Miniature town models and memory: An example from the European borderlands

Miniature architecture: A brief history

Archeological evidence of the existence of miniature models of houses and places of worship in ancient societies has been found in excavation sites across the Mediterranean basin (Millon and Lampugnani, 1994: 19) and Central America (Busch, 1991: 11). According to Porter and Neale (2000: 2), ‘scaled down representations of objects and buildings have, in one form or another … been in existence since the dawn of antiquity.’ Even in their earliest history, these miniature models performed a variety of functions, including votive, symbolic and celebratory ones.

An early example of an architectural model of an entire city is a set of miniature buildings in silver, offered by the women of the northern Italian city of Parma as an amulet to the Holy Virgin, for the protection of the city against siege in 1247. According to a contemporary chronicler, Salimbene d’Adamo:

… the women of Parma … betook themselves with one accord to pray for the aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that she might help to free their city; for her name and title were held in the greatest reverence by the Parmese in their cathedral church. And, that they might the better gain her ear, they made a model of the city in solid silver, which I have seen, and which was offered as a gift to the Blessed Virgin; and there were to be seen the greatest and chiefest buildings of the city, fashioned of solid silver, as the cathedral church, the Baptistery, the Bishop’s palace, the Palazzo Communale, and many other buildings which showed forth the image of the city. (Coulton, 1907: 119)

Miniature cities in silver and gold were built in the centuries to follow in other European cities, with the same intended function to bestow supernatural protection to the full-scale cities they symbolically represented. Commemorative and celebratory city models were also customary, such as those of five German cities and the city of Jerusalem, crafted in painted lime-wood by wood turner Jakob Sandtner (1561–1574) for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria (Anderson, 2013: 149; Croy and Elser, 2001).

Architectural modelling during the Renaissance, with usage strikingly similar to present-day common practice, is particularly well documented. In 1994, a major exhibition titled The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture was held at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. ² Spreading over two floors and 37 rooms, and consisting of some 250 objects, including original models, reliefs, engravings, drawings, paintings, books, drafting implements and building tools, the exhibition brought the architectural model to public attention as never before. The central showpiece of the exhibition was the monumental wooden model of Antonio da Sangallo’s (1485–1546) project for St Peter’s basilica in Rome, built by Antonio Labacco. The largest remaining architectural model of the Italian Renaissance, big enough for an observer to walk into, was designed to show both the exterior and the interior of the structure in considerable detail (Millon and Lampugnani, 1994: 40). Research leading to the exhibition revealed that, much like today, models were used mainly for study, presentation, competition and guides to construction (p. 71). Although models continued to be built in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, very few have been preserved to the present day.

A notable assortment of models of classical, mostly Roman, architecture that belonged to the British architect and idiosyncratic collector Sir John Soane (1753–1837) is today part of the permanent display in his house and museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Models in Soane’s collection, made in cork or plaster, include those of famous buildings from the ancient world, either in their original form or as ruins. Additionally, there are models Soane himself made of his own architectural projects, which he used for presentation purposes and in teaching his students. Soane’s models thus delineate a rich life trajectory, from objects of use in the design process to exemplars, objects of a collector’s passion, and finally objects of institutionalized national heritage as part of the museum (Elsner, 1994; Richardson, 1989). In this, they offer a good example of objects with a social life of their own, one well within the range of the biographical possibilities our society allows, and indeed offered as an idealized model. Around the same time that Soane was building his collection, detailed cork miniatures of classical buildings were used as teaching devices ³ for architectural students and museum exhibits for the broader public.

With the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, miniature architectural models were used as important props of cultural memory to create a sense of national heritage and facilitate the nation-building process. In the French city of Châlons-en-Champagne, medical doctor Charles-Joseph Mohen (1818–1895) created over 700 wooden miniatures representing French architectural landmarks from the stone age onwards. ⁴ Another exemplary miniature catalogue of architectural heritage is that of the collection of 387 miniature buildings – residential villas, farmhouses, banks, churches, railway and petrol stations – built by Viennese insurance clerk Peter Fritz (1916–1992). The function of Fritz’s models, however, goes beyond ‘documentation’ and imitation of full-scale real landscapes. Made of an eclectic selection of materials readily at hand, including cardboard, plastic, cigarette packets, cut-up newspaper and pieces of fabric, these models have very little to do with a top-down nation-building narrative. Rather, they read the heritage narrative with a dose of irony and humour, and through an aesthetic of the banal and the everyday. The ‘biography’ of this collection is also of interest: it gained visibility on the global art scene when presented by Austrian artist Oliver Croy and architecture critic Oliver Elser at the 2013 Venice Biennale, as a curated installation titled The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz. Croy, who had discovered the collection 20 years earlier in a Viennese junk shop, calls it an ‘encyclopaedia of provincial architecture in the aftermath of modernism which is still to be found today, whether in Austria or elsewhere’ (Croy and Elser, 2001: 6). Unlike commercial miniature model manufacturers, such as the well-known toy manufacturer specializing in miniature railways, Faller, Fritz maintained an ethos of satire and ‘cheerful amateurism’ in his approach to representing reality.

