








































< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of 
Autarchy and Fascist Intervention
SUE SAMUELSON AWARD FOR  
FOODWAYS SCHOLARSHIP 

1st PLACE WINNER 2013

By: Diana Garvin

Food demonstrates how power works through narratives of design. It complicates 
the idea of an all-powerful government monolith by revealing the local variations of 
manufacturing, construction, and financing for state enterprises. Fascist Italy provides 
a particularly fruitful time and place for the analysis of gender and culture for two 
reasons: first, because the self-mythologizing tendency of dictatorships boosts the 
production of material culture and offers a wealth of materials to study, and second, 
because the period presents a hyperbolic cultural moment that makes subtle phenomena 
more readily observable to the historian.  In mid-to-late 1930s Italy, the kitchen 
emerged as a primary domestic site for Regime intervention. With Benito Mussolini’s 
invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 and the onset of the League of Nations’ economic 
sanctions against Italy the following month, promotion of autarchy, or economic self-
sufficiency, meant that female labor such as shopping, gardening, and cooking took on 
a heightened political charge. On the national level, the regime introduced a raft of 
policies aimed at rationalizing and modernizing Italian industry. By reducing imports 
and increasing production, the regime believed Italy could attain the economic self-
sufficiency and increased imperviousness needed in the event of war. Popular magazines 
and books translated these policies into recommended practices for everyday life. 

Autarchy did not originate as a food-based policy. Stemming from the League of Nations’ 
sanctions following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and the establishment of Italian East 
Africa, autarchy promoted the production and consumption of Italian goods, both material 
(linoleum) and abstract (Italian labor, Italian language). For example, F.T. Marinetti 
introduced Italian terms for English and French words, turning the “bar” into a “quisibeve.” 
But when autarchy entered the home, it headed straight for the hearth. In this article I 
use Italian Fascist period culinary magazines and cookbooks such as La Cucina Italiana 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

and Dalla Cucina al Salotto, as well as kitchen designs from architectural journals such as 
Domus, to illustrate the daily political interplay between individual women and the State 
in the private sphere. Ultimately, I argue that modern kitchen design in 1930s Fascist Italy 
evokes bids to rationalize unruly bodies and work. Specifically, I examine the interplay of 
the national and the personal by analyzing how popular cookbook authors such as Delia 
Notari, and prestigious designers such as Ignazio Gardella, translate the State’s concern 
for autarchy, or economic self-sufficiency, into calls for rationalization, or streamlined 
production, in individual kitchens. Because the kitchen constituted a female workspace 
for the preparation of raw goods for familial consumption, and because the majority of 
the family budget went towards food, promoting autarchic eating provided a key means 
for the regime to encourage Italians to participate in this key aspect of Fascist politics.

The kitchen is the room of the house used for cooking and food preparation, and 
traditionally some form of hearth would have constituted the center of activity. In 1930s 
Italy, depending on the family’s socioeconomic level, either the woman of the house or a 
female cook typically tended to this domestic labor. Beyond these general commonalities, 
however, one cannot speak of a typical Italian kitchen. During this period both popular 
and elite publications targeted the kitchen as a household site ripe for modernization. 
Large-scale city and town planning projects, such as the construction of the Fascist New 
Towns in the Pontine Plains and the sventramento (gutting) of Rome aimed to promote 
hygiene and smooth flow through the body of the city. Erecting public housing blocks 
forced state-funded architects to grapple with the question of which material elements 
should comprise Italy’s new, ideal kitchens. They connected specific concrete traits to 
abstract ideas of backwardness and irrationality. Large, dark, dirty, disorganized kitchens 
emerged as the foes of rationality. Although careful not to disparage the well-kept country 
kitchen, many publications privileged new organization and use of this space by advocating 
electric stoves over open fires and the eating of family meals in a separate dining room. 
They prescribed windows for light and ventilation, autarchic materials for ease of cleaning, 
and electric appliances for saving time. Modern kitchens conceived as small, tidy, light-
filled workspaces also required efficient labor practices. Both this domestic space and 
its associated agent, the cook, emerged as targets for modernization. In fact, the cook’s 
movements in the kitchen received as much attention in these texts as the room’s design. 

On June 14, 1925, Mussolini launched the Battle for Grain to liberate the Italian population 
from the “slavery” of foreign bread. This campaign focused on increasing promotion and 
consumption of non-standard grains such as rice, and to a lesser extent on decreasing 
consumption of pasta and bread.  A blend of propaganda, news media, and the arts all 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

carried these messages to the populous. Stripping bare to the waist, Mussolini cast himself 
as a virile farm worker to join in Sabaudia’s first wheat threshing in July 1935, a bit of 
political theatre memorialized on the cover of that month’s issue of La Cucina Italiana. 

On a literary arts front, Mussolini’s famous poem “Amate il pane,” “Love Bread,” 
encouraged Italians not to waste this precious product, while F.T. Marinetti’s invective 
“Contro la pastasciutta,” “Against pasta,” in La Cucina Futurista maintained that 
eating pasta diminished speed, aggression, and virility, all aspects of the Marinetti’s 
conception of the ideal modern Italian man. Fascist efforts to drive down grain 
consumption began quite early, in the mid-1920s, while concerted efforts to increase 
domestic production and utilization of raw materials emerged in a second wave of 
political and print activity in the late-1930s. Many Italians, particularly southern 
Italians, resisted the official line that rice offered superior nutrition and flavor due 
to lingering associations that linked rice and the privations of World War I when the 
government distributed it as a bread substitute. Further, incorporating rice into the 
southern Italian diet ran directly counter to the traditional foodways of the region 
where pasta predominated and rice was considered an undesirable foreign foodstuff 
(Dickie 2010). Fascist intervention in this culinary arena further intensified with 
the arrival of League of Nations’ sanctions in October 1935 (Helstosky 2004).

