Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Preamble
Rape ... The third sack ... Betrayal of historic patrimony. For many who know and love Rome, what has happened to it in the last one hundred years can only be characterized in such terms. After the Goths and the Vandals, after the mercenaries of Charles V in 1527, the fateful city succumbed one final time to a spectacular ravaging. lt carne at the hands of its own people-politicians, landowners, speculators-who destroyed a third of its built environment and more than half of its green in the name of progress and urban renewal. For others, what has happened was necessary. Rome too, despite the Colosseum and the imperial fora and St. Peter's and Piazza Navona, had to become a modern city. lt had to cope with implosive population and the motor caro This exhibition is not designed to justify the stance of one side or the other. On this issue, it is too easy, too simple, to be polemical. Rome is everybody's city. lts monuments and its great _public spaces ha ve been a staple of the Western experience, like the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare. Man-handling this experience excites and angers us alI. Understandably so. We are choosing not to be polemical. Our aim is to represent and to explain what happened. The period since 1870, which saw the most extensive transformation in the fabric of Rome, is also the least known period of its physical history-in this country at any rate. This' lacuna deserves to be filled properly, dispassionately. The story is interesting not only for its own sake, but also because it conditions the historic Rome that is the object of our reverence and pilgrimage. For what we see and study of its architectural history has been pre-selected, edited, and staged for us by the rulers and planners of modern Rome. The exhibition presents the documents, sets up the debate. Recrimination, compassion, or praise-these are the viewer's privileges. The term Third Rome is a convenient way to refer to the city as the capital of ltaly, following upon the Romes of the emperors and the popes. It has a neat beginning: 20 September 1870, when the Royal ltalian Army breached the classical Walls at Porta
1870-1950:
An lntroduction
Spiro Kostof
Porta Pia today, with the monument to the Bersaglieri by 1. Mancini and P. Morbiducci (1932). This exterior facade of the gate is by V. Vespignani, 1865; the tower behind it belongs to the inner facade by Michelangelo. [F.Rigamonti]. The Walls at Porta Pia, with the breach to the right; taken by L. Tuminello on 21 September 1870. [Museo di Roma].
Pia and put an end to the one-thousand-years-old temporal rule of the see of Peter. It was the crowning act of the unification of Italy that had been in the making since the collapse of the Napoleonic order. For Rome, it meant the rude awakening of a picturesque, backward, but immensely prestigious town of some 230,000 people, through the influx of a massive government apparatus; a new middle class ofbureaucrats, bankers, and speculators; and working people drawn to the capital of the young Kingdom by the promise of unusual opportunity. It meant housing facilities for tens of thousands, accommodation for government offices, new roads, and 'public services. It meant, beyond alI this, the fashioning of a national image-the iconography of unity. Actually, at least for the physical history of Rome, the Breach of Porta Pia was not a brusque startingpoint. The architectural and planning activity of the last pope-king Pius IX constituted one of the more progressive elements of a notoriously reactionary .- administration. This activity must be considered as the exordium for the planning of the Third Rome. The expansion of the city toward the eastern hills and the intent to do so north of the Vatican, in the flatland of Prati di Castello; the placement of the main railroad station on the Viminat by the Baths of Diocletian; the attempt to link this reactivated part of town with the traditional core by means of a major new artery (the precursor of Via Nazionale) -these and other initiatives of Pius' regime prejudiced planning decisions after 1870. This is why we open the exhibition with the sunset years of papal Rome. Our aim in the introductory section is not only to recreate, by way of contrast, the image of the city at the time of the Breach, but to suggest connections and continuities. In the main, the theme of the exhibition is the updating of the historic fabric since 1870-its uses and abuses. This imposes an obvious and welcome circumscription on the otherwise immodest subject, the planning history of modern Rome. Geographically, the area within the Walls becomes our prime concerno The development of the distant
periphery, planless and undisciplined, occurred generally .speaking on historically virgin land; it ha s, therefore, little bearing on the theme. Suburban architecture is represented, for the most partI by the residential typologies which are included in the section on housing. Only three extramural installations receive detailed treatrnent, due partly to their special importance, and also, at least in the case of two of them, for the conscious attempt in their design to emulate the forms and programs of classical Rome. These are: the university complex to the northeast, now called Citt Universitaria; the Foro Mussolini, now Foro Italico, to the northwest, beyond Prati di Castello and Quartiere Mazzini; and, about five miles south of the old center, the monumental complex of the Universal Exposition of 1942 (EUR) which was never held.