At the beginning of the 20th century, model building was practised by architectural greats such as Antoni Gaudí, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others (Millon and Lampugnani, 1994: 72). Many of these models remain and are today exhibited in different museums. As an example, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) today holds a collection of some 294 architectural models, ‘representing 110 architects and including models made for study, for presentation, and solely for exhibition’ (Delidow, 2013: 1). Rather different in purpose and scope is the collection presented by Austrian architect and long-time Professor of Architecture, Friedrich Kurrent, at the Technical University in Munich in the volume titled Scale Models: Houses of the 20th Century ⁵ (1999). This collection represents a magnum opus produced by Kurrent’s students over the more than 20 years of his tenure. It consists of 200 models of houses designed by renowned architects – Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Taut, Rietveld, Schindler, Aalto, Plečnik and others – as well as models made by lesser known architects, or models that were never developed beyond the project stage.

Among the models held at MoMA, of particular note is the model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece, Edgar Kaufmann’s house Fallingwater, built in 1937 in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. The model was commissioned by MoMA in 1984 from architect and experienced model maker, Paul Bonfilio. As a commissioned museum piece, the miniature had to meet certain parameters set out by MoMA in order to provide physical presence of the famous building to the museum visitor. Bonfilio’s model painstakingly portrays not only the intricacies of Wright’s architecture, but also the interplay between the built and natural environment, including the ripples and waves of the waterfall that inspired the name of the house, rendered ‘natural’ in acrylic sheet (Bonfilio, 2000: 42). Bonfilio’s model is noteworthy because of the recognizable authorial imprint imparted on it by the model-maker. According to Margo Delidow (2013: 4), Bonfilio’s commissioned models, Fallingwater as well as others, ‘possess an unmistakable style that links the Fallingwater model to his shop, similar to how a painted portrait can be recognized for its artist rather than its subject’.

In addition to architectural models of single buildings, city models can be found as exhibits in museums, town halls, or indeed in any suitable urban public space, such as a park, pedestrian zone or the central city square. Observing city models could be seen as derivative of and inferior to walking the city streets, or as a bona fide way of experiencing the city in its own right. To quote Marian Macken (2007: 32):

There is the full-scale city, able to be walked around and become immersed within. Then there is the three-dimensional scale version, navigated differently, yet travelled over all the same. These city scale models document the urban situation, for viewers to understand the place within which the model resides.

The quality of the two versions of experiencing the city, however, is not the same. Megalopolises such as New York City and others can hardly be grasped as a whole by walking; yet, the scale model affords more of a bird’s eye view over the city, making the entirety, with its structures and the relationships between the parts more intelligible. According to Macken, scale models represent the city as a ‘cohesive, designed whole: an idealised, unweathered metropolis with definite parameters. The city is seen to develop in staccato-like bursts, jumping from one static instant to another’ (p. 32).

Probably the most widely known example of a city model is the Panorama of New York City, on display at the Queens Museum. Designed by city planner Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, this monumental work was built by more than 100 people in the course of three years. Accuracy of detail was of utmost importance, the original contract stipulating less than one percent margin of error between reality and the world’s largest scale model. According to Akiko Busch (1991: 26), Moses ‘saw the model … not simply as a temporary public exhibit but as a precise, permanent, and utilitarian planning tool’, and an ‘ongoing resource for architectural firms, community groups, city agencies and others involved in the growth and management of New York City’. More recently, the Panorama has been brought to life in commemorative performance to honour the victims of the 9/11 attacks, echoing the annual full-size Tribute in Light installation. ⁶ To reflect the wound that this watershed event left on the city, a year later, in 2002, the Twin Towers were removed from the museum exhibit and replaced with a miniature laser-driven Tribute in Light. Unfortunately, due to technical considerations – the continuing laser projection would have been detrimental for the model itself – this compelling performance was to last only one day. The Twin Towers were re-erected the following day and have been there since. The Panorama is a revealing instance of a ‘living miniature’ meant to follow the developments of its life-size object. Continuing updates may be conceptually attractive, but they depend on financial viability. To support the ongoing maintenance of the Panorama, Queens Museum has introduced the ‘Adopt a Building Program’, inviting donations from $50 for an apartment to $1,000 for a small building, in exchange for a ‘title deed’ for the ‘real estate property’ on the model itself. The Museum admits to not having yet taken a firm position on how the Panorama should be treated: as an artefact, a memorial, or a ‘breathing and reflexive sculpture’ (Rosenberg, 2015).

Alongside urbanistic and architectural models, hobbyist model-building also flourished during the 20th century. Over the last 50 years or so, John Henry Ahern’s (1903–1961) guides for model makers (1947, 1948, 1951) provided invaluable information about the practical aspects of the modelling craft. The books, richly illustrated with Ahern’s own drawings, have seen multiple reprints since their original publication and are still considered as benchmark texts by amateur model builders. A London-based insurance broker, Ahern was also a passionate traveller, photographer, car and motorcycle enthusiast and an accomplished master craftsman specializing in miniature buildings, landscapes and railways. His Miniature Building Construction: An Architectural Guide for Modellers (1947) covered the entire process of model building, from the selection of suitable objects for representation to the materials and techniques that would lend themselves to achieving desirable effects.