One might be tempted to make the argument that rationalism constitutes the means 
to promote autarchic practices in the kitchen. After all, embracing rationalism and 
autarchy would likely require changes in architectural design and food preparation 
practices. They share the common goal of eliminating waste in the kitchen and 
promoting productivity and economy, albeit on a household scale. But these concepts 
do not equate, and writers discuss them in different terms. One key difference lies 
in the respective results of rationalism and autarchy for the nation. While advocating 
autarchic practices in individual households ultimately aids the Italian economy, the 
promotion of rationalism in individual homes does not offer a similarly obvious benefit 
on the national level. Further, architectural writers engage more often with the goal of 
rationalization, whereas household manual writers evoke autarchy with greater frequency. 

However, given the obvious affinity between these concepts, we must ask what larger 
projects they collectively support. How do rationalism and autarchy link to the question 
of the body and the national body? Foucault shows that power over life centers on a 
conception of the body as a machine, and that such power is essentially “a right of 
seizure: of things, time, bodies” (Foucault 1977). In the case of the 1930s kitchen, we 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

see the application of power to productive ends rather than deductive ends. While the 
intensity of these terms may initially seem incongruous when applied to the banality of 
the kitchen, we must remember that this is the level at which life, and thus power, is 
situated and exercised. By attempting to influence the design and use of the kitchen, 
the regime endeavors to seize time and control of bodies move. As such, rationality 
and autarchy bring the regime’s application of power into the very heart of the home. 
This treatment imbues food preparation with the form of “life-administering” power. 

Evidence of food’s role as a form of life-administering power emerges from analysis 
of the leading architecture magazines Domus and Casabella, as well as housekeeping 
manuals such as Dalla Cucina al Salotto: Enciclopedia di vita domestica. Together, these 
publications articulate the proper design, organization, and use of the Italian kitchen 
in the mid-to-late 1930s according to two different demographic cohorts of writers that 
divides along lines of gender and profession. Male architects tended to write for these 
magazines as an extension of their design work, whereas women crafted housekeeping 
manuals largely based on their personal experience of maintaining a home. Whereas 
Domus heralds the editorial board’s sympathy to Fascism, even including Benito Mussolini’s 
lauds of their editor in a special feature, housekeeping manuals and cooking magazines 
tend to invoke Fascism in depersonalized terms to set the scene for autarchic “how 
to” guides. Popular cooking magazines aimed at women, such as La Cucina Italiana, 
occupy an extreme position on the spectrum of engagement with Fascist politics. While 
many popular magazines, such as Bellezza and La donna italiana, would occasionally 
include regime-friendly articles such as autarchic fashion spreads, La Cucina Italiana 
constitutes a unique case of a hobby magazine’s adherence to state dictates. 

The founders and editors of La Cucina Italiana, Delia and Umberto Notari, openly 
supported the Fascist regime by promoting Mussolini’s autarchic campaigns with reader 
contests and letters to the editor. Delia Notari, not Umberto, pushed for the creation 
of La Cucina Italiana and controlled the editorial slant of the magazine as Director. 
A widow of engineer Joseph Magnaghi, Delia née Pavoni married Umberto Notari 
and appears to have shared his pro-Fascist politics. During her tenure as Director of 
the magazine from November 1929 to December 1934, she encouraged contributors 
to incorporate recipes for autarchic eating to support the regime. Umberto Notari’s 
adherence to Fascist political doctrine appears to have developed in his early 20s, during 
his collaboration with F.T. Marinetti on the magazine Poesia. His enthusiasm for social 
conservatism in general, and Fascist racial policy in particular, manifested in many 
of his publications from La donna ‘Tipo Tre’ to his signature on Manifesto della razza 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

and Panegirico della razza italiana. Proponents of Fascism from the art world such as 
Massimo Bontempelli, Ada Negri, and Margherita Sarfatti contributed articles as well.

Many Domus magazine articles feature ideal kitchens economically inaccessible to the vast 
majority of Italians, but advice columns addressing women, such as those from architect 
Ignazio Gardella, provide directives for rational kitchen design and use that could be 
more broadly applied. Hailing from a family of architects, Ignazio Gardella graduated in 
engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1928. Together with university acquaintances, 
he helped create the Italian Modern Movement before turning to Rationalism. His work 
in this realm, featuring autarchic building materials, found early success in several 
architectural competitions, such as the 1934-38 Dispensario Antitubercolare di Alessandria 
and the 1944 Milano Verde Plan, featured in the pages of Domus. His work sought to 
economize the cook’s time, space, and effort in the kitchen in the name of abstract 
goals such as modernism. Housekeeping manuals address a far broader socioeconomic 
group and largely try to help women cope with the effects of Fascism, namely the 1935 
League of Nations’ sanctions that rendered shopping and cooking a daily challenge. 
While both exclusive and popular magazines, as well as many democratic housekeeping 
manuals, all demonstrate outward support for Fascism, the latter also provide tactics 
and strategies for negotiating its occasionally negative effects on the household larder. 

In their differing prescriptions for kitchen design and its everyday use, Domus and La 
Cucina Italiana tend to point to what Michel De Certeau would call “tactics,” whereas 
Dalla Cucina al Salotto resorts to “strategies,” (De Certeau 1984). In this culinary 
context, one might consider tactics the cook’s creative use of the kitchen, whereas 
strategies suggest a more rigid, prescribed use for the space. Along these lines, we 
must bear in mind that even popular texts such as cooking magazines and housekeeping 
manuals cannot tell us how Italian women actually organized and used their kitchens. 
Such a statement goes beyond the scope of this project and would entail extensive 
ethnographic research. What they can tell us, however, is how writers and publishers 
publically performed Fascist political affiliation while prescribing actions for the female 
public to make practicing its policies less burdensome on a daily basis. Further, by 
examining architectural plans for and photographs of ideal kitchens, we can see how 
abstract calls for modernity and rationalism took physical form in the kitchen.

Kitchens are designed, in that architects create them, but kitchens also design: 
their material qualities influence the behavior of those who work within them. 
Managing this space amounts to manipulating the cook by dictating not only the 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

materials and organization of her surroundings, but also how she interacts with 
objects in this location through the variant series of actions involved in food 
preparation. The home serves as a process rather than a pure physical form in 
that it serves as a sort of institution, not unlike a factory or a clinic. On a daily 
basis, the kitchen conditions the cooking, and the cooking conditions the cook. 

