This article charts the rise to fame of Gabriele D’Annunzio by focusing on a number of key moments in his life and the strategies he employed to shape his public image. The Roman years and the 1890s saw the writer’s first iconic transformation into Italy’s aesthete par excellence, a myth and related iconography that still shapes our view of the poet. The years in Florence, spent at the Villa Capponcina, coincided with the time in which d’Annunzio re-fashioned himself into a self-appointed national poet. The war years were central to the creation of an entirely new figure, the poeta soldato, whose military heroics and charismatic leadership provided novel and dubious models of engagement with contemporary politics and culture. Finally the years of the self-imposed exile at Gardone focus on the late, and as yet undocumented, use of photographs employed by d’Annunzio to keep the myth of the national poet-soldier alive under Fascism. These subsequent transformations resulted in a highly successful and thoroughly modern staging of his personality which turned him into a national icon.

Most books by or about Antonio Gramsci reproduce on their covers the same studio photograph dating from the early 1920s. It is a head and shoulders portrait showing Gramsci with longish hair, dark coat buttoned at the neck, unsmiling and looking into the camera through wire-rimmed glasses. This was also the image of him most commonly displayed in Communist Party branches all over Italy from the late 1940s to 1991. Yet if we compare it with other extant photographs of Gramsci, as well as with those of other revolutionary leaders adopted as iconic in the communist movement, we can see it differs from the former and resembles the latter in several ways. The most striking difference is the erasure of any sign of Gramsci’s bodily impairment: the curvature of the spine and short stature resulting from the spinal tuberculosis he had as a child. The article examines the history of this photograph and the way it became adopted as the approved image of Gramsci and considers what was at stake in removing from official memory a condition of disability that was central to his own personal and political identity.

The body partially disrobed as a visual strategy for self-branding is the theme of this article. During Fascism, photography, in synergy with the communications industry ante-literam, was an essential part of the construction of the cult of the leader that transformed the figure of Mussolini into an icon. Mussolini’s partial nudity is considered here as a powerful political tool. The Duce, in anticipation of our celebrities today, did not hesitate to undress and display his torso in what Valerie Sperling calls ‘iconic public-relations stunts’ that were both exhibitionistic and voyeuristic (Sperling 2014, 21). Deconstructing the visual language of Fascist propaganda that made the man into a myth, this article illustrates the most iconic aspects of Mussolini’s visual strategy, demonstrating his innovative capacity to take advantage of a modern attitude towards self-representation, similar to that adopted by today’s heads of state.

This essay explores the 1950s as a space of cultural transition through two bodies of iconic images: Tazio Secchiaroli’s 1958 reportage of Aiché Nanà’s striptease and Franco Pinna’s documentation of the rituals of mourning during his work in Salento with anthropologist Ernesto de Martino. Produced on the eve of the miracolo economico, these images are iconic condensations of the contrasting cultural horizons defining the national imaginary of 1950s Italy. Challenging the self-containment of these images, the essay journeys outside the frames into the surrounding historical, cultural and geographical landscapes. To explore how, through photography, Italy visually negotiated the persistence of the past and the advent of modernity, the author traces a genealogy of Italian photography from political action to paparazzismo and examines the significance of the ethnographic journey to the south. Pinna’s photography and de Martino’s ethnography emerge as sites where post-war Italy faces the intractable realities of death and the return of a ‘bad’ past. The essay investigates how ritual mourning engages the photographic image to reveal an amnesiac culture of the spectacle exposing Italy’s relation to history as a modern repressed.

Photographs play a crucial role in the ways the lives and deaths of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Aldo Moro are remembered in Italian culture. Locating photographs of the two men taken before and after their murders against the backdrop of the changes in photographic practice that took place in Italy from the period of the economic boom in the late 1950s through to the early 1970s, this article explores and compares the cultural meanings of the photographs of the bodies of these two very different but equally symbolic public figures, both alive and dead. Analysing the significance of these images in Italy in the 1970s and after, it notes how contemporary theoretical approaches to the medium – particularly in terms of understandings of mass media forms and the theoretical linking of photography and death – shaped how the photographs have been understood in relation to their social and political context. It argues that the afterimage of the photographs of the corpses of Pasolini and Moro is overlaid in Italian cultural memory over the visual record of the two men during their lives in a kind of mnemonic ‘double exposure’ that constitutes these bodies of images as collective icons of their times.

This article explores Gabriele Basilico’s photographs of the contemporary Italian environment and argues for their status as both iconic – that is to say, distinctive, highly visible, and memorable – and anti-iconic symbols or images. The discussion first explores the anti-iconic impulse in Basilico’s work. It marks out his standing as one of the most prominent proponents of the trend in contemporary Italian photography which sought to counter the mythic view of the country’s landscape and highlights his involvement in the trend’s seminal exhibition, Viaggio in Italia (1984). The article then makes a case for the simultaneous iconic nature of Basilico’s photographs by looking at the 2007/08 exhibition Milano si mostra. 1 Km con Gabriele Basilico, examining the ways in which Basilico’s images were made into icons of Milan’s urban identity.

Tony Gentile’s photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino is one of the most reprinted Italian photographs of the twentieth century. Deriving a special status from its connection to the lost dead bodies of the judges, Gentile’s photograph is a cultural icon, which makes demands on viewers in the present like an uncanny revenant from 1992. This paper considers examples of ways the photograph has been visually, symbolically and materially manipulated by social agents in the years since the judges’ assassinations, to reflect on the polysemous power of the photograph. Considering visual adaptations of the photograph from anti-mafia demonstrations to monuments, and commemorative stamps; from football stadiums to political cartoons, this paper will show how Gentile’s photograph has become the quintessential visual symbol representing the struggles over the memory and meaning of the war against the mafia in contemporary Italy.

Italian visual propaganda often makes use of well-established imagery, to exploit its proven impact. Renaissance masterpieces with religious subject matter were recurrently reproduced on political posters in the early post-war years and during the referenda campaigns of 1974 and 1981, mostly to characterise the parties as Christian. In Italy and elsewhere these images now tend to be employed in a secular way, for instance to denounce injustices and atrocities, and invite compassion and solidarity for the victims. Symbolic motifs traditionally associated with specific ideological traditions also used to feature strongly in Italian visual propaganda; they virtually disappeared in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Christian-Democrat and Socialist parties in the wake of the Mani pulite investigations, and the Communist Party’s transformation into a social-democratic party. They have been replaced by new icons. Iconographic motifs dear to fascism and Nazism, however, continue to be used, by stealth or unabashedly, by Italian far-right organisations.