Written in a popular style and addressing the target audience of fellow modelling enthusiasts, Ahern’s book nevertheless implicitly touches on two issues that will figure more prominently in later academic debates in art and architecture theory: that of the impossibility of drawing a clear demarcation line between art and craft; and that of the double bind of the model, as simultaneously a surrogate object, and an object in its own right. He believed that a fine model was a work of art, on account of the passion, knowledge and skill the modeller required to be able to interpret an already existing original. The aesthetic canon he endorsed was thus one of utmost visual realism. He believed that a fine model was a work of art, on account of the passion, knowledge and skill the modeller required to be able to interpret an already existing original. Reportedly, he took great pleasure in showing photographs of his models to friends and ‘asking if they recognised where they might have been taken. Only later would he reveal that they had been looking at a model’ (Kitchiner, 1994: 300).

The model of Umag/Umago this article deals with, while bearing similarities with the classes of miniatures described above, nevertheless resists conventional classification. I explain this in a separate sub-section further below.

Models as objects of disciplinary inquiry

Models are employed in numerous fields of human activity, including architecture, art, science-related disciplines, philosophy, structural engineering, military machinery and vehicle industries, toy industries and hobby crafts. There is a vast, multidisciplinary literature concerned with scale models, which ranges from practical ‘how-to’ advice to architects and hobbyist model builders (Ahern, 1947; Bonfilio, 2000; Cowan, 1968; Knoll and Hechinger, 2008; Stavrić et al., 2013; Werner, 2011) to histories of model building (Millon and Lampugnani, 1994; Porter and Neale, 2000) and a multitude of theoretical studies focusing on the models’ aesthetic and epistemic aspects of interest within specific disciplinary discourses.

The medley of approaches goes hand-in-hand with the broad semantic field associated with the word itself. The word ‘model’ derives from Latin modulus, diminutive of modus, a ‘measure … one should not exceed, a limit, hence … way of doing something or of behaving’ (Partridge, 2006: 2020–2021). A model is thus a ‘small measure’, which either mirrors something that has prior existence, or sets a standard for something yet to be created. Both of these alternatives construe the model as something inextricably linked with, and dependent on, another entity, often larger and seen as ‘more real’ than the model itself. It therefore comes as no surprise that, across a range of academic disciplines, models are often theorized with a focus on orders of reality and the nature of representation more broadly.

There are different ways of categorizing scale models of built and natural landscapes. In architecture, they have been classified into two main groups according to their use: the primary group consists of a priori models, which are produced in the various stages of the design process, and the secondary, or a posteriori models, mainly for exhibition purposes (Deshayes, 1999; Smith, 2004; Stavrić et al., 2013). Study scale models include conceptual models created during the preliminary design stage, working models during design development, and presentation models in the contracting stage (Knoll and Hechinger, 2008: 13). Models in this category thus pre-date the execution of the object they represent, participating in its creation and, in a way, conjuring it into being. Secondary or exhibition scale models are made a posteriori, and can serve a range of purposes, including education, community building, commemoration and celebration. Shadowing architects, urban planners and engineers, artists and hobbyist model builders have variously engaged in a priori and a posteriori model construction.

Temporality is central to the representational status of a scale model and ultimately to its meaning-making. According to Marian Macken (2015), it is integral to the lifetime of the full-scale architectural object, from the time of making, to that of inhabiting, recollecting and repositioning’. Elsewhere, Macken (2007: 67) reflects on the widespread understanding of secondary models as ‘neutral documentation, whose original looms large’. Instead, she argues, they should be seen as both versions of the city and simultaneously independent of it. To define them otherwise, she continues, undermines their ‘power of representation’.

Milica Topalović has reflected upon the model’s complex temporality in her contribution to the thematic issue of the OASE Journal for Architecture, titled ‘Models: The idea, the representation and the visionary’:

The reality of a space is brought to question when its attributes contradict conventional experience; for example, when a space or a place seems to be doubled or multiplied, when a place thus comes to act for another place, and the reality of both the original and replica loses credibility. Doubt is also cast on the reality of a space when a time shift is involved, when a space seems to try to enact an event or a setting from the past or in the future. The space of a model always seems unreal, as it comprises precisely these kinds of time and space shifts; a model always points beyond its specific geographic and temporal coordinates to a different space and a different time. In the space of a model, here becomes there, and now becomes then. (Topalović, 2011: 37)

The notion of models having an aesthetic and ideational existence in their own right, which does not depend on the full-scale architectural object they represented, is relatively new, originating in the late 1970s. The shift first became evident in the fields of art and architecture. The groundbreaking event was the exhibition ‘Idea as Model’ staged at New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1976. In the Preface to the catalogue, published five years later, Peter Eisenman (1981) wrote that models could possess an ‘almost unconscious, unpremeditated, even generative, effect on the design process, that is, a similar effect to that of a two-dimensional projection to provoke unforeseen “structural” developments or even modes of perception in the process of design’. ‘Idea as Model’ was followed by other similar displays. Models also became legitimate objects of academic study and were taken up in the 1980s and 90s as the central theme of numerous academic articles. The idea of architectural models as marketable art has had increasing currency ever since and has been capitalized upon successfully by architects such as Frank Gehry or Michael Graves.

