HistoryCity series launches immersive app trail for Italy’s historic ‘fascist city’
The story of Trento during Italy’s Fascist era has been turned into an immersive app trail, with audiences transported back to the day that changed the course of the Second World War in Italy.
‘The Fascist City’ on the Hidden Trento app – one of the acclaimed HistoryCity series – has been created by historians at the University of Exeter with a team of Italian experts. It is set on 8 September 1943, the day Italy surrendered to the Allies. For Trento, this meant occupation, as the German army swept into the country and took control of the north.
The story of this dramatic day is told by Guido, a disenchanted Fascist official, and his daughter Emma, who has grown up under Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship. Caught between Nazi occupiers and Allied bombardment, Guido is trying to get Emma out of town to the relative safety of the mountains.
As the pair make their way to the train station, users of the app stop at nine sites that reveal the imprint of the Fascist era on today’s Trento – from the Casa del Fascio or Fascist headquarters, to Piazza del Littorio (today Piazza Cesare Battisti), a model of Fascist modernism constructed after the city centre was gutted, to the novel architecture of the Raffaello Sanzio school, where Emma is a student.
HistoryCity trail director Dr David Rosenthal said: “As the characters move through the city, Allied planes buzzing overhead, the sites you stop at – or tap if you’re offsite – prompt exchanges between Guido and Emma about the situation they see in front of them, or memories of that place. At Piazza del Littorio, for example, they recall a moment three years earlier, in 1940, when the piazza was packed to hear Mussolini’s declaration of war on the radio – and we use an excerpt from that broadcast. We also hear Guido’s internal reflections on the war. As immersive mobile public history this has been an ambitious project.”
The drama is brought to life by voice actors in English, Italian and German. The role of Emma is played in Italian and German by the Trentino actor Martina Scrinzi, the star of last year’s Vermiglio, which took the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and earned Scrinzi the best newcomer prize at Italy’s David di Donatello awards.
Meanwhile, at every site the storytelling is complemented by expert commentary, explaining what it was like for someone like Emma to grow up in Mussolini’s Italy, or how antifascists were hunted down, and sometimes tortured and killed in the city’s police headquarters.
By the middle of 1943 Italy was a war-battered and divided nation. After the Allies invaded Sicily in July, Mussolini was deposed and arrested. When the new leadership surrendered to Anglo-American forces on 8 September – the day the app trail is set – the Trentino region was annexed into the Third Reich. Mussolini did come back into the picture a few days later, after the Germans broke him out of jail, and in the rest of the north he led a Nazi puppet state that battled the Allies and Italian partisans until its final defeat in April 1945.
‘The Fascist City’ trail, the fifth trail on the Hidden Trento app, is a collaboration between HistoryCity and experts from the Italo-German Historical Institute; University of Trento; Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino; and Soprintendenza per i beni e le attività culturali della Provincia autonoma di Trento. It was supported by the Caritro Foundation.
HistoryCity apps include Hidden: Exeter, Venice, Valencia, Florence, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Deventer, Trento, Tours, and Landshut. The same team makes the HistoryScapes app, a parallel project in partnership with the National Trust, with trails at Saltram, Quarry Bank, and the Devil’s Punch Bowl in Surrey. All apps are free from the App Store and Google Play.
