Building memories/Writing new narratives. Discovering the Italian ‘Tecniche Sapienti’
Authors: Prencipe Monica , Mattogno Claudia 
Published: November 2024

In Italy many women have contributed to transforming the physical space: designers, philanthropists, landscape architects and city planning councilors, as well as militants and activists. Even after a series of pioneering studies since the 1990s – like the ones from the Milanese ‘Gruppo Vanda’ or the Roman ‘La Casa di Eva’– we still know very little about their work and impact on the wide discipline of architecture. Only in December 2021, the first all-female exhibition was inaugurated by the most important Italian architectural museum: the retrospective Good News. Women in Architecture at the MAXXI in Rome focused on a wide range of examples throughout the world and the Italian panorama was not the center of the exhibition, manifesting how nowadays is still fundamental to shed light on many other names to reconstruct an Italian gender genealogy. The limited visibility of these historical names of the XX century is the result not only of a diffuse delay by several Institutions but also of a very restricted availability of female architects’ archives, which represent today less than 4% of the total. Thanks to a wide survey of the Italian Archival Superintendency and other important channels of dissemination, like Wikipedia and the renowned blog ‘Un dià una arquitecta’, the first outcome of the paper is to highlight the difficult Italian current situation regarding female archives and raise awareness on several other names which still deserve attention from national institutions. In this complex panorama, a different and modern venture has been carried out by the University Sapienza in Rome since 2019, thanks to ‘Tecniche Sapienti’. The research focuses on discovering the biographies of the first women enrolled in the Faculties of Engineering and Architecture in Rome between 1910 to 1968, intercepting many unknown female pioneers and first graduates (in the capital city but in some cases also in Italy) in professions considered to be of male competence, challenging prejudices and stating their talents with determination. The project has been organized around four different objectives, which also represented different phases of the work: - ‘Naming’: this stage has been accomplished with a survey of the school yearbooks and the construction of lists and statistics about the female presence in the two faculties; - ‘Selecting’: after naming, scope of this phase was to select the figures with personal and career information; - ‘Knowing’: with the purpose to deepen some of the selected names, even with the discovery of new archives, like in the case of Bice Crova, Elena Luzzatto and Anna Gabrielli; - ‘Disseminating’: to raise awareness of women's role in architecture among national and international institutions. The initial reconstruction of the research ‘Tecniche Sapienti’ tried to draw on a plurality of documents and data, resorting to the yearbooks of the Faculties and the Sapienza Archive, but also other personal archives not yet systematized, and finally interviewing, when possible, the pioneers’ relatives and in some cases directly meeting some of them. Their stories have been organized following three periodizations linked to important events of the university: the ‘Pioneers’ (1910-1936), the ‘Mothers’ (1936-45) and finally the ‘Enterprising’ (1945-68). The first group – the ‘Pioneers’– starts in 1910 when the Title III of the university Regulations disrupts the order of the School for Engineers and allows female students. The second period – the ‘Mothers’- begins in 1936, the year in which the Schools of Engineering and Architecture were transformed into a Faculty and became part of Sapienza University. Finally ‘the Enterprising’ develops from 1946 to 1968, when the political disputes revolutionize the streets of our cities as well as the methods of accessing the university. The aim of the project is not only to build a gender genealogy of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture in Rome, but it could also represent the seed for a new narrative of a more inclusive Italian history of Architecture. The project has been carried out with a different approach, trying to unveil the stories behind each name of the yearbooks, focusing on figures not always indicated by scholars as significant. The research ‘Tecniche Sapienti’ also had the advantage to recreate a history built around the complex network of women gravitating around the university, rather than only individual stories.