Olafur Eliasson, among others, has lent his name to the view that ‘reality’ and the ‘model’ are not two separate spheres. Echoing Baudrillard’s (1983, 1994) theory of the simulacrum, he affirms:

Every model shows a different degree of representation, but all are real. We need to acknowledge that all spaces are steeped in political and individual intentions, power relations, and desires that function as models of engagement with the world. No space is model-free. This condition does not represent a loss, as many people might think, deploring the elimination of unmediated presence. On the contrary, the idea that the world consists of a conglomeration of models carries a liberating potential as it makes the renegotiation of our surroundings possible. (Eliasson, 2010: 19)

In philosophy of science, Finnish philosopher Tarja Knuuttila (2004) has argued that conventional theories, which interpret models as ‘representations’ or ‘mediators’, fail to capture their full epistemic potential. She proposes a different conceptual framework, with models understood as epistemic artefacts. Models, she claims, have a variety of intended uses, including –but not limited to – representation. According to Knuuttila, it is the material dimension of models that allows them to act as ‘collective objects of knowledge’, with a more complex relationship to reality than the representational theories would have us believe.

Anthropologists have approached models from a different perspective, focusing on the social dynamics of the architectural design process. Using the methodological framework central to science and technology studies (STS), Albena Yaneva (2005) conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam. Observing the design meetings and other instances of formal and informal communication at the Office, she identified a range of factors that played an important role in the decision-making, including the affordances of materials and scoping instruments, previous choices, client demand, city politics, site specificity and users’ expectations (p. 871). Yaneva’s observations resonate with the arguments by Eliasson and Knuuttila, albeit from a different disciplinary perspective. Arguing that models neither refer to a particular defining reality or a transcendental centre, she concludes that the final product of architectural design is not the building as a finished product: rather, it is ‘something quasi-unreachable and at the same time ever-present in all models and states: a multiple, cumulative object visible through all of them and in the movements connecting them’ (p. 888).

Finally, research focusing on scale models in cultural heritage and museum studies has brought to the fore the role of the scale model in the construction of individual and collective memory of traumatic life events. Australian Andrea Witcomb has studied a miniature model of the Nazi extermination camp of Treblinka, created by Chaim Sztajer, one of the camp’s survivors. ⁷ Witcomb’s main interest is in revealing how this scale model acts as a conduit for an affective response to past experiences by the audiences. Rejecting the notion of the miniature object being a mere representation of the Holocaust, she argues that it should be understood as memory itself, brought out into the open through its materiality. The model, she says, works by activating ‘empathy in the present, rather than for past victims. Rather than offering an unrealistic claim to experience the past’, it ‘provides a glimpse into ongoing grief’ (Witcomb, 2010: 47).

The scale model in Witcomb’s study ‘invites’ the viewer to respond to it affectively, emotionally and cognitively, and ultimately to partake in the grief of its creator. Witcomb seeks to explain why her own reaction to the miniature was so powerful. Why did it touch her in a way that no other object in the museum did? She concludes that what makes this particular model different is that it is

impregnated with the emotions of its maker and his status as a survivor. By being made literally from the memory of one man, it becomes more than a re-creation and more than an interpretative tool. In some important though hardly perceptible way, this model becomes a link to the past by virtue of the fact that someone’s memory and lived experience is embodied within it and given material form. (p. 45)

My own approach in this study builds upon a range of insights discussed above. Like Eliasson, Knuuttila and Yaneva, I do not see the scale model as a mere ‘trace’ or ‘reflection’ of another reality of a ‘higher order’, but rather in its own right. There is no doubt that Favretto’s model inspires affective response in a way similar to Sztajer’s miniature: imbued with its creator’s sorrow caused by displacement and dispossession, it is literally his memory materialized. It seems to open a direct window onto the trauma of exile, producing empathy and visceral identification.

The social biography of a miniature model

Favretto’s model is endowed not only with its own autonomous existence and affective power, but also with considerable social agency and, in particular, with the power to mobilize memory communities.

My focus on the ‘social life’ of the model has its roots in the notion that objects have their own ‘cultural biographies’, championed famously in Arjun Appadurai’s edited volume The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986). This influential monograph inaugurated, 30 years ago, a ‘turn to things’ in the social sciences, by placing ‘things’ discursively at the centre of the processes of social reproduction. Anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and cultural studies practitioners turned their attention from the value of things as preordained by the producer towards the many shifting roles they perform over their life cycle in their social and cultural contexts. What used to be called ‘objects’ now became ‘things’, being afforded agency in their own right. The term ‘object’ was seen as ‘compromised’ by its history, always as one pole of a binary distinction: subject/object, self/other, mind/matter.

In his contribution to The Social Life of Things, Igor Kopytoff described the things’ lifetime as involving numerous potential shifts into and out of the state of being a commodity: what is considered a commodity at a particular time, may become a singular object not defined by its exchange value at others. Kopytoff (1986: 66–67) offers a set of questions one could ask when writing the biography of a thing, similar to those that would normally be taken into consideration when writing people’s biographies:

What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?

Kopytoff’s questions resonate with many of the questions I am asking in this article: Who was Benjamino Favretto and what are the traumatic life experiences his miniature model materializes? What are the possible scenarios of social life a miniature hometown can perform? What was the role assigned to it by its creator? What other social roles has it performed, and in what circumstances? What different periods of its life can be identified, and how are they related to the recent social change in the Istrian borderlands?

Flights and arrivals, clashes and renewed fusions

At this point, a brief explanation of historical context is in order. Umag/Umago is a small harbour town in Istria, a peninsula in the north-western Adriatic. Historically, Istria has been part of Europe’s borderlands, where the Latin, Slavic and Germanic worlds met and mingled. Istria as a whole, in the poetic words of its native literary author and activist Marino Vocci (2002: 11), is a land ‘in between’, ‘of flights and arrivals, of clashes and renewed fusions’.

