This article explores the transmission of national identity through the “things” that a nation is capable of producing and the environments that it is capable of creating; the article does this through a specific case study—post–World War II Italy—and a specific vector—large passenger ships. “Things,” as Remo Bodei (2015, 42) has stated, are an extension of the human body, able to interact with women and men and to help them understand the meaning in which they dwell and live, suggesting to them “il modo per farle parlare” (the way to make them speak).1
In this article, I examine, in particular, the things that are created as part of a unitary project of objects, furnishings, works of art, materials, new technologies, and references to history in the carefully designed rooms of the large vessels that maintained relations, almost exclusively until 1958, between the two sides of the Atlantic: ocean liners....
