questions than at any time in the discipline’s history. As this shifting historiography extends, repositions, and recalibrates the discursive map, our thinking about Italy’s long-standing centrality to the field demands reassessment. For scholars of architecture across the long twentieth century, an array of sites, ideas, and individuals from across the peninsula have been crucial measures for architecture’s global enterprise. Mapping the tangled vectors of Italian influence is inextricable from decoding architectural discourse, and it remains an incomplete intellectual project. Doing so, however, raises the question of whether we can question Italy’s status in architectural history without perpetuating its assumed importance.

How can the history of Italian architecture be positioned, now, within the field’s broadening disciplinary horizons? What might a critical approach to this history look like? Is a simple “corrective”– different geographies, different actors – answer enough? This symposium invites contributions that grapple with our central questions: whether and how we should pursue the historical study of Italian architecture, and what might this mean for future contributions to this discipline.