Following half a millennium as part of the Venetian Republic (1269–1797) and roughly a century under Austrian rule (1797–1918, with a Napoleonic interregnum between 1806 and 1815), Umag/Umago came under Italy in 1918 and remained within its borders throughout the interwar period and World War II. ⁸ Italy’s capitulation in 1943 marked the onset of the exodus of the Italian population from Istria, Rijeka/Fiume and Venezia Giulia. In 1947, the Paris Peace Treaty divided Istria between Yugoslavia and the so-called Free Territory of Trieste, which was in turn divided into zone A, under allied administration, and zone B, controlled by the Yugoslav army. ⁹ Umag/Umago fell within zone B. In 1954, London Memorandum assigned zone A to Italy, while zone B passed fully to Yugoslavia. Between 1943 and 1955, about 200,000 to 350,000 people, mostly – but not exclusively – Italians, left Istria to seek refuge across the border (Ballinger, 2004: 32).

With its Venetian past and its Italian majority population, Umag/Umago was among the centres from which the exodus took place. Fulvio Tomizza, a well-liked literary author and postwar emigré originally from the village of Juricani/Giurizzani in the Umag/Umago district, describes the long queues of people waiting to submit their departure papers in the Umag/Umago town hall in Materada, the first novel in his Istrian trilogy:

The line at town hall came down the steps and all the way out to the gate; and everyone in it was waiting to appear before the windows of the emigration office. But things were moving along fast, and people were pushing their way up the stairs. They were from Giubba and Salvore, from Seghetto, Gezzi, and Madonna del Carso. (Tomizza, 2000[1960]: 109)

For many of these exiles, including Beniamino Favretto, the creator of the miniature model examined in this article, Trieste was the first port of call. It was in Trieste that the Famiglia Umaghese, a homeland association of exiles from the Umag/Umago area and member of the Trieste-based Unione degli Istriani, was founded in 1959. The Famiglia Umaghese is among those exiled communities that have in recent years sought to heal the divide between the ‘esuli’ (‘exiles’, or those Italians who left Istria after World War II) and the ‘rimasti’ (those who remained within the territory of former Yugoslavia. In Umag/Umago’s current demographic makeup, Italians are a minority: of the 13,467 inhabitants counted in the township in the 2011 Croatian census, 1,962 (or 14.57 per cent) are of Italian nationality (Buršić, 2011: 52–53, 107).

The master craftsman, the trauma of displacement and the social life of the miniature Umag/Umago

Before leaving his hometown as part of the Italian–Istrian post-World War II exodus, Beniamino Favretto had his woodworker’s studio right at the symbolic heart of Umago, just behind the iconic bell tower emblazoned with the relief of the Venetian lion in the historic town centre. Along with another master artisan, Emo Rossi, Favretto is credited with carving, in the 1930s, the wooden choir behind the main altar of the town cathedral.

At the outbreak of World War II Favretto was a sailor on board the Urania, a passenger ship owned by Lloyd Triestino. When he finally returned to Umago after the war, he found that his house had been completely demolished by bombing and decided to join the exodus to Trieste. This was a difficult period for Trieste, which was then the first port of call for the Istrian exiles and was struggling under the pressure of having to provide decent existence for them. In the mid-1950s, Favretto and his wife decided to emigrate to the United States, where Favretto found a job assembling pre-manufactured wooden homes. Although this meant that he was able to continue working with wood as his main material, this job did not give him fulfilment. ‘Deep down’, Corrado Cattonar told me,

my grandfather was an artist, he was very proud of his work and always made it passionately his own. So this job in the United States did not give him satisfaction, because he could not express what he had inside, and also because he was in a country where he did not know the language …

This is why, in his spare time, he indulged in building miniature passenger ships, based purely on his own imagination, that is, without having any particular model in mind. The miniatures were perfect in minute detail and indeed resembled full-size passenger ships, the French SS France (1912–1936) and the Italian SS Cristoforo Colombo (1954–1982). When, after several years in the United States, Favretto and his wife decided to return to Trieste, they left the miniature ships behind, in the safekeeping of their US-based children.

Once retired, Favretto began the construction of his miniature Umago, with the intention of bequeathing it to his homeland association, the Famiglia Umaghese. ‘He did it mainly for them, to have the memory of the town as it used to be, and to give life to the thought of returning, if only for a couple of minutes, to their town of birth’, says Cattonar. In fact, even before that, he had taken delight in re-constructing the Umago of his memories in painting and verse. At the back of his paintings, he wrote the names and the surnames of the people who lived in the houses that were depicted, along with the family nicknames used there to distinguish between distantly related families bearing the same main surname. His paintings are now in the possession of the Favretto-Cattonar family on either side of the Atlantic.

The Umago in which Favretto had spent half of his life was small enough for him to remember in considerable detail. For each miniature house of his scale model, he knew who lived there, and what stories about them were in circulation. With his paintings, old photos and postcards as promemoria, he was well equipped to convey a sufficiently lifelike image of his city, as an instrument of healing for his compaesani Umaghesi. If there is something he did not remember, he could ask someone from the tightly knit community of exiles. He worked on his scale model in a small room in his rented apartment converted into an artist’s studio, opposite the Burlo Garofalo Hospital in Trieste. Corrado Cattonar remembers:

He practically slept in that little room, and I often … I grew up in that little room. There was a desk there, with all sorts of implements, and well, I am also a woodworker today. I have beautiful memories of my grandfather who was building this scale model, and I was there with all these little pieces of wood, constructing and then painting my tiny ships … because, that is another thing that I inherited from him, a passion for passenger ships.

