The Wulz Sisters and the Cat That Fought Mussolini

A Guardian feature this week returns attention to the Wulz sisters, Wanda and Marion, the Trieste photographers who used their studio portraits to defy the patriarchy of fascist Italy. The piece, by the paper's culture desk, focuses on how the sisters photographed dancers, fencers and other famous women — as well as their cat, Mucincina — in a quiet but pointed act of resistance.

The Guardian quotes Federica Muzzarelli, a scholar of photography, on the conditions of the era: "In those fascist times," she says, "women were not free. They were regarded as mothers and homemakers." The Wulz sisters, the feature argues, weaponised their family pet and their camera against that confinement, producing images that celebrated female physicality and independence at a moment when the regime sought to reduce women to domestic roles.

The Wulz sisters operated in Trieste, a border city that in the 1920s and 30s was a laboratory of Italian fascism — and, precisely for that reason, a place where photographic modernism could carry an edge of defiance. The Guardian's feature situates their work within the broader European avant-garde, noting that Wanda and Marion ran a commercial studio while also experimenting with portraiture that broke from the stiff, official style favoured by the regime.

For a culture desk tracking Italy's artistic heritage as the foreign press frames it, the Wulz story matters on two counts. First, it corrects a long male-dominated canon: the sisters are far less known than their male contemporaries, and the Guardian's revival is part of a wider international reassessment of women artists of the interwar period. Second, it gives a concrete, human face to the relationship between culture and authoritarianism — a theme that continues to resonate in coverage of Italy's past and present.

The feature's focus on Mucincina, the family cat, is not mere whimsy. In the sisters' portraits, the animal appears as a companion and a prop, lending the images a domestic intimacy that stood in deliberate contrast to the regime's monumental, martial aesthetics. The Guardian's framing — that the sisters "weaponised" the pet — underscores how even the smallest gestures could carry political meaning under dictatorship.

The piece arrives as Italian cultural institutions and international museums increasingly revisit the work of women photographers of the fascist era. Whether the Wulz sisters will gain a wider exhibition presence remains to be seen, but the Guardian's feature is likely to prompt renewed interest among curators and collectors, particularly in the Anglo-American market where Italian modernism in translation has a steady audience.