Chronologically, our story ends with the disintegration of the Fascist regime. The city within the Walls has been, on the whole, undisturbed since then, and the latest Master PIan, approved finally in 1962, prohibits any future changes. We have extended the terminus of the exhibition to 1950 only to be able to illustrate the execution of Via della Conciliazione leading to St. Peters-a project started in 1937, in celebration of the earlier accord between the Vatican and Mussolini's government, but completed only after World War It in time for the Holy Year of 1950 which was to celebrate his fallo
must liberate aH of ancient Rome from the mediocre construction that disfigures it, but side by side ~ith the Rome of antiquity and Christianity we must also create the monumental Rome of the Twentieth Century. Rome cannot, mustnot, be solely a modern city, in. the by now banal sense of that word; it must be a city worthy of its glory, and that glory must be revivified tirelessly to pass it on as the legacy of th~ Fascist era to generations to come.l
Via XX Settembre (formerly Strada Pia) about 1868; from Fontana delI'Acqua Felice in the foreground to Michelangelo's Porta Pia. The building on the right-hand side of the street, just behind the fountain, is the Granarone of Urban VIII, demolished in 1937. Between it and Porta Pia, the Villa Bracciano. [Museo di Roma]. Aerial photograph, including this same stretch of Via XX Settembre as it appears today. On the right side of the street, the large mass of the Ministry of Finance by R. Canevari, 1877, the first major government building to be built after the Breach. At the lower right-hand corner of the picture, Piazza dell'Esedra by G. Koch (1896-1902) and the beginning of Via Nazionale. [Fotocielo].
This grandiloquent program encapsuiates the pIanning philosophy of nationalist Rome during the entire period reviewed by the exhibition. From the start, the city's post-papai destiny was envisaged in terms of expansion and modernist aggiornamenfo on the one hand, and the conjuring of a new image on the other, an image that would speak of Italianness, of unity, of grandeur. The two goals were, in fact, one. Residentiai quarters far a dramatically swelling popuiation, roads to connect them to the oider center, improved means of communication throughout the expanded metropolis-these were at Once the product of the new exigencies and a conspicuous part of the new image. They accommodated the daiIy life of the capitai which embraced over 500,000 peopie by 1900, more than twice the number at the Breach of Porta Pia; and they proved, in additiorl, that it was worthy of holding a pIace of distinction among the great cities of modern Europe. The other part of the image was the past-and it too was caught in the duai fury of progressivism and pride. Large chunks of it disappeared to make room for traffic and the monuments of the Third Rome. The rest served as show and foiI. Far the Third Rome was competingnot only with its neighbors in Europe but with itseIf: and the pastI in this earnest contestI was an asset, a hindrance, and a challenge. It is in this light that we must view the fatefui choice to build the Third Rome on the carcass of the other two, to revive this carcass, revise it, and stretch out from it aiong predetermined paths. There were, from the outset, proposais such as that of Baron Haussmann to build the new Rome outside and at some distance from the old; or, at the least, to set up a new monumental core of government buildings and other public institutions so as to dislocate the rituai
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Piazza Venezia today with the Vittoriano, and Palazzetto Venezia moved to the west. [Courtesy of F. Quilici].
Piazza Venezia fram the Campidoglio, about 1870. The immediate foreground is the roof of Santa Maria Aracoeli, behind which, at center, Palazzetto Venezia. Left and right of the piazza, Palazzo Venezia and Palazzo Torlonia, the latter demolished ca. 1900 to make raom for the present PalaZizodelle Assicurazioni Generali di Venezia of.1911. [Museo di Roma, Parker series].
center of the city and create a separate umbilicus. The east was favored. Quintino Sella, statesman and Comptian positivist, soughtto demystify Rome and redefine it as a center of science and the intellectual life, the brain of Italy. Re sawthe modern structure develop with Via XX Settembre as its backbone, a stret=t that joined the Quirinal palace, now the officiar:esidence of the King, andthe Porta Pia which had already assumed the status of a nationalist martyrium. TheMinistry of Finance, of which he was for a' timein charge, was installed in 1877 m a vast he,w building along this artery, in' the hopes that it would ad as ,architectural magnet far the momentous dislocation. It did not work. The Third Rome preferred promiscuity to independence, and did so once again both for the sake of expedience and for the sake of historicimagery. Expedience was two-pronged: economy and the pressure of time. Rome had to transform itself into the capitill of Italy with frantic haste. (The official transfer of the government from Florence took pIace on 1 July 1871.) The finances of the city admin7 istration' were quite unequal to the task, and the parsimoniousness of thefirstgavernments brought little relief. lt is conceivable'that a totally new city or a new . adillinistrative, bU5>iness,.anq cultural complex would, in the elld,.haveproved more economical, compared to the vast ultimate cost, fihancial and human, entailed by the .~ggering. program'Of ~~propriation and demolition. But under the immediat' circumstances of haste and penury, piecemeal adjustment seemed the prudent thing to do. MiDi~!riesaI1d other gov-
ernmenLolfice.s''Yere.housedin older available buildiitgs/ existent streets were widened and straightened up; new ones cut through by.meansof massive, dedeveJstruction-the so-ca,Iled sventramenti;Jhellewly -oped residential quarters werehooked up to this amplified stJ;eet structure; and the suburban sprawl used the radiaI disposition ofthe consular highways 'of antiquity for some semblance of order. 'Butt1l1s' is -anIy one partof the argument. The other was the fact of Rome. Through the long struggle of unification, Risorgimento rhetoric of every persuasion had trumpeted thehistoric fatality of Rome. Mazzi:" nian republicans, Garibaldini, and the royalists of Piedmont alI recognized that ltalian unity was impossible without occupying Rome, and ineffectual without designating it the national capital. "Atter th~ Rome of the emperors, atter the Rome of the popesj there will come the Rome of the People;' Giuseppe Mazzini declared. "Rome or death!" was the Garibaldian battlecry. And the mastermind af unity, Camillo Cavour, was honest enough to recognize the inevitability of Rome even when this meant thedemption of hisnative Piedmont and its chief city Turin., "Our fate .. .is to see to it that the Eternal City, inwhich twenty-five centuries have accumulated every kind of gIory, becomes the splendid C"pital of the ltalian Kingdom;' he said in 1860, a passage Mussofini was fond of quoting in his own speeches? ' With this emotional background, ifwould hay'e been remarkable indeed if, atter the Bn~ch of Porta Pia, the historic center was to be abandoned or downgraded. Qn th~ contrary, it was imperative to.take
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Marcello Piacentini project for a new metropolitan 1916. [From Capilolium, I, 1925, 419].
