The Wulz Sisters' Camera Defied Fascist Italy

A new feature in the Guardian has brought renewed attention to the work of Wanda and Marion Wulz, two sisters who ran a photography studio in Trieste during the fascist era. According to the article, the pair defied what it calls the 'unbridled patriarchy' of Mussolini's Italy by photographing dancers, fencers and other celebrated women — as well as their cat, Mucincina, in a famous portrait that became a quiet act of rebellion.

The Guardian quotes Federica Muzzarelli, an academic, who notes that in those fascist times women were not free; they were regarded as mothers and homemakers. The Wulz sisters, by contrast, used their camera to present women as active, athletic and independent — a subversive image in a regime that prized domesticity and male authority.

For a region like Umbria, where the legacy of fascism lingers in stone-built towns and family archives, the story of the Wulz sisters is a reminder that resistance often took place far from the political stage — in studios, in portraits, in the careful framing of a subject's gaze.

The Guardian's feature centres on a single, striking image: the sisters' cat, Mucincina, posed with a raised paw in what has been read as a satirical salute to Mussolini. The photograph, taken in the 1930s, has become an emblem of the sisters' wit and their willingness to mock the regime from within a respectable profession. Wanda Wulz, the elder, was known for experimental work, including photomontages and solarisations, while Marion handled the studio's commercial portraits.

The sisters' subjects included athletes and performers — women whose bodies and careers contradicted the regime's ideal of the secluded housewife. By documenting them, the Wulz sisters created a visual counter-archive of Italian womanhood, one that the Guardian's piece argues has been undervalued in histories of photography. The article notes that their work is now being re-examined by scholars and curators, with Muzzarelli among those calling for wider recognition.

For inland Italy, the Wulz story resonates beyond Trieste. In Umbria's hill towns, similar archives of studio photography from the interwar years survive in parish collections and family albums, often unexamined. The Guardian's feature may prompt local historians to look again at such material for traces of quiet defiance — a woman fencer's portrait, a dancer's pose — that escaped the regime's censors.

The cat Mucincina, the Guardian notes, became a kind of mascot for the sisters' defiance. The image of a domestic pet returning the fascist salute was a joke that could pass as mere whimsy, yet it carried a sharp edge. That the photograph survives, and now circulates internationally, is a small victory for the sisters' belief that the camera could be an instrument of freedom.