What might account for these repeated calls for intervention in the kitchen 
and its daily use? Why do writers recommend modernism and rationality as the 
solutions? Recurrent themes of economy and science link these concepts to writers’ 
characterizations of the modern and rational kitchen as one that saves space, time, 
effort, and money. In this ideal rational kitchen, the cook’s agency and inspiration 
vanished. Like automatons, they are to take only prescribed steps, thus eliminating 
all waste. They become one more elettrodomestico, an electronic servant. Promoting 
abstract concepts as panaceas for such concrete issues suggests that there is more 
at stake in the 1930s Italian kitchen then one family’s supper. Indeed, the intensity 
and pervasive rhetoric of this concern for creating a rational kitchen evokes 
larger political discussions of the day, namely the Regime’s call for autarchy. 

Narratives of Rationalism in the Kitchen

Domus articles taking the kitchen as a central subject pervasively employ the trope of 
rationalism but they rarely define it. Rather than expressing the architectural style of 
Rationalism, rationalism in this context evokes Taylorist dictates meant to save space, 
time, and money while improving hygiene. In other words, it domesticates Rationalism by 
decreasing its scale of application from the factory to the kitchen by reworking concepts 
meant to improve factory efficiency to the private home. “Parliamo un po’ della cucina, 
razionalmente,” “Let’s talk a little about the kitchen, rationally” goes the title to an 
authorless August 1937 Domus article. This phrasing evokes the recurrent slippage in 
kitchen articles between advocation for rationalism as Taylorized work and the promotion 
of logic over emotion. The only other space to continually receive this type of treatment 
is the office, suggesting that this type of rationalism specifically targets places of work 
for intervention. These articles tend to treat the office as a factory for white collar 
male workers. In all three spaces--the office, the factory, and the kitchen--the worker 
disappears. The text uses the noi form, which obscures differentiations between the 
speaker and the addressee in phases such as, “Quanto abbiamo descritto è l’essentiale 
per la cucina,” “What we have described is essential for the kitchen.” Collective pronoun 
use can alternatively refer to the author alone, as it does in the former sentence, or to 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

“noi Italiani,” “us Italians,” in a preceding paragraph that exhorts Italians to embrace 
electric kitchen appliances as the Germans have. The author takes advantage of the 
slippery linguistic properties of “we” to increase his authority and evoke collectivity 
as necessary to his purpose. Office articles treat the worker as sex-neutral unless 
describing a specific position such as typist or overseer.  By contrast, kitchen articles 
always assume a female worker. When the type of work evokes the worker’s gender, 
gender targeting appears in differing form of address. When speaking of male workers, 
writers often use hypothetical sentence structures to suggest and entice. For example, 
the conditional tense predominates, evoking the possibility of choice for the male 
worker. By contrast, articles regarding female workers use the imperative tense to issue 
direct commands. This division suggests the view that respect for the worker’s agency 
depended partially on their gender. While articles called for all workers to rationalize 
their activities, they approached male and female workers with different language. 

We also see this discourse divide play out in the focus and content of individual 
articles. In contrast to articles primarily concerned with the office, the call for kitchen 
rationalization often accompanies a negative recollection of antiquated kitchen design. 
Writers often contrast these traits directly in the text, pointing out the superiority 
of linoleum over stone, electric stoves over open fires, small rooms over large ones, 
wall-flush furniture over central orientation, and white and blue wall-tiling over darker 
colors. Articles concerning the kitchen further include prescribed sets of location-
specific practices for how cooks should move within the space, while office-centric 
writings do not. Gardella frequently advises cooks to maintain an erect posture even 
while sitting, and to move from table, to stove, to sink so as not to waste energy with 
extra movements. This differentiation suggests that narratives of rationality in the 
kitchen involve gender and class elements absent from those regarding office structure, 
an assumed bourgeois male, and therefore neutral, space. Rationalism emerges as a 
sort of cure for the messiness of food preparation overseen by women, and articles 
often conflate women with disorder by treating them as an unruly element in need of 
surveillance and discipline. Such rhetoric also evokes the regime’s sventremento (gutting) 
campaigns in population-dense, working-class neighborhoods which sought to improve 
the city’s hygiene as though it were a living body. These articles treat the kitchen, a 
space of female work, as a room particularly prone to irrational practices. Irrationality 
links with the room’s darkness and dirtiness, with unnecessary waste, and with old-
fashioned practices and postures. Articles prescribe modern remedies, often in the 
form of autarchic materials and methods, to order this threateningly disorderly space. 

Saving time, money, and space functions as a concurrent goal for the extension of 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

autarchy into the kitchen in architecture magazines. Commonalities such as optimizing 
labor while diminishing and eliminating waste and controlling women’s actions in the 
domestic sphere link these bids for economization. Promotion of economy evokes the 
need to change individuals’ daily habits for the benefit of the nation. The premise 
that each Italian kitchen functions as a microcosm of the national larder imbues 
household food choices and preparation with enormous power and symbolic significance. 
As such, rationalism, economy, and autarchy constitute both strategies and goals, 
both the means and the ends for controlling this private space of production. In 
Foucault’s words, the regime’s interventions in the home might be described as “a 
power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, 
and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” 
(Foucault 1977:137).  Because food and cooking directly affect the biological existence 
of the population, the kitchen emerges as an ideal locus for the exercise of power 
over the national body, with women bearing the brunt of this bid for control.  

The Kitchen’s Invisible Service

Both Domus and housekeeping manuals treat the kitchen as a space of invisible service to 
the rest of the household. The significance of the relationship between the kitchen and 
the house derives from its evocation of an analogous bond between the house and the 
nation. Power over life in the realm of the kitchen can thus be understood in terms of 
power over the cook’s actions and power over the nation’s eating habits. In other words, 
power intervenes at two levels: that of the body as a machine--the “anatomo-politics 
of the human body” (Foucault 1977:139)--and the national body, through regulatory 
controls of the body as machine. One of these regulatory controls is the seemingly 
contradictory characterization of the kitchen as a space of seamless, invisible labor 
that, though segregated from the rest of the house and occupying a low rung in its 
hierarchy of rooms, nonetheless permits the daily processes of the house to function. 
In short, these texts treat the kitchen as both vitally important, but utterly lacking in 
social prestige. It is a space of labor and function, rather than leisure and display. 

