Wulz sisters' subversive lens resurfaces in Italy's memory wars

A Guardian feature this week has brought renewed international attention to Wanda and Marion Wulz, the Trieste-based photography sisters who used their studio, their lens and even their cat Mucincina to defy the patriarchy of fascist Italy. The article, which draws on the work of academic Federica Muzzarelli, describes how the sisters shot dancers, fencers and other famous women in the 1920s and 30s — a quiet act of rebellion in an era when, in Muzzarelli's words, "women were not free. They were regarded as mothers and homemakers."

The Wulz sisters operated from the northeastern port city of Trieste, far from the salons of Rome and Milan, yet their portraits travelled. Their most famous image — a self-portrait of Wanda with the family cat Mucincina held above her head, its tail forming a defiant moustache — was a direct and witty jab at Mussolini's cult of masculinity. The Guardian notes the image has become an enduring symbol of artistic resistance to totalitarianism.

For Naples, the story of the Wulz sisters carries a particular resonance. This is a city that produced its own generation of women artists and photographers who worked under the same oppressive regime, often without recognition. The international spotlight on the Wulz sisters invites a broader question about how Italy remembers the women who resisted fascism, and how many of their stories remain untold.

The Guardian's piece arrives at a moment when Italy's relationship with its fascist past is under renewed scrutiny, both at home and abroad. The Wulz sisters' work was largely forgotten until recent decades, when feminist art historians like Muzzarelli began to recover it. The article cites Muzzarelli's research to place the sisters within a wider network of women photographers who used the medium to carve out professional identities in a society that denied them public roles.

The Wulz sisters' story is also one of place. Trieste, like Naples, was a city of contradictions under fascism — a cultural crossroads with a strong middle class and a tradition of cosmopolitanism, yet subject to the same brutal repression as the rest of the country. The sisters' studio, the Wulz Studio, was a family business that survived through the regime years, and their portraits of women — athletes, performers, writers — offered a counter-narrative to the regime's idealised image of motherhood.

The cat Mucincina, as the Guardian notes, became an unlikely symbol of defiance. The image of Wanda holding the cat aloft is now read as a parody of Mussolini's own posturing, a feline moustache mocking the Duce's famously shaved head and jutting jaw. The photograph has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections that trace the history of women in photography.

For Campania, the feature invites a reflection on the region's own visual history. Naples had a thriving photography scene in the early 20th century, with studios documenting the city's vibrant street life and its emerging middle class. But the role of women photographers in that scene is scarcely documented in international accounts. The Wulz sisters' story, as told by the Guardian, offers a lens through which to consider what has been lost — and what might still be recovered — in the South's own archives.

Muzzarelli's scholarship, cited in the article, frames the Wulz sisters as pioneers who used their art to assert a female gaze in a period of aggressive masculinity. The Guardian's feature is part of a broader reappraisal of women in Italian art history, a field that has gained momentum in recent years as museums and galleries across Europe revisit their collections. The question now is whether Italian institutions — and the international press that covers them — will extend that same attention to the women who worked outside the major centres, in cities like Naples.