Today, as the Vice-President of the Famiglia Umaghese, Cattonar asserts his own feeling of rootedness in the Umago of his grandfather’s dreams.

Back in the 1970s, Favretto’s miniature hometown gradually grew in size and careful detail. When it was presented for the first time at the Unione degli Istriani, the audience could watch the bright light of the moon (a strategically placed light bulb) descend over the tiny houses, which were also illuminated from inside: a living spectacle for the nostalgic Umaghese community. ‘Regrettably’, says Cattonar, ‘I later had to remove the little lights from inside the houses, when I was preparing the scale model for its temporary placement in the museum.’ The removal of lighting, the ‘one tool available to model makers that can suggest [the] more atmospheric qualities of architecture’ (Busch, 1991: 81), revealed the precariousness of the life of all miniature models, suspended as they are between desire, artistic intent and constraints of more practical nature, whether technical, financial or political. Miniature Umago here resonated with the Panorama of New York City, unable to reproduce the Tribute of Light due to technological barriers, and subsequently suffering a sort of ‘identity crisis’, oscillating between aspirations to live with the city, and to freeze the past as it once was.

In the meantime, once launched into the public sphere, the scale model continued its social life with mixed fortunes. The offices at the Unione were not spacious enough to house the rather large construction, and Favretto had to find another home for it. Like its creator in the 1950s, the model itself crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1974. There, it remained ‘dormant’ in the family house of Favretto’s US-based son, exhibited as needed to the local community of Istrian exiles.

The miniature Umago received a new lease of life in the 1990s with the dismantlement of Cold-War geopolitics, the dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the unfolding of a memory boom in postmodern societies across the globe. As part of the renewed interest in cultural memory, the first large gathering of Istrians and Dalmatians worldwide was held in Trieste in September 1997. To honour this occasion, Favretto’s model was invited to cross the ocean yet again. There were also plans to institute a new museum of Istrian and Dalmatian culture in Trieste, which gave reasonable assurance that the miniature hometown would not remain homeless once it returned to the ‘old continent’.

Several years later, the model crossed borders again. This time, it was the border – or borders – that many exiles for decades were reluctant or refused to cross. The model returned to the mythical hometown of its creator, to be exhibited at the Italian Community premises in Umag/Umago itself. This exhibition was visited by political dignitaries of the highest calibre, and received considerable media attention. At this point, there were even thoughts of leaving it there permanently, at the request of the Umaghese Italian Community. Corrado Cattonar, who had been the main caretaker and agent for his grandfather’s model for some years now, had to make the decision in agreement with the Trieste-based Famiglia Umaghese, which had helped finance the transport of the model back to Europe.

By now, the situation in Trieste had changed: the Unione degli Istriani had expanded its offices and now had enough room to house the model. In 2009, the miniature was moved to the premises of the Civico Museo della Civiltà Istriana Fiumana e Dalmata. For that occasion, Corrado Cattonar gave it a major facelift, repairing the broken or decayed pieces, removing the accumulated dust and finally placing it under a plexiglass cover, to protect it from further damage. He explained: ‘When it is on display, everyone would go, wow, look at this and look at that, and would touch a piece, or a little house, so it was necessary to find a more permanent conservation solution’.

Despite its current glass-enclosed museal existence, his miniature has not lived its life in isolation. Rather, as I have sought to demonstrate above, it has performed many different functions, from healing to grounding, from family ‘assembling’ to reproducing identity and community. It has had a rich social life, travelled far and wide and has had numerous ups and downs while moving through the intricate networks of family, exile community in Trieste, Istrian diaspora in the United States, and the Italian population on both sides of the border, in which the deep division between the esuli and the rimasti is yet to be overcome. It has taught life lessons to younger generations of the family, given healing to the displaced community of fellow countrymen, and even made important steps towards cross-border reconciliation.

Under a glass dome

For exiles, Umago is the most beautiful place on earth. Yet, the nostalgic memory of an exile has very little in common with the town’s postwar development. In the past, says Tomizza (2000[1960]):

The heart and soul of the place used to be the pier, the church, and Mrs. Nina’s hotel. It has now shifted to Punta, where the new hotels rise out of the woods and the rocks. Today the old town is completely abandoned. Everyone’s left, as if they didn’t care about the new town or knew it hadn’t been built for them. Amidst those houses of another era, squeezed together around the bell tower, all you meet are cats and an occasional old man sunning himself and ready to tell you all about the winds and tides, and relate stories of bygone days. (pp. 108–109)

In our daily experiences of a particular place, we seldom notice the minor changes that occur from one day to another. Place changes require a perspective of longue durée. They are most acutely observed and sometimes most viscerally suffered by exiles. What was it like in the old days? How did it feel to live there? Stories of places travel from one generation to the next. The impulse to preserve a sense of place associated with the lost homeland and to pass it on to one’s offspring is strong among displaced populations.

