Malleable monuments and comparative cultural property law: The Balbo monument between the United States and Italy

• Caponigri, Felicia ^[1]
  1. [1] Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame, IN, United States
• Localización: International journal of constitutional law, ISSN 1474-2640, Vol. 19, Nº. 5, 2021, págs. 1710-1737
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Still standing in situ today, the Balbo monument in Chicago has presented an especially monumental challenge for the Chicago community, including members of the Italian American community in Chicago. This article considers the laws which regulate cultural heritage in the separate territories of Italy and the United States, cultural property law and historic preservation law, respectively, in light of archival research on the behind-the-scenes maneuvers of the Balbo monument’s installation. In certain circumstances, historic property is not the same as cultural property, even though historic property and cultural property may at times overlap. Identity may more greatly inform one category over another through the law’s terminology, connections to place, and resulting historical connections. The central proposal of this article is that some monuments, as they are defined with reference to history under the law, seem so specific to certain histories and historical narratives that they might be meant to be, perhaps counterintuitively, malleable monuments. Despite their characterization as historic property or cultural property, malleable monuments should, can, and, at times, already do, proverbially bend to our shifting and evolving notions of identity as they are inevitably tied to our histories. In Italy, “malleable” may mean tangible monuments with changing symbolism and cultural significance; in the United States, “malleable” may mean embodied symbolism and cultural significance with the impermanence of tangible monuments. Permanence is not definitive of malleable monuments’ existence; rather, impermanence is. Recognizing the complexity of what it means to be Italian in America today through the Balbo monument, the article concludes, may mean accepting the Balbo monument as a malleable monument.