ROME: FROM FASCISM TO LIBERATION

Fascist Design

There is not a clear-cut formula for recognizing the remnants of Fascist architecture. Much like the contradictory government itself, architects of the time differed by region and styles and movements often clashed from city to city and region to region (Doordan, 1983). Rome in particular adopted a neo-classical inspired style without the ornamentation and filth left over from the Liberal government. This style conveyed the continuity of the once-great Rome, while stressing a new, sterile, and monumental order under Mussolini, who desired to unite the capital under the imperial, mystic themes inspired by Romanitá. The modern architecture of fascism conveyed no particular movement’s message; Rome “reflected the persistent Fascist representation of Rome as the Mediterranean empire… intended to evoke associations with earlier imperial eras in the city’s history.”

The Master Plan

The concerns of the Master Plan regarded hygiene and aesthetics that conveyed art and art history. Mussolini’s picturesque Rome was best seen from the window of a speeding automobile on the new, widened roads cutting through Rome’s historic center where monuments stood tall in their newly isolated glory.

In architect Luigi Lenzi’s The New Rome, he reveals how both private and public architects presented separate plans that were combined to make the ultimate version of the Master Plan. The private Burbera Group consisted of younger architects that proposed isolating the ancient part of Rome to relieve congestion and make a new town square while the Roman Town Planning Society proposed leaving the current urban center untouched and building a new one elsewhere.  According to Lenzi, “both provided an ordered development at which the new growth was arrived at without harming the essential character of the old sectors.”

Influential Architects: Piacentini and the Rationalists

Though the Rationalist movement appeared during Mussolini’s reign, it was not the sponsored movement or style of ll Duce. This post war generation of architects aligned their styles with Fascist beliefs. Mussolini never officially backed the Rationalist movement, but he did employ some of its proponents in state building projects.

The young architects of the Rationalist movement are what Diane Yvonne Ghirardo described as more avant-garde and militaristic than the Piacentini. Their architecture was a direct reflection of the effect of Mussolini on the young generation that grew up in post WWI Italy. Rationalist architect Ernesto Rogers describes the connection between Rationalist architects and Mussolini when he said that the artists “based [themselves] on a syllogism which went roughly thus: Fascism is a revolution, modern architecture is revolutionary, therefore it must be the architecture of Fascism.” (Doordan 1983, 127)

One of the central architects of the Master Plan under Mussolini was Marcello Piacentini, an artist established prior to the fascist era commissioned by Mussolini for many of the government buildings of the State. Piacentini gained fame as an architect after a 1911 exposition of architecture and for his design for the Cinema al Corso. During the Fascist era, he edited Architettura, the most influential publication for the Fascist Union of Architecture. He was a leader of the Master Plan commissions, including the Esposizione Universale di Roma. Piacentini’s littorio style was more of a “purified classicism” that invoked “sterile imitations of the past.” He employed the feel of romanitá through restrained modernism with similar materials used in Imperial Rome, but he believed “the architect must imply forms convenient for our era” and discard frivolities that “lacked meaning and life.” (Ghirardo 216)

Piacentini’s power as an architect and his influential voice in the architectural community made him a useful tool to mitigate between the avante-garde youth generation of Rationalists and the pre-established traditionalists. Ghirardo suggests that a style known as Mediterraneita is the origin of the modernist rational style, a tradition of Italy’s Mediterranean coast. This style included white walls and rectangular or squared space derived from formulas. Mediterraneita was based on the “spirit of precise form,” and “For Piacentini, mediterraneita meant reasoned, well thought out architecture based on technical and spiritual necessities, solemn and enduring forms, forms that expressed a renewed spirit gifted with close links with the Italian past” (215).