The miniature Umag/Umago recreates the town as remembered by Favretto, with the pier, the cathedral, Favretto’s joinery and the old hotel named after the Venetian lion, the Leon D’Oro, as its focal points. Other interwar-period landmarks, labelled and listed on a separate plaque, include the parish hall, the municipal building, the civic tower, the bishop’s house, the churches of Saint Rocco and Our Lady of Sorrows, the kindergarten run by the nuns of Providence, the police headquarters, doctor’s surgery, pharmacy, primary and vocational schools, maritime authority and the after-work social club (Italian, dopolavoro). ¹⁰ The miniature is a work of history, explains Cattonar:

Umago has since then undergone a tremendous change. Unfortunately, the Germans mined the harbour as they were withdrawing at the close of World War II. They destroyed not only the entire quay, but also the houses closest to the water … so a great deal was demolished already then. Then Yugoslavia decided to raid the historical centre a little bit to build a hotel there, but that hotel was never really popular, because obviously there are other hotels right on the promontory … Umago was used by the Yugoslav regime as experimental ground for new buildings … Even on the other side of the harbour, they built these little restaurants without much planning, and upsetting the people living there. And now, what has been done, has been done.

With its ‘frozen’ temporality, Favretto’s miniature model denies post-war changes that have threatened to turn Umag/Umago from a ‘place of home’ to a ‘non-place’. The model thus resembles the imaginary city of Fedora, described by Italo Calvino in his Invisible Cities (2013: 32). In Fedora, says Calvino, we find a strange museum, in which imagined alternative futures of the city are displayed as miniature models covered by crystal globes. In every age, he explains, someone would look at Fedora as it was at the time and would want to represent it as an ideal city. Yet, by the time the miniature city is completed, Fedora itself has changed so much, that the ideal prototype is no longer viable. The museum, nevertheless, serves an important purpose: here, each visitor can find a city of their own, which corresponds to their most intimate desires. The conclusion of Calvino’s vignette is that both the big stone Fedora and the little Fedoras enclosed in crystal globes equally deserve to be included in the maps of Kublai Khan’s empire, ‘not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions’.

A thing that resists easy classification

Miniature buildings, vehicles, people and animals surround us at all times from early childhood onwards, as dollhouses, miniature soldiers and ships in a bottle. As the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1980[1938]) convincingly demonstrated, play was a seminal factor in the development of human culture. Following Huizinga, the eminent ‘historian of the city’, Lewis Mumford (1967: 7) argued that, long before becoming capable of transforming nature, humans had ‘created a miniature environment, the symbolic field of play, in which every function of life might be refashioned in a strictly human style, as in a game’. These make-believe miniature environments are nothing but symbolic culture, which, according to Mumford, distinguishes humans from other living creatures.

Microcosms offer the viewer a unique vantage point, from which it is possible to observe an entire world both phenomenologically and conceptually. The urge to construct microcosms has been part and parcel of our cultural history. As a particular kind of microcosm, town models are often displayed in town halls and other public places, with the purpose of promoting civic spirit and encouraging identification with the broader community.

In his book Remaking the World (1996), literary scholar James Roy King thus argues that model-making provides pleasure and insight ‘and perhaps a few hints regarding possible revisions of the world’ to both the model-maker and his or her audiences (p. 3). King distinguishes between model-making enthusiasts working at home with limited resources and professional modellers requiring extensive funds for specialized training and elaborate tools. The division, however, is not clear-cut: model-makers today fall anywhere along the spectrum between these two poles, ‘interested in the latest technical developments but with eyes always open to materials found throughout the house that can be put to use in their work’ (p. 6).

The creator of miniature Umag/Umago likewise defies conventional categorization. A skilled artisan, Favretto is described by his grandson as primarily a ‘good man and hard worker’, who took every opportunity to recreate his lost home through a variety of different media. At his home in Trieste, Cattonar keeps a painting by Favretto, representing his old house; on the reverse of the painting, an inscription in Favretto’s handwriting reads:

My home, in my heart you will always be the most beautiful of all, more beautiful than the palaces of Babylon or those of the pharaohs. Toll, oh bells of my township and, with your tolling, pay homage to us scattered around the world.

Favretto’s miniature hometown measures approximately 2.80 m in length and 1.80 m in width. It is made of plywood, with roofs of the houses in cardboard, tree tops made of rubber foam and grains of rice representing rocky reefs. This creative bricolage of materials at hand reveals an aesthetic similar to that of the Viennese model maker Peter Fritz, discussed elsewhere in this article. Like Fritz, Favretto is neither a professional architect nor a historian. ¹¹ His primary purpose is neither a mere accuracy of record, nor artistic value for its own sake. While Fritz builds his own miniature collection to catalogue the types of buildings likely to be encountered in the Austria of his time, Favretto intends to signify home – the ‘place of all places’ – and thus provide a trigger for identification to his ‘extended family’, the Famiglia Umaghese.

The miniature Umag/Umago is suspended between technology and poetry, science and art, materiality and nostalgia. Its verisimilitude is sufficiently compelling to appeal to the imagination of the audience: a traditional Istrian urban setting, complete with stone walls, façades painted in pastel colours, window shutters in shades of brown and green and the landscaped geometry of the public park. Two miniature Italian flags strategically placed in the town centre speak for themselves, branding ‘home’ in national terms: a gesture that resonates with the foundational narrative of the exodus as a desperate undertaking by those who refused to sacrifice their Italian national identity.