axis,
possession ai the city properly, to make visible the c~Qfiua~d=--()ut otfheinillermial administratio~ -af Sto Peter a~d. lnto th sfeward.ship of King Vietor Emanuel 11. Tne installation of the royal house at the Quirinal, th~ winter palace of the popes, cannot be explained away in terms of its availability and size; the aet was symbolic of the shift of power. Nor is it merely praetical that govemment offices commonly occupied church property expropriated under the bill of 1866, app.li.e .. d t()_RQme. in 1873, that abolisheq ownershp'prTvileges of ~eligious groups known col-:fectvely as the asse ecclesiastico~ To deemphasize the ritual centers of papal Rome and repossess the spirit of the city, monuments to the new saints of the Risorgimento flooded the traditional iconography of the Roman empire and the Church. Their placing was, more often than not, a conscious statement of new intentions._Jbe_ stone pile in memory of the arch-hero Victor Emanuel II .. rose ln--Pi.iiia:' venezia, -against the Capitoline hill . which had for centuries been identified with the sporadic populist rule of the commune, as opposed to the enduring absolutism of Peter's temporal power. Roundabout lay the most concentrated remains of imperial Rome-the fora, the Palatine, the Colosseum, and the theater of Marcellus-with which the young Kingdom was anxious to establish spiritual affinity. I.beQ1)_e!ltI'Kof Via Nazionale and its west. ern extensioIl,Cor~o VJ:ttoTlO- Emamiel--ffitne-1870s -aria lS80s,turne_d Piazza Venezia into the prime tra.fTic nucleus of the Third Rome, as the presence of --trtl:Vitt.oriano, with the Altar of the Fatherland, had turned it into a ritual nucleus.
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the top of the Spanish stairs; it would siphon off alI major traffic from the older town, and would serve as the setting for the ceremonial and administrative buildings of the Third Rome. 'The old city would thus gradually lose its vitality and commerciaI value ... and will remain as the Citadel, the Arx ... A variant of this idea was incorporated into the major revision of the Master PIan of 1909, developed by a commission appointed in 1923 and never sanctioned by law. In a book of 1927, Oario Barbieri argued for dislocation from aI/scientificI/ viewpoint, presenting it as a geographical and topographical inevitability. Barbieri proposed to supersede the focal interest of Piazza Venezia, and its rival Piazza Colonna-which formed a secondary node as the public space of a cluster of important buildings including the Parliament (Palazzo di Montecitorio), newspaper offices, the stock exchange, and the late nineteenth-century department store Bocconi - with the establishment of a large piazza around the Baths of Diocletian situated more equitably between the older city and the modem expansion outside the Walls.6 Again, during the preparatory debate leading up to the Master PIan of 1931, a group of architeets headed by Piacentini put forth anew his abiding pIan far the transplantation of the urban center.