Domus editor and architect Gio Ponti implicitly states that the kitchen and the bathroom 
hold equally low stature, placing them last in both text and print coverage, that is, when 
they are shown at all. Dining rooms and living rooms predominate at the expense of 
these functional spaces. As an architect, industrial designer, teacher and publisher, Gio 
Ponti’s prolific publications rendered him a towering figure in the field. After founding 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Domus in 1928 and serving as editor until 1941, he left to establish and serve as editor 
of Stile until he returned to Domus in 1948, remaining in the post until his death in 
1979. As a professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano from 
1936 until 1961, Ponti served as mentor to many young designers and his architectural 
designs also helped form the modern skylines of Turin and Milan. Smaller in scale but 
broader in scope, Ponti’s product designs could be found in many high style stores. The 
semi-public nature of the dining and living rooms that Ponti designed means that they 
serve as theatre backdrops, creating a performance space for the family to demonstrate 
sophistication to their guests. Lighting recommendations in an October 1935 article 
exemplify this tendency to treat these rooms as staging areas. Ponti points the ideal 
orientation of the bedrooms on the eastern side of the apartment block, perfect for 
morning light. Rays hit the dining room by mid-afternoon shining a spotlight on the 
kitchen’s output, but not on the kitchen itself. This room remains in the dark, literally 
and metaphorically. Ponti relegates the kitchens and bathrooms “a nord esclusivamente, 
“exclusively to the northern side” (Ponti 1935:15) where light cannot penetrate. Being 
backstage, kitchens and bathrooms hold lower stature. They merely support social display 
by concealing the work and mess involved in food preparation, clean-up, and bodily 
processes. Domus appears to deemphasize these spaces because they are “private,” 
but what shared characteristic makes them unsuitable for public viewing? For Ponti, the 
answer is functionality: kitchens and bathrooms contain the efforts required to affect 
glamour in dining and living rooms. After all, glamour by definition suggests effortlessness. 
By privileging coverage of practically all other rooms over kitchens in both the amount 
and order of text, as well as in the building architecture, Ponti evokes the idea that the 
ideal kitchen should perform invisible work in service of the rest of the house. Kitchen 
work was hidden due to its associations with the subaltern. Because lower-class women 
typically cooked, cleaned, and served the food in middle and upper-class households, 
the pervasive cultural distain for the female gender and low social classes attached 
to the spaces in which they worked, and to the types of labor that they performed. 

Family Economy and National Economy

Similarly and more explicitly, Ignazio Gardella articulates this conception of the kitchen 
as invisible service to the rest of the house in his inaugural January 1939 column on 
home economics, “I Servizi della Casa,” which focuses exclusively on the kitchen. He 
echoes the sentiment that the kitchen serves as a place of work, “di un determinato 
lavoro, importantissimo nell’economia della famiglia,” “of a specific work, extremely 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

important in the family economy” (Gardella 1939a:56). Of course, this phrasing 
means more than just money. Family economy can also refer to the functionality of 
the family unit. In this article, Gardella treats the two as definitions as inseparable, 
suggesting that improving one benefits the other. In this holistic view, rational kitchen 
design, coupled with rational cooking methods, thus benefits the family purse.

Gardella seems to believe that many architects equated associated 
characteristics such as practicality and functionality with undesirable aesthetics. 
He responds to this perceived denigration with an impassioned defense of 
rationalism, and its “incandescenza lirica,” “lyrical incandesce,” 

Per quell’equivoco, c’è chi, quando si occupa dell’arredamento della 
propria casa, accetta magari per il bagno, la cucina e gli altri servizi, 
un arredamento moderno (che sarà quasi sempre un brutto moderno 
di maniera), ma vuole poi per il ‘salotto’ e la ‘camera da letto’ un 
arredamento un po’ ‘meno moderno’ se non ‘antico’ del tutto.

By mistake, there are those who, when they set about furnishing their own 
house, accept modern furnishings (and it will almost always be an ugly manner 
of modern) perhaps for the bathroom, the kitchen, and the other functional 
rooms [servizi], but then want for the ‘living room’ and the ‘bedroom’ slightly 
‘less modern’ if not completely ‘old-fashioned’ furnishings (Gardella 1939a:4).

Gardella notes and then argues against this pervasive equation of modernity with 
service and functionality, as well as antiquity with display and comfort. Working rooms 
such as kitchens and bathrooms receive modern treatment because, unlike living rooms 
and bedrooms, they are meant to improve work rather than to promote enjoyment. In 
the context of style and its emotional effect on the room’s inhabitants, functional and 
decorative rooms often represent binary opposites. Gardella suggests that denigrating 
the modern is a “mistake,” in that modernism too can offer aesthetic pleasure. 
However, the fact that he must address this issue suggests that many homeowners 
disagreed. In this paragraph, and in others, Gardella along with Delia Notari, Vanna 
Piccini, and others writing on the kitchen, fuses rationalism with modernism. These 
writers treat the rational kitchen as modern. Both descriptors emerge as potentially 
joyless, unsurprising given their close association with the idea of utilitarianism and 
work. In characterizing the connection between cooking and finances with labor market 
terms of work and economy Gardella evokes the intimacy of the connection between 
consumer choices made in private homes and their effects on the national economy. 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