Any distortions in scale and distance correspond to the magnitude of the symbolic capital a particular landmark carries for the exiled community. As an example, the iconic 12th-century church of Saint Pellegrin is shown as adjacent to the town centre, while the actual distance of 4 kms is indicated textually on a plaque accompanying the exhibit (Figure 1). This church, consecrated to Umag/Umago’s patron saint, Pellegrin, is a signifier of the identity of the exiled Umaghese community, gathered around the eponymous Trieste-based association, the Famiglia Umaghese San Pellegrino. The symbolic link between the town and the church thus justifies the church’s placement within the miniature, even though this means that the principle of fidelity of scale cannot be fully observed.

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Figure 1.

Front left, the Church of San Pellegrino. © Photograph: Corrado Cattonar.

Claude Lévi-Strauss placed art halfway between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought and described the miniature scale model as the universal prototype of artwork. All miniatures, he argued, have an inherent aesthetic quality and, conversely, most artworks are small-scale (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 22–23). While we develop knowledge of a real object by first gaining knowledge of its component parts and then proceeding to observe the whole, in the case of the miniature, the process happens in reverse. A smaller and simpler object seems easier to grasp in its entirety, providing gratification and a ‘sense of pleasure which can already be called aesthetic on these grounds alone’ (p. 24). The miniature Umag/Umago similarly bestows fulfilment, allowing the audience to contemplate ‘home’ as an ‘unbroken experience’, something within reach and a sum total of impressions internalized from old postcards and family photographs.

The ‘magical’ element is equally prominent: a glass tray containing a handful of soil and marked with the label, ‘earth from our Umago’ (Figure 2). What a majority of museum visitors do not know – whether they themselves belong to the exiled Umag/Umago population or not – is the deep meaning this soil has for the Favretto/Cattonar family.

This is something not many people know, that is, only people from our family know it, and you will know it now … My grandfather was buried in Umago. But he was buried there ten years after his passing. It was then that it became possible for [the exiles] to bury their relatives there. Because when my grandfather was dying, I will always remember it, he began to cry, look, he cried as a child, I will always see him in my mind covering his face with his hands, when he sadly realised that death was approaching and that he would not be able to go to Umago, to be buried there, although he had a family grave there. Because it was still during Tito’s regime, and it was not allowed. So he was buried in Trieste for ten years, but believe me, this was always important to me, I used to go to the cemetery and say, nonno, I know you are here now, but you are not resting in peace. Luckily the things changed after the fall of the regime, so we could take his remains to Umago and that is where he is now resting, in his family grave. And what others do not know is that I took some earth from the place where he is buried and, before covering his model with plexiglass, I put a little bit of that earth on his house and said, there, now you are at home … There, I am shivering when I think about that. (Corrado Cattonar)

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Figure 2.

Miniature Umag/Umago before the installation of the plexiglass cover. In the forefront, the ‘magical elements’: soil, starfish, shells and rocks. © Photograph: Corrado Cattonar.

Together with several sea-scallop shells, starfish and fossilized sea sponges, this soil bestows the miniature Umag/Umago with a spiritual dimension (Figure 3). These things are integral to, yet ontologically different from the town model as a whole. Through them, mere likeness is elevated to embodied presence. In a similar fashion, the creator of the Fallingwater model discussed earlier in this article, Paul Bonfilio, used a piece of stone from the actual site in the miniature landscape, so it could be the ‘soul of the model’ (Bonfilio, 2000: 80). In Bonfilio’s model, the piece of stone conjures up the presence of place, paying homage to the object of representation; in Favretto’s model, the sand added by Cattonar summons up the presence of the model-maker, making a meta-textual statement about his symbolic inseparability from the place he had considered ‘home’. The ‘enchanted’ elements often remain unknown to the ‘uninitiated’ observer. Simultaneously an icon and a relic, the miniature thus touches the audience differently, depending on the underlying narrative each individual observer has access to, and the different collective he or she identifies with.

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Figure 3.

Flag and ‘magical’ objects. © Photograph: Corrado Cattonar.

Conclusion

The ‘reality’ of our world, Hannah Arendt (1998: 95) contended, depends both on the existence of human witnesses to our experience, and on reification, or materialization of remembrance. The miniature Umag/Umago represents an attempt to ‘freeze’ meaningful moments in the life of its creator and thus save them from transience. The selected temporal snapshot is associated with a major transition Favretto experienced both in his personal life and in the life of his community.

Despite not knowing the rich history of Favretto’s miniature the moment I first saw it, and despite not ‘belonging’ to any of the collectives it appeals to, I responded to it with strong affect: the model touched me with its magic, in a way that a written historical narrative would not have been able to. Like the imagined visitors of Calvino’s Fedora, I experienced the Umag/Umago model ‘exonostalgically’, as a mythical place of my own. Here, I borrow the concept of ‘exonostalgia’ from a recent article by anthropologist David Berliner. In this article, Berliner (2014: 376) distinguished between ‘endonostalgia’, or nostalgia for a personally experienced past, and ‘exonostalgia’, or ‘a vicarious nostalgia … which encompasses discourses about loss detached from the direct experience of losing something personal, nonetheless triggering a whole array of affects’. ¹²

The power of Favretto’s miniature thus extends beyond the context of Istrian exile. With its rich social life, its frozen temporality, its bricoleur aesthetics and the surrounding narrative of a belonging that is no longer possible in our deterritorialized, ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000), the miniature provides relief and acts as an ideal catalyst of postmodern subjectivity.