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Later, Mussolini's highways of grandezza, Via dell'Impero and Via del Mar~, reaffirmed this cen-'::tralization and identified it with the famous orator of the balcony at Palazzo Venezia-and this, despitea return since World War I to the philosophy of Sella and the dislocation eastward of the urban center. In 1916, far example, Marcello Piacentini had proposed a monumental new backbone for the city, running between the centraI railroad station (to be moved outside the Walls, to the east of Porta Maggiore) and a northem station beyond Piazza del Popolo. This spina dorsale would pass through Piazza delle Terme (Baths of Diocletian) and Piazza Barberini, and along
But to no avail. Ibe Fascist arteries of Viadell'lmpero and Via del Mare were more or less completed by , 1931, and the Master PIan could do no other but to -recognize the irrevocable centrality of Piazza Venezia. Only atter World War II did the idea of abandoning the older city for a new eastern nucleus return -and embodied formally in the y1aster PIan of 1962. Ihe , spina dorsale was now called'--asse attrezzato. It was profeted some distance beyond the edge of the built city, in the open country, stretching between Pietralata and Centocelle. The Master PIan is due to expire this year; but there is as yet little evidence of the asse attrezzato, and the phenomenal post- War development of EUR in the south, securely strapped to the old center by Via Cristoforo Colombo and the subway, may well have preempted it forever.
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The so-called tempIe of Vesta, looking north, with the socalled tempIe of Fortuna Virilis and the house of the Crescentii immediately behind it; 1870s. [Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, EI16057]. 14
The same area in 1935, taken from the campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. [Alinari,41787].
Gustavo Giovannoni, it found at least one eloquent vOlce thaTafguea~-15eyold nostalgia, for thecor~c~pt ofmbT;isirio:';that entire sections of the old fabric .~~re worthy of preservation because urban envi~0I"!ment was a physica!, socia!, and cultural entity; that monuments derived their authority and scale from coexistence with humbler construction.9 But Busiri VifLmtionfl,li?:_Q._tiQns=.c01:lVenkne, health, and growth --:prevailed _tl1r.o),lgho_ut.Fascism added to "fhema-familiar argument: demolition and new construction made jobs for many hundreds. The question of convenience usualIy amounted to easy passage through the older city on a scale consistent with the steady increase in population and the improving means of surface transportation. At first the problem was simple enough. A private company calIed the Societ Romana Omnibus operated a few lines of public transit by horsedrawn carriages which easily negotiated the traditional network of streets. These vehicles were slowly replaced, beginning in 1882, with a tramway system, also horsedrawn until 1890, after which it shifted gradually to electric traction. The fixed tracks for the streetcars encumbered principal streets and squares, and became increasingly undesirable with the proliferation of motor vehicles. From 1920 onward the city converted its public transportation into a system of buses, relegating streetcarsto the periphery. In 1930 Rome had about thirty thousand motor vehicles, with a noise problem notable enough to occupy Mussolini himself. His solution for ending the noise: more cars! In a rare miscalculation of the Italian character, the Duce asserted that when there .fire many more vehicles on the streets, "all must channel themselves one after the other, and then there will no longer be any motive for annoying the public with useless honking" (speech of 18 March 1932). Il
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Traffic on Via Nazionale in the early part of the century. [Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, G/566].
Scheme of major traffic routes, actual and projected, through the historic center.
Whatever the means of transportation, it was a foregone conclusion from the start that the older town could not be traversed for long without cutting through it some more direct and wider routes than it had available. !n an east-west direction, the major ne~d un.til 1900was-effident ommunication betWeen the new quarters around the railroad station
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di Spagna to Prati} through the continuation of Via della Croce in a straight line running by the Mausoleum of Augustus. Neither artery was realized} but the problems remained on the boards until the end of the Fascist era-and even beyond it. The principal north-south thoroughfare continued toube Via del Corso. If anything, the placement of t~ Vittoriano on axis with it formalized this famous avenue that linked Piazza del Popolo} the ceremonial entrance to the city in pre-railroaddays; -Piazza' 'Colonna; n:ath'now redsi.gm~d PiaZza Venezia. What had to be solved was the extension of the Corso southward beyond Piazza Venezia. A direct line was clearly out of the question: ideally both the Capitoline and the Palatine should be skirted. Mussolini's Via del Mare and Via dell'Impero could be justified} at one leve as having filled this need. West of the Corso, lesser north-south outlets were constantly being searched. Among several daredevil solutions that were threatened in the course of the decades} Via Arenula in the 1880s and Corso del Rinascime;toin the mid-1930s are two disjointed 'stretches that did get done. And of course the lungotevere proved of immense value for north-south t~afJic on either side of the river. As for the question of health, it carne up in the obvious manner. Older rundown sections of town-the Ghetto, the tenements along the Tiber, the west and south slopes of the Capitoline, the area around the theater of Marcellus-were lived in by the poorer classes. They were scenes of neglect and unseemly congestion-and} by implication at least, of vice. To bring light and air into alI parts of the city organism and improve the density quotient-not to mention the imperati ves of grandezza that dictated the liberation of historic monuments-the pick must have its way.