The home often served as a synecdoche for the homeland. This symbolic relationship 
elevated private choices of Italian food product selection to a matter of national 
importance. Lidia Morelli went so far as to introduce the 1935 reprint of her popular 
housekeeping manual Dalla Cucina al Salotto: Enciclopedia della vita domestica by 
addressing how the sanctions affected the vocabulary she could and could not use in her 
book. She had worked as a linguistics and literature teacher before going on to become 
a writer and journalist. Morelli published the first edition of Dalla Cucina al Salotto in 
1905 under the pen name Donna Clara, but abandoned this practice as her writings on 
household management rose in popularity and prominence. La Stampa, La Casa Bella 
(which later became Casabella), and Petit Point all published her work during her lifetime. 
Morelli also enjoyed success as on the radio, taking part in the ironically titled Florentine 
program “Abbassa la tua radio, per favore, “Turn down your radio, please.” Speaking to 
“the readers of today” in a note dated 18 November 1935 she explains that words such 
as marmitta norvegese, salsa ginevrina, sformato inglese, pagnottine scozzesi, baking 
powder, bridge, and tè alle cinque were perfectly permissible “quando un vocabolario 
estero non voleva dire ‘appartenente a Stato ostile e sanzionista,” “when foreign words 
didn’t mean ‘belonging to a hostile, sanctionist State” (1935:1). In other words, Morelli 
classifies all foreign elements of cookery--from phrases, to habits, to foods--as outdated. 
Her stance towards this attitudinal change is one of consent: she casts the situation 
as one of moral choice for the housewife, thus elevating the stakes of Italian food 
purchases. Directly connecting linguistic autarchy with autarchic cooking, she claims to 
be pleased that this shift not only resulted in the “innocent rebaptizing” of certain food 
terms, but also led to newly positive attitudes towards Italian products and the culinary 
industry. For example, in Manifesto della cucina futurista, F.T. Marinetti suggested that 
the foreign-sounding bar ought to be retired in favor of his Italian neologism quisibeve, 
“here one drinks.” Whether or not these were truly Morelli’s opinions or if she merely 
felt compelled to perform obeisance in this public text matters less than this text’s 
overwhelming popularity.  Morelli’s articulation of linguistic questions as being less 
important than kitchen methods and market choices casts autarchy for the massaia 
(housewife or country woman) as a set of practices grounded in the material world. 

Interestingly, Morelli recommends rationalism as a means to promote autarchy, a practice 
that bleeds into the simple cleaning suggestions this manual provides. Turning the 
constraints of the sanctions into a personal challenge for her readers, she notes her regret 
that certain recipes do not evoke the recent turn towards autarchy in the kitchen,

meglio sarebbero se più adatte ai tempi, se semplificate o cambiate, secondo 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

un regime fatto più severo. Ma confido nel buon senso, nell’ingegnosità delle 
lettrici per una scelta sensate, per una sostituzione razionale … e razionata.

It would be better if [these recipes were] more adapted to the times, 
simplified or changed, according to a regime that has become stricter. 
But I rely on the good sense, on the ingenuity of the readers for a 
sensible choice, for a rational, and rationed, substitution (1935:2).

It is interesting to note the ambiguous nature of the word regime, alternately meaning 
a governmental, domestic, or dietary regime. Terms such as adaptation, simplification, 
and change signal the actions to be taken by the reader in the kitchen, but they also 
involve a high degree of mental work to shift from simply enacting a recipe’s commands 
or recreating a passed-down dish. The repetition of sense and sensible, rational and 
rationed, stands as a bulwark against the wanton wasting of time and goods. Rationalism 
and rationing thus come together in service of autarchy. And yet, Morelli devotes far more 
frequent attention to the benefits of rationalism as a hygienic, or even moral practice, 
than she does to rationalism as a means to promote autarchy.  Maintaining a clean 
home and a clear conscience trump calls for aiding the national economy. Ultimately, 
Morelli’s depiction of rationalism as a means to practice autarchy reveals a stronger 
emphasis on the homemaker’s needs and wants rather than those of the nation. 

A dedicatory letter following Morelli’s note on the sanctions juxtaposes modernity 
and old-fashioned ways in the kitchen. To open this letter, she claims, “Non sono 
laudatrice dei tempi antichi,” “I’m not one to laud the old days,” despite the now-
common necessity of “questa vita nuova dal ritmo acceleratissimo,” “this new life of 
very accelerated rhythm,” to keep up with “nuove mode, nuove gusti, nuovi progressi, 
nuovi orientamenti,” “new ways, new tastes, new progress, new orientations.” 
Although she does not use the term rationalism, Morelli refers to the synonymous 
phrase scienza pratica as a key element of modernity in the kitchen with an animating 
effect in the massaia. Although one might expect that a manual promoting obeisance 
to the regime’s calls for autarchy in the wake of the sanctions might address the 
homemaker as a passive object to be molded by dictates, this is not the case. 

Morelli instead argues in favor of rationalism in terms of its benefits to the reader. These 
practices render her “attiva, abile, energica, capace di affrontare e di risolvere da sola una 
difficoltà o un pericolo, “active, able, energetic, capable of confronting and resolving alone 
a difficulty or a danger.” She ascribes agency to the homemaker. This narrative provides an 
example of a phenomenon common to nineteenth-century American cookbook narratives 
examined by Andrea Newlyn (1999), wherein women present themselves as paradoxically 
empowered by their relegation to the domestic sphere. According to Newlyn, in these 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

cases “cookbooks situate the kitchen as an emancipatory space in which women could 
transcend traditional identities and control how domestic spaces were deployed” (1999:38). 
Morelli thus characterizes the reader as what Newlyn would term as “an agent of reform 
who restores an otherwise marred domestic landscape” (1999:38). The very title, Dalla 
Cucina al Salotto, encapulates a dynamic narrative insofar as it evokes movement from one 
state to another, from the chaos of the private kitchen to the equilibrium of the relatively 
more public salon. But unlike the writers of Domus, Morelli begins her consideration of 
the household in the kitchen before moving into the dining room, the living room, etc. 

This ordering proves all the more interesting given her acknowledgement of the 
relative social esteem accorded to both spaces, the salon being a “un luogo ridente, 
pulito, elegante,” “a laughing, clean, elegant place,” and the kitchen being “semibuio, 
grigio, e disordinato,” “half-darkened, gray, and disorganized” (Morelli 1935:26). To 
combat this troubling state she advises surveillance, but of an infrequent sort so as 
not to offend the cook’s sensibilities (suscettività) or to get oneself dirty (insudiciarsi). 
These two suggestions evoke an uneasy division of authority between mistress and 
cook over the kitchen space and cooking, a division that refracts definitions of 
cleanliness and hygiene through the prism of domestic work and social class. 

