The study of art topics faced in the periodicals published in Italy between
the nineteenth and twentieth century, revealed the extraordinary vitality of the
press that, since the earliest years of the twentieth century, increasingly lines
up, in the covered topics and in the critical activity, to the one of contemporary
national and European periodicals.
The richness and variety of the dealt topics, lets to reconstruct the great
ferment of ideas that characterizes the cultural and social framework of the
Italian nation, together with the achievement of political unity.
The first issue of TeCla - Review, carried out with the assistance of several
scholars, focuses on the different contribution and relationship between the
arts owing a lot to the Wagnerian ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk. This concept of
total work of art, in which lies the strong expression of the identity of a people,
helps to shape the varied and attractive cross section of the different aspects
of local cultures, and lies in numerous articles appeared in major newspapers,
from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the
twentieth century.
Therefore, issues related to art in its various forms (pictorial, musical,
theatrical, with attention to collecting, to museum studies, exhibitions, but also
to urban popular traditions, fashion, tourism, customs and society), more and
more frequently accompanied by illustrations and interesting photographic
collections, appear in the pages of periodicals.
Resumed by artistic movements such as Scapigliatura and vanguards of
the early twentieth century, connoted by significant methodological
contributions and by specific theoretical observations, we find these same
themes published in journals since the early twentieth century.