Interior court of a tenement in the block bounded by Piazza della Consolazione, Via Monte Caprino, Foro Olitorio and Via della Consolazione; before its demolition ca. 1930. [Museo di Roma, C/2231].
on the one hand} and on the other} the Borgo on the right bank with St. Peter's and the Vatican} the up-changed goal of pilgrims and tourists. Yia Nazionae and Corso Vittorio Emanul joined' bv Piazza VeneZIa}provided the answer. By then} however} two Sg:rlhcantcievelopments. put pressure for east-west arteries fUrther north. Piazza Colonna} as we have mentioned already} gained in stature (and traffic) with the decision to abandon projects for a new Parliament building at Magnanapoli above the imperial fora, in favor of a remodeled and enlarged Palazzo di Montecitorio where the house of deputies had been meeting on a temporary basis since the transfer of the capita!. The new Galleria Colonna} in its form and location} acknowledged the growth of this piazza as the major commerciaI and business node of the Third Rome. ?econdly1Prati di Castello} the flatland north of the Borgo, had been developed through private initiative into a thriving guarter with population of about thirty thousand by the end of the first decade of this century. To meet the needs of these two foci} the Master PIan of 1909 proposed: (1) to extend the line of Via Tritone, a late nineteenthcentury street, beyond Piazza Colonna toward the Borgo by means of a widened Via dei Coronari; and (2) to create still another east-west axis} from Piazza
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At first the scope of this urban surgery tended to be reasonable} if not exactly modest. Points of stress for the traffic pattem were probed with some concem for curtailing destruction and coaxing the fabric into shape. The Commission of Five set up by the city council to review the final version of the Master Pian of 1873 cautioned, in its report, against hasty or extravagant cuts. lt recommended pulling down old and decrepit houses with no "interior passages:'
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Aurelio MartineIli, master pian, 1871. [From Martinelli, Roma nuova nell'icnografia delle grande strade ... , fold-out pian].
Goffredo Narducci, alternate solution to Corso Vittorio Emanuele, 1881. [From Narducci, Progello di una nuova via centrale ... , fold-out pian].
Providing for the d'isplaced population, the victims of J!lonymentality anci the PQlicy ofsventmmentdidnot 'l1ave priority. In the ear1y decades of the Third Rome, _!bis_p.?.Ell!~!i?~vy~?absorbe4yvi.tl1~n the city! or else ended up in shanty-towns at the edges, places like Mandrione and Porta Porte se; here, it had to compete with immigrant workers who arrived from alI parts of Italy by the thousands to provide the labor force for the building boom. The city council, in its deliberations, touches on the subject almost casualIy, the mayor rendering ritual assurances that something is being done. To give one example: during the debate of 20 April 1885 for the demolition of the Ghetto, there is a fervent pIea by one councilman that the Banca Tiberina, contracted to rebuild this area, be forced to include in its scheme some housing for the four thousand inhabitants who were being evicted. The administration cavalierly dismisses this request by referring to some new residential developments on the boards, and especialIy the one between Porta Pinciana and Porta Salaria ILWhich, in actuality, shaped up soon afterward as one of the most prestigious upper class districts of the Third Rome. Two official efforts supported by the council were, in the end, only of symbolic value. Neither was exclusively geared to the victims of the pick. Since 1867 a non-profit organization called "Societ anonima edificatrice di case per la classe pove,ra e laboriosa" provided very limited low-rent housing. The council, perhaps with a guilty conscience, supported its work through the cession of free land and the guaranteeing of bank loans. In another responsible mood, the council gave up 25,050 square meters of its land on the Esquiline to Senator Alessandro Rossi, who agreed to build upon it, at his own cost and within a period of three years, a number of lowcost houses, mostly for single families. By 1885 the high-rise development of the surrounding area put extraordinary economic pressure on the fledgling community. The touncil paid Rossi back for the cost of the operation, and resold buildings and land to speculators.18 For the rest, we might cite the experiment of a private firm to build a popular quarter at Testaccio in relation to developing an industriaI zone
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here. The result, thirty years in the making, wauld nat be considered a madel community. After the crash52f tb~:Ja.te_J~_QsLtb~gemglitiQn f~Y~r subsided. Cancurrently,a leftward shift in city goy" ernment, especiaily u1der' th adrr.inistratian af the, ~ar IrPisf NatharqJ:90?~I9I3),-inspired -ari'oi~ggrly, sJlstained program af sUbsdized nousing. Naneth~!e~~, _a.ggI9EI}~r~!ionsor shacks or baracche multipIied. Byi920 there were pernps aver fiftY "thausand baraccanti an the main approaches ta Rame far wham autharities expressed apen disdain. And then, with the advent af Fascism, urban surgery returnecl with a vengeance. Far twenty years demolitian af the alder sectians af tawn went an at an unprecedented scale, rendering hameless thausands af lawer class Romans. The apening af Via dell'Impe~9_?:laIle,ina ruthl~ss:straight linef_rom thTolosseum ta Piazza Venezia,asti"oYdS;SQOhaQga.ple uniti>.The projectar the isalatiau..oLth.e_M.al.lsQle.um f Augustus cleared,in the mid-1930s,28,OOO square meters'ofbuiit"'riviranmeilt c~ntaining 'at -least 120 multi:':starIid t~nements.
