The Wulz Sisters Who Defied Fascist Italy With a Camera

A feature in the Guardian this week revisits the work of the Wulz sisters, Wanda and Marion, two photographers from Trieste who used their studio to defy the gender conventions of fascist Italy. The piece, by the Guardian's art desk, centres on their portraits of dancers, fencers and other prominent women, and on Mucincina, the family cat they posed in irreverent, staged scenes — including one that mocked Mussolini. "In those fascist times," Federica Muzzarelli, a scholar quoted in the article, told the Guardian, "women were not free. They were regarded as mothers and homemakers."

The sisters operated in the 1920s and 1930s, a period when the regime's visual culture was overwhelmingly masculine and monumental. Their counter-image — intimate, playful, and centred on female subjects — stands out in the historical record of Italian photography, which the foreign press has increasingly examined for traces of resistance.

For a region like the Marche, the story resonates beyond the studio. The Wulz sisters' work is a reminder that Italy's modern identity was shaped not only in Rome's piazzas but in provincial ateliers, where small craft businesses like theirs — a family firm, built on skill and local patronage — mirrored the dispersed industrial districts that still define much of central Italy's economy.

The Guardian's feature notes that the Wulz sisters' work has been the subject of renewed scholarly interest, with Muzzarelli among those arguing that their portraits of accomplished women functioned as a quiet rebuttal to the regime's idealisation of domesticity. The cat, Mucincina, appears in several images, including one where it is posed in a way that contemporaries read as a mockery of the dictator — a risky gesture in a state that policed public expression closely.

The sisters' story also speaks to the broader fate of Italian photography between the wars, a field where women found unusual room to work even as the regime curtailed their public roles. The Guardian article positions their output as part of a wider European avant-garde, linking Trieste's cosmopolitan port culture to movements in Vienna and Paris.

Seen from the Marche, the Wulz sisters offer a useful lens on how the foreign press now reads Italian cultural history: not as a single national narrative, but as a patchwork of local stories — family firms, regional cities, and individual craft — that together form the country's identity. It is a perspective that matches how international economic coverage increasingly describes Italy's manufacturing districts, where resilience is found in small, adaptable units rather than in grand national projects.