Engaging in food preparation seems to mark the worker (the cook) and the workspace 
(the kitchen) as unclean, and thus in need of surveillance to maintain a suitable 
level of hygiene. Morelli suggests that while the cook should constantly work, the 
mistress should only periodically survey this work. Some dirtiness on the part of the 
cook must be expected given the messy nature of kitchen tasks, but the lady of the 
house must avoid spending time in the kitchen to avoid personal contamination. 
However, in inspecting the kitchen, the housewife is to “fa capolino,” “peep in,” 
(Morelli 1935:26) to assess the cleanliness of the room. Concern with cleanliness 
emerges in terms of aesthetics, in the desire to keep the kitchen “nitida e inodora” 
“clean and odorless” so as to make it a pleasant and clean space. So while the 
end state of cleanliness is appreciated, it is the constant act of cleaning, or the 
material itself, that marks a kitchen as hygienic rather than merely “clean.” Because 
the cook’s livelihood marks her as unclean, incessant cleaning provides a sort of 
ongoing awareness of, and penitence for, the material conditions of this position. 

This trope’s frequency and its attendant rhetorical intensity point to a fear of sickness 
originating from this potentially unclean space. Morelli goes so far as to recommend that 
the cook wear “una tunica simile a quella d’infermiera, che la guerra fece entrare quasi 
in ogni casa,” “a tunic like those worn by nurses, made to enter almost every house by 
the war” (1935:56). Dressing the cook in the style of a nurse turns the kitchen into a sort 
of clinic. This garment, accompanied with a white cap also modeled on nurses’ garb, 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

promotes hygiene by dint of being easily washable and because their odor-absorbing 
capacity protects one from nausea. The color white also enabled the lady of the house 
to make an instant, material surveillance of the kitchen’s cleanliness by displaying dirt. 
Concern for kitchen odors, here and in Domus, appears in frequent instructions to open 
windows and aerate the kitchen. Although these texts often describe kitchen smells 
as unappetizing and embarrassing for the hostess, some manuals, such as Morelli’s, 
conflate this distaste with bodily ailments, thus bridging the gap between questions 
of taste and health. As Feminist theorists Janet Price and Margrit Shildrik suggest in 
Feminist Theory and the Body, “the female body is intrinsically unpredictable, leaky 
and disruptive” (1999:2). Treatment of the kitchen as a potentially dirty, overflowing 
space recalls the messy, uncontainable female body. To maintain and contain female 
space and female bodies, manuals recommend medical techniques of surveillance 
and dress. This move suggests that the kitchen functions as a sort of clinic, where 
boundaries of private and public may be defined and solidified by architectural plans. 

But the kitchen is not only a clinic, it is also a battlefield: the cook fights a host of abstract 
enemies, ranging from dirt to hunger. Given the political backdrop of impending war, 
Morelli’s characterization of the cook as a soldier casts the cook in a heroic light and lends 
gravity to her work. Morelli frequently deploys this portrayal in the context of providing 
the cook with the necessary tools to do her job, be it proper garments or utensils, stating 
that “Allo stesso modo che non si può esigere da un soldato che ben combatta se lo si 
lascia senza armi, non si potrà pretendere da una cuoca che estrinsechi le sue abilità, 
se non avrà sottomano le efficacissime armi per la lotta contro la fame,” “In the same 
way that one cannot expect a soldier to fight well if you leave him without weapons, one 
cannot expect a cook to express her abilities if she does not have very effective weapons 
for the fight against hunger” (1935:49). Morelli’s analogy heightens the cook’s similarities to 
the soldier by repeating the word armi twice, rather than relegating weapons to soldiers 
and whisks to cooks. Such an analogy also underscores the multivalent connection between 
the warfront and home. Because many families had a soldier at the front, emotional 
as well as economic ties stretched across the public sphere and the private home. 

To aid her in this fight, autarchic materials and rationalist practices help the cook to save 
time and energy. Morelli recommends Italian-produced linoleum as a covering for the 
kitchen table, as it is both impermeable and washable. White walls and cupboards provide 
a “methodo più moderno e igienico,” “a more modern and hygienic method” (1935:46) to 
“impedire un viavai ingombrante e un perditempo in cucina,” “prevent awkward comings 
and going and a waste of time in the kitchen” (30). Casting kitchen architecture, color, 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

and furniture as a method rather than as a tool ascribes agency to the space, giving it 
the power to impede or enhance rationalist and hygienic practices. We see the central 
importance of time in Figure 2, one of Morelli’s ideal kitchens. The caption reads, “This 
kitchen set-up, anything but large and awkward, arranges everything according to its 
function.” Concern for spatial and temporal organization marks this kitchen. The camera 
angle, centering on the kitchen clock, suggests as much. Like a factory’s clock this 
timepiece set high on the wall marks the rate at which the cook completes her daily work. 
To make the most of a few pieces of rational, practical, easy to clean kitchen furniture, 
Morelli suggests building a small kitchen, eliminating excessive ornamentation and creating 
a functional and more hygienic space. As this caption suggests, examples of modern 
kitchens partially derive their value from contrast against older kitchen design, revealed 
here as “large and awkward” spaces where function inconveniently followed form. 

In contrast to the older forms of kitchen design that Morelli critiques, appliances take 
on an increasingly central role in the modern kitchen. They possess quasi-agentive 
status, suggested in the term elettrodomestici, “electric servants,” which places 
their role somewhere between that of weapons and auxiliary forces in the war for 
hygiene. As very few Italian kitchens possessed appliances until the late 1940s, Morelli’s 
description of this kitchen’s tools suggests an ideal rather than a commonality. Women 
remain their commanding officers, “Così preparata ad attaccare l’ignobile lotta contro 
l’unto, la servetta – o la massaia – si accinge coraggiosamente e con l’ausilio di armi 
adatte, a debellare il nemico,” “Thus prepared to attack the ignoble struggle against 
grease, the maid – or the housewife ¬– courageously gets ready, and with the auxiliary 
of appropriate weapons, to defeat the enemy” (1935:56). Although Morelli denigrates 
this act of cleaning as ignobile, her extended metaphor promotes the cook to the 
level of military general complete with an auxiliary defense at her command. 