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Group of low-cost houses with shops designed for Senator Alessandro Rossi, 1877. [Archivio di Stato di Roma, 30 Notai Capito lini, Ufficio 39, voI. CLXXXVIII,236ff.].
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The refugees af the~,~"?.Qf1:!lm~e!!tL~er:~ll()""JJ()1JseJi Jjy,the.regLm~ in~'ieries ()f ersatzcail1mu!lities called - pprgate, built rapidly in the apen country t;th'ast, ten miles or more away fram the city praper and tied ta it anly by railroad lines. They cansisted af rows af plain single-family dwellings which, at least in the beginning, shared cammunal services such as water and sanitatian facilities. Administratively the borgate, literaIly "scraps af city;' did nat fit in any af the faur regians inta which greater Rome had been divided since 1924. These were: The rioni af the alder city; the immediately adjacent quartieri, bath within and withaut the classical Walls, that embraced the newer past-1870 Rome; the more distant periphery af the suburbi; ancl finally, the Raman cauntryside or Agro romano. Neither arganically incorparated inta the urban structure nar true agricultural settlers, the residents af the borgate led an ambivalent existence between city and country, living in one and commuting ta the first for their livelihaad.
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Detail of frieze on east building of Piazzale Augusto Imperatore, 1940. [M. Treib].
Fascist ratianaIe for this massive transplantatian suffered fram paradax. Dispersement agreed, an the
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one hand, with the party's urban philosophy: to thin out the population of the congested centers, and stop the flow into the major cities, by systematically resettling the countryside. Borgate were extolled far their benefits to physical well-being and their promise of bucolic bliss-the Virgilian plough tilling the sacred land. But at the same time, population growth, far Rome at any rate, was a basic tenet of Mussolini's revival of the Augustan age. Fecundif:y_W51~ n~warded byth~ regim~, ,as it had been under the first emperor of ancient Rome, and celibacy was frowned upon. By 1930, the one million mark had been rea che d, which was probably dose to the population of ancient Rome at its height, under Trajan and Hadrian if not earlier under Augustus. But Mussolini had a different figure: He spoke of the Augustan city with its population of four million! (speech of 11 March 1923). al Living in borgate could therefore be justified as positive support for the aims of the regime, in that it encouraged child-begetting. The theory was that unhealthy, cramped living conditions adversely affected the birth rate by forcing fathers to stay away and neglect their family duties. And what the pick brought down was, unarguably, unhealthy and cramped. So it seemed that the sventramenti which could be advocated far reducing density and airing the city organism also helped to increase the population by giving rise to the fecund environment of the borgate.
Masterworks of the period-for example, Gaetano Koch' s Palazzi;'Amici next to Santa Susanna, and Museo Baracca on Corso Vittorio Emanuele; Francesco Azzurri's Hotel Bristol in Piazza Barberini, and theTeatro Drammatico Nazionale to the east of Piazza Venezia, also by him-were condemned after barely half a century of existence, an uncommonly short life far a public building of Rome. Beyond the vulnerability of the recent pastI no, period was generally disparaged. Church architecture presented something of a dilemma in the beginning. The pope as temporal ruler had, after all, been the enemy. The abolition of the asse ecclesiastico led to the seizure of much church property, as we have said, induding a number of well-known monasteries and palaces. But by and largethese were merely remodeled and pressed into service far 5tate and city functions. Many small churches succumbed, it is true, in the first wave of demolitions, and some anti-derical malice was demonstrably at work. One antidericalist submitted a proposal to the city council far the wholesale liberation of antiquity in the Romn Forum and the Capitoline, which joyfully called far the sacrifice of S. Francesca Romana, SS. Cosma e Damiano, S. Adriano and 55. Martina e Luca, and Michelangelo's ramp to the Campidoglio. What was established by all this, however, was only the principI e that all churches did not, by definition as it were, qualify as monuments.
