Professor Flavia Marcello is a writer of place-based fiction with notes of, sometimes sardonic, humour where characters question their identity. Her biography of World War 2 Resistance fighter, Carla Capponi has been shortlisted for the 2026 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship.
She is an expert on the unique and multi-layered history of Rome with a focus on the Italian Fascist Period.
She is director of Synergy3 Consulting, teaches at WEA in Sydney and is a mentor with the Envisage Program.
Relations between Art & Architecture
I’m not technically an art historian but I am very interested in how art and architecture work together to produce an experience of space. This happens in the spaces of exhibitions, in temporary pavilions for expositions and other events like the Milan Triennale.
Then there are statues, bas-reliefs, mosaics and frescoes that are conceived and executed as part of the building itself. This happened a lot in the public buildings of the Italian Fascist period but is also common in religious buildings from churches to monasteries.
I have written quite a bit about how art and architecture worked together as part of political propaganda, especially in Rome’s EUR suburb, that was going to be site of the Rome Expo of 1942. It is also very common in Christian churches where frescoes that told stories of saints or events from the bible were used to communicate religious, and often political, messages. I am particularly interested in Annunciation paintings because of their strongly architectural imagery. Look out for a publication coming in 2018 on Fra Angelico’s Annunciation paintings at the Monastery of San Marco in Florence.
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There are strong connections between this topic the work I am doing in Innovation Heritage.
Photographs by Ian Woodcock
Photograph by Martino Passi