In the modern kitchen, the stove takes the place of the open fire. This shift reflects 
a more general move from visible to invisible cooking, as the fuel source can now be 
hygienically enclosed in a smooth, metal container. As this photograph and Figure 3 
demonstrate, the stove holds chief importance, “tiene – è evidente – il primo posto,” 
“has, it’s evident, the first place.” In particular, electric stoves with four burners serve 
as the ideal standard, as electricity burns without a trace as compared to gas or wood. 
Mentioning this attribute first, she also suggests that electricity’s inherent hygiene 
is reason enough to convert from another type of hearth. She further characterizes 
electricity as practical and easy to adopt. Morelli suggests that form indicates function 
in the context of stoves, that solid materials and construction assure regular function 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

and steady flame. Discussion of old-fashioned wood-burning stoves evokes the context 
of war due to the rarity and price of newer models. Political events once again enter 
the kitchen through economics, and Morelli offers modernity in the form of electricity 
as the ideal solution, and antiquity in the form of wood as a suitable back-up. 

Both photographs (Figures 2 and 3) also evoke how raw materials play a role in linking 
autarchy with hygiene in the kitchen. Morelli, like the writers of Domus, depicts material 
type as the most important consideration in selecting kitchen dishes and utensils, as 
shown by her kitchen necessities list, and demonstrates similarly intense interest in 
the use of autarchic materials for flooring, walls, and plumbing. Linoleum reigns chief 
among these, due to its ease of cleaning when contrasted with old-fashioned stone 
floors. Morelli similarly decries the use of copper as unnecessary and outdated, especially 
when iron can be cheaply had and steel does not oxidize. Aluminum receives special 
attention, “Più conveniente … privo d’ogni pericolo, di cui si spiega il grandissimo attuale 
favore … e si pulisce con la massima facilità,” “More convenient … and without any 
danger, which explains its current great favor … and one can clean it with the greatest 
of ease” (1935:47). In “The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum,” Jeffrey Schnapp 
points to the 1930s as the “golden era of aluminum designs for the kitchen and the 
beginning of Fascist Italy’s pursuit of domestic autarchy” (2001:245). He further notes 
how aluminum kitchen products evoked abstract concepts of “lightness, speed, mobility, 
strength, energy, and electricity” (Schnapp 2001: 245). Morelli’s description suggests 
that these characteristics bespeak scientific modernity in the kitchen. She goes on to 
say that laboratory tests conducted in Glasgow demonstrated that no food can alter 
aluminum utensils. Although Morelli painstakingly highlights the virtues of linoleum 
and aluminum, two autarchic materials par excellence for their utility in the kitchen, 
she makes her argument based on their ease of cleaning rather than their domestic 
production. Indeed, she invokes foreign scientific proof to promote Italian materials. 

Given that she speaks of autarchy explicitly in the introductory letter and in photo 
captions, the omission here seems to speak to the primary importance of what utility 
these materials offer in the private sphere rather than their economic benefits to the 
Italian nation. For example, a photo of a chrome-nickel blend used in a sink receives the 
compliment, “E’ orgoglio nostro che li construisca una veneta italianissima acciaieria,” 
“It is out pride that a very Italian, Venetian steelworks constructs it” (Morelli 1935:48). 
This exclusion does not, however, undermine the link between the kitchen and the 
national larder. As noted previously, her introductory letter proves her awareness of 
and concern for the kitchen in terms of national concerns. Rather, Morelli’s focus on 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

autarchic materials in the kitchen demonstrates focus on the element of the equation 
of greatest interest to her audience. What she offers in these recommendations are 
sensible tips that also serve a national end. Purchasing aluminum and linoleum could 
be seen as patriotic if the reader chose to identify her actions in this way, but Morelli 
does not force the point by drawing this connection in her discussion. In pointing to 
practicality rather than politics, Morelli allowed her readers maximum flexibility to 
define the extent of their political involvement for themselves. Choosing aluminum 
could be practical and/or political, and Morilli left it up to the reader to select her 
preferred justification. But while dual narratives provide a strategy for negotiating 
the extent to which the kitchen equals the national larder, Morelli does not question 
the connection itself. Regardless of the justification for selecting autarchic materials, 
this recommendation supports national goals of economic self-sufficiency. 

This focus on autarchic materials emerges in more strident terms in Morelli’s third image 
of an ideal, upper-class kitchen. Morelli says of the photo, “Kitchen, this one large and 
complete, where from the walls in washable rubber material to the glass and metal 
furniture to the floors in linoleum, everything is a perfect expression of hygiene.” Domus 
frequently featured kitchens, including this one, designed by leading Rationalist architect 
Piero Bottoni, considered to be an authority on kitchen design. Piero Bottoni was one of 
the leading practitioners of Rationalism, serving from 1929 to 1949 as the Italian delegate 
to the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, and Domus featured many of his 
kitchen designs in the mid-1930s. These articles, like Morelli’s book, generally assume 
that a cook works in the kitchen rather than the lady of the house. Rarely do articles 
describe this figure in the third person as the cuciniera (cook). Domus articles directed 
to the lady of the house tended to address her in the second person, as we see in the 
monthly invitations to participate in the Concorso Cirio of 1935, one of Italy’s first national 
cooking competitions for homemakers. This shift suggests that most Domus articles on 
kitchens, which use the third person to describe the cook, refer to a servant rather than 
the lady of the house. To an even greater extent than Morelli, Domus writers tended 
to focus on how design ameliorates cooking, while obscuring the figure of the cook. 

While Figure 2 also appeared in Domus, the caption does not. Not only are the materials 
hygienic, but their dimensions promote health as well. Morelli applies findings from 
the scientific and medical world to kitchen work, noting that one must consider the 
relationship between the cook’s stature, height, and the work to be done, as well as 
the need to conduct work while sitting straight rather than standing or bent over. The 
kitchen above not only provides a stool for work at the kitchen table, but it also places 



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

the workspaces in a logical order from preparation at the work table, to cooking at 
the stove, to cleaning at the sink, to waiting to be served at the final counter under 
the cupboards. Connecting “minore spreco di fatica e di salute,” “less waste of effort 
and health” (Morelli 1935:60), Morelli suggests that the Taylorist approach to kitchen 
work evoked by this photograph leads to improved hygiene. The kitchen also moves 
from an irrational to a rational space through realization of the manual’s directives. 

Conclusion 

In Fascist Italy modernity and tradition came together under the aegis of autarchy to 
highlight what is at stake in the aesthetics of kitchen objects. With the onset of the 
League of Nations’ economic sanctions against Italy and the regime’s responding call for 
autarchy to neutralize this threat, questions of domestic production and consumption 
assumed a heightened importance. Therefore, the promotion of autarchy crossed 
spheres, encompassing the public via linguistic translations and pushes for increased 
productivity in factories, farms, and mines, and the private via calls to the home 
cook to get more out of less. She was to Taylorize her movements as if in a factory 
to get more work out of less physical energy and to make judicious decisions with 
food products, providing the family with more nutritional energy out of less food. 

The regime generally did not concern itself with making these dictates explicit. Rather, 
authors and designers translated the regime’s broad calls for autarchy into specific 
practices for their readership. Economic prudence and trendiness also played significant 
roles in shaping popular aesthetics. Within the general frame of obeisance to the regime 
via promotion of autarchy, designers took variant approaches with regards to how such 
consent manifests in prescribed actions. While the intensity of terms such as “modernity,” 
“rationalism,” “autarchy,” and “consent” may initially seem incongruous when applied 
to the banality of the kitchen, we must remember that this is the level at which life, 
and thus power, is situated and exercised. By attempting to influence the design and 
use of the kitchen, multiple demographic groups, including both individual citizens and 
representatives of the state, endeavored to seize time and to control how bodies moved.  



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Magazine cover, photograph of Benito Mussolini threshing wheat in 
the Fascist New Town of Sabaudia (La Cucina Italiana [July 1935]).



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Kitchen photograph (Dalla cucina al salotto; enciclopedia 
della vita domestica [1935, p.13]).



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Piero Bottoni, Kitchen photograph (Dalla cucina al salotto; 
enciclopedia della vitadomestica [1935, p. 14])



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

References Cited

Anonymous. 1933. Parliamo un po’ della cucina razionalmente. Domus.

De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. 
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dickie, John. 2010. Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and their Food. New York: 

Free Press.

Domus, ed. 1937. Il libro di casa 1938. Rome: Cirio.

_____ , ed. “Servizio razionale.” Domus. Oct. 1935, 24-25.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth 
of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gardella, Ignazio.1939a. I servizi della casa: la cucina. Domus January.

---. 1939b. Consigli tecnici per la casa. Domus May. 

Helstosky, Carol. 2004. Garlic and Oil: Politics and Food in Italy. Oxford: Berg.

Morelli, Lidia. 1935. Dalla cucina al salotto; enciclopedia 
della vita domestica. Turin: S. Lattes.

Newlyn, Andrea K. 1999. Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: 
The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth-Century Manuscript 
Cookbooks. The Journal of American Culture 22 (3): 35-47.

Pinkus, Karen. 1995. Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under 
Fascism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ponti, Gio. Attrezzature del lavoro. Domus February 1939.

_____ . Avvenire. Domus, July 1940.

_____ . Casa M. a Milano. Domus, October 1935.

_____ . Un appartamento risistemato a Milano. Domus, November 1938.



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Price, Janet, and Margrit Shildrick. 1999. Feminist 
Theory and the Body: A Reader. New 

York: Routledge.

Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 2001. The Romance of Caffeine and 
Aluminum. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 244-269.



< Garvin, Diana. “The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist 
Intervention.” Digest: a Journal of Foodways and Culture 3:1 (2014): n. pag.> © American Folklore Society 2014

Notes
1 In Dalla Cucina al Salotto, Lidia Morelli provides an intriguing illustration that 
divides middle-class household costs by months of work required for their 
payment. Food requires four and a half months of the yearly salary, whereas the 
second most expensive bill, rent, requires only two (Morelli 1935:Figure 71).

2 This poem was widely reproduced across different forms of Italian print 
media in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Many household manuals, including 
Almanacco della donna italiana 1941, included a decorative plate of this poem.

3 In contrast to Domus’ standard article formats, this text appears as 
an untrimmed newspaper clipping, “L’Elogio del Duce al Dott. Gianni 
Mazzocchi editore della nostra rivista,” Domus (Jan. 1940):21.

4 This socially conservative notion of work space typified such publications 
during the 1930s. Further, the Italian approach largely parallels conceptions 
of the office in other countries, such as the United States.

5 “Questo tempo di ‘sanzioni’ ha veramente un alto valore morale, 
del quale dobbiamo compiacerci,” “This time of ‘sanctions’ 
has a high moral value, of which we must satisfy.”

6 She claims, “sono io sono la prima a rallegrarmi che questo abbia fine,” 
“I am the first to delight in the fact that this has happened.”

7 By 1935, the cover already heralded its distinction 
of “50 migliaio,” fifty thousand sold.

8 Karen Pinkus plays upon this haziness in titling her work 
on Fascist period advertising Bodily Regimes.

9 Tending towards hyperbolic terms and phrasing on this topic, Morelli 
weaves the following vignette, “La minuta dei pasti s’indovina al primo 
entrare. Ahimè … l’odore … vi dànno un senso di nausea, di sazietà, di … 
miseria!” “One guesses the dinner hour upon entering the door. Alas … the 
smell gives them a sense of nausea, of satiety, of … misery! (1935:25).

10 For an example, see Anonymous, Parliamo un po’ della 
cucina, razionalmente, Domus (Aug. 1933):30.