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The most blatant expression of anti-Church feeling carne in the form of statues intended to antagonize the Vatican. Whole sections of town like the Gianicolo were consecrated as memorials to the struggle against papal forces; there, the city set up an impressive monument to Garibaldi and rows of busts of lesser Risorgimento heroes, in plain view of the dame of St. Peter's. But more pointedly, renowned sinners against the. authority of the Church were allowed to claim in triumph the stages of their disgrace. On the slope of ground between Michelangelo's ramp and the stairs of Santa Maria Aracoeli, Cola di Rienzo's image was raised in 1887 in me mory of his brief defiance of papal dominion aver the city in the mid-fourteenth century, and his inauguration of the ill-fated Roman Republic. At Campo dei Fiori, scene of his burning at the stake in 1600,
Giordano Bruno was now honored with an eloquent statue, hooded and standing on a base decorated with reliefs celebrating other famous heretics. AIthough financed by private donations, the agreement of the city council to provide public space for it in the heart of papal Rome and the decision of the mayor to attend the unveiling ceremony caused violent riots between modem guelphs and ghibellines. Th~xa,pprochemeI).t.oLChurchand .State was. slo~ and difficult;it was also inescapable. When it finaUy -'came, {nthe historic Lateran accords of 1929, the -extraterritoriality of the Vatican and (conditionally) ototner"prlnC1pl CithoIic installations was formally' . rcognized, as it had been by Napoleon the Great 'in 1809 during his occupation of Italy. Through its custody of these monuments, and through new buildings for its own use and heavy surrogate speculation, the Church continued its active part in the shaping of the Roman environment. The"statues of Bruno and Garibaldi held their ground. Not only that, but next to the great knight rose the exuberant equestrian monument to his wife Anita Garibaldi, as Mussolini had promised in his report to Parliament on the Lateran accords (14 May 1929).22 The following year, in seating a commission to draw up the new Master PIan of Fascist Rome, the governor Principe Boncompagni conveyed to the members this prescription of the Duce. Rome was to be .s;.QD$iderel in three vast categoriesof-e;'~ironmeili (1) Roma monumentale, subdivided into Roma antica
and Roma cristiana-rinascimentale; (2) Roma moderna,
The inauguration of the monument to Giordano Bruno at Campo dei Fiori, 9 June 1889. The sculptor is Ettore Ferrari. [Photograph by T. Fabbri; in Museo di Roma].
. from 1870 to the start of the regime; and (3) Rom _.m~dernissimao'(Jf:l:;c.ista. The commission was in-- structed, in relation to the first C)fthese, to revive the monuments of the classical phase and restore those of the Christian-Renaissance phase. Tl1e..sec.0Il4, modern Rome, should be brought clown. As '-for the third, the new Master PIan must accommodate what it safeguarded of the past to present trafficneeds.
23
By and large, then, it was officiallyagreed since 1870 that the historically significantarchitecture of Rome extended from antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century. The problem was to decide which among the hundreds of monuments that survived from this vast period had precedence. In the case of
21
classical remains, an articulate and impassioned lobby of archaelogists exerted considerable pressure on public opinion and, through the Commissione Archeologica, also on the city administration. The Commission was formed in 1870 to repIace the old Commissariato delle Antichit e Belle Arti, and soon afterward merged with the separately instituted Consiglio d1\rte. The State had its own apparatus within the Ministry of Public Instruction, and large-scale programs of conservation-e.g~, the birth of the Passeggiata Archeologica in 1887 (realized only in 1911), a park that embraced the area south of the Palatine and the Colosseum-reguired, additionally, the approvaI of Parliament. Theoretically, ancient ruins belonged to the city and the State. But control over them became nebulous when they happened to reside in private property. For everyconservational victory against entrepreneurs in the first decades-the saving of a stretch of the so-called Servian Wall whose demolition was sought by the Societ delle Ferrovie Romane for extending the railroad station; the rejection of a proposaI to run a tramway line down the ancient Via Appia; the insistence on the inviolability of the classical Walls during the development of the Quartiere Ludovisi north of Piazza Barberini-the city council could be held accountable in tens of other cases where inadeguate legislation or reluctant enforcement of it worked against the glory that was Rome. Even on property disposed of by the city, checks were halfhearted. The buyer of municipal land was contractually obliged to recognize the city's proprietary rights over alI objects of historical or artistic value found upon it. But of non-portable finds, usually nothing was said. Major contracts with developers sometimes provided for work stoppage in the case of the unearthing of "vestiges of monuments which should be preserved"-two months for the project to rebuild the land of the demolished Ghetto.24 It should be evident that the developer might, on occasion, be tempted not to report such vestiges. When he did, he would at most be obliged to shelter them in a basement or to build around them. Only withthe establishment of centralized government after the War could the battle against the de-
veloper be won uneguivocally. One of the first acts of Mussolini in POWE;,r, again in emulation of Augustus, was to abolish the elective nature of city offices and appoint a Governar responsible directly to the Minister of the Interior and through him to the head of State. The Governatorato consolidated in itself the surveillance of Roman patrimony, and the ideological dedication of the Duce to the classical past assured it of effective backing. The change is dramatically illustrated by the case of Largo Argentina. In 1911 remains of two Republican temples carne to light during excavations undertaken by the Superintendency of Monuments. A modern building was being projected for this site, and the owners were now reguested to agree to preserve these remains in a cortile of their building. Soon afterward, during the clearing of the site, two more temples turned up. Archaeologists clamored that the work be stopped. But the city was committed to private enterprise, land acguisition had been legaI, and a sum of about fifteen million lire would be needed by the city to renounce building plans and isolate the ruins..The temples appeared doomed when, on 28 October 1928, the anniversary of the FascistMarch on Rome, Mussolini appeared on the site, expansive of mood; heard claims like a modern Solomon; and declared: "I would feel dishonored if it is allowed to erect even one meter of new construction on this site:' And that was that. Back several years later to inaugurate the Foro di Largo Argentina, the Duce commented (through righteous anger and not meaning it literally, we are assured): "I should like to have brought to me here those who opposed this work, to have them shot on the SpOt:'25 The license to preserve unimpeded has, as obverse, the license to destroy unimpeded. The law of speed and the mentality of the straight line encouraged liberties, effacing ~nd distorting as much of the ancient fabric as was revealed. The pace of the gre4,t sventramen,. ti of the twenties ~ thir,tieswas so .fre--neti~ that, commonly, to photograph or sketch what obstructed the path of grandeur was allone had time for; one couldsimply ncitafford careful archae'ological record. Even that which gualified, in accordance with "the Roman law;' for a definite pIace in the new urban scenography might be maimed in
View of the temples of Largo Argentina, ca. 1930. [Museo di Roma, D/1046].
Demolition of historic building at the corner of Via MarForio and Via Chiavi d'Oro, during the building of the Vittoriano. [Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, C/4103].
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the process of its exhumation. The case of the imperial fora is instructive. The straight line of Via dell'Impero knowingly drove a diagonal slash through the right-angle layout of this monumental core of antiquity. The thoroughfare that. razed an entire residential nucrus to display the imperial forafor posterity now divided this complex into 'fwo incongruous parts, in defiance of the logic of ... its originaI composition. Furthermore, anywhere from one-half to three-quarters of what was excavated carne to be buried again, this time under the intractable coat of asphalt that paved the thirtymeter-wide thoroughfare. Two more aspects of the monumental approach should be underscored. Monument, to the authorities of the Third Rome, did not imply only the highstyle; and, at the same time, not every high-style building enjoyed the immunity of a monument. From the distant past, an imperial apartment-block (insula), a medieval house or inn, may be spared despite the humble nature of their program. They would be isolated nonetheless-and thereby monumentalized. Examples of this vernacular monumentality, so to call it, are: the insula at the foot of the Capitoline, wedged between the giant flank of the Vittoriano and the Aracoeli stairs; the Albergo della Catena near the theater of Marcellus; and across the way, next to the classical remains sometimes identified with the porticus Minucia, a medieval house of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries. The main impediment to the conservation of highstyle buildings was, of course, private ownership. Renaissance and post-Renaissance palaces and villas, ancestral homes of patrician families, continued to be lived in beyond 1870. Their disposition could not be regulated unless they were officially desig-
nated as monuments and so rendered untouchable. Requests that the city take precisely this course were met with cries about the sanctity of property rights. Not unti! the mid-1880s do we hear of a list of "private edifices with monumental character, artistic and historical:' And even then what could be prohibited was exterior transformation, not remodeling within.26 Ih~ laissez-faire proved advantageous both to the city and the owners. The city could expropriate high---- styJe buildings when its own plans required it. nie 6wners could transform their property or liquidate .it altogether for their own gain. The most lamented 10ss carne in the first two decades after the Breach of Porta Pia. A string of patrician villas on the eastern hills that "createda continuous green belt beyond .. the residential center of papal Rome, from Porta Pinciana to Porta San Giovanni, disappeared under the grids of speculative housing.27 And with it vanished the chance fo control the city's promiscuous growth by interposing a natural barrier between the older town and the suburbs. But even with monuments under its sole jurisdiction, the city showed no consistent reserve. The Tower of Paul III and the cloister of Santa Maria Aracoeli were allowed to be felled in the mammoth operation that prepared the north slope of the Capitoline to receive the substructures of the Vittorianobut not the church itself. Th arguments in these cases are uniformly unedifying. They boil down to this: that those who are against demolition assert the hTstorical or architectural importance of the .building in question; those who favor demolition compromise is reached try to downgrade it. 0tt~I1,a when it is decided tO save the building by moving lt elsewhere. If the structure is brick, moving means 5imply reconstmction ex nODO. With masonry structures a method had been developed, and used successfully in the transplantation oJ Santa Rita da Cascia, among others, whereby the blocks would be numbered during the dismantling, and then reassembled on the new site. The section called the Wanderers in the exhibition documents some sampIe cases; a somewhat more thorough, but by no means exhaustive, list is appended to this catalogue.
24
subsidized housing for the lower classes; a new tax on the land of speculative building that forced the entrepreneur to acknowledge that developing a certain urban area constituted a privilege for which he must pay; a Master PIan that advocated the conservation of green space and introduced zoning, at least to the extent of distinguishing between areas of low and high density. But it is too glib to equate anticlericalism or populism' with the public interest. At any rate, democracy at the Capitoline also found it impossible to resolve the housing problