Of the many Italian art exhibitions organized abroad in the 1930s by Antonio Maraini, secretary general of the Venice Biennale and of the 'Sindacato Nazionale Fascista Belle Arti', that of Berlin in 1937 had a particular importance. The 1937 exhibition took place at a time of international tension following the establishment of a political alliance between Italy and Germany. The Ausstellung Italienischer Kunst von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart assumed the significance of a precise action aimed at reinforcing the Rome-Berlin Axis. The German press hailed the exhibition as the “expression of the will of a people, who struggle with us shoulder to shoulder, to uphold the values of the European artistic and cultural tradition against Bolshevik nihilism”.
Organized in the wake of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung and the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, which Maraini visited and whose concept he fully shared, it was imperative that the exhibition of 19th- and 20th-century Italian art should avoid provoking Hitler's sensibilities. It had to be aligned as much as possible with his aesthetic doctrine, explicitly detailed in the inaugural speech at the 'Haus der Deutschen Kunst' in Munich. Consequently, Maraini adapted the history of Italian art of the previous century and a half, synthetized in the oft-used phrase “From Napoleon to Mussolini”, to Nazi sensitivity. He made a careful selection of artists and works, censoring and revising, eliminating or minimizing anything that might be incompatible with the “Führer's principles”: from Futurism to Cosmopolitanism, from cerebral, deforming “isms” to disruptive “Jewish tendencies”.
Drawing on unpublished archive documents, the article reconstructs the various phases of the exhibition's realization and analyzes its reception by the German and Italian press, making eloquent comparisons with similar exhibitions organized by Maraini in different political and diplomatic contexts, such as Paris in 1935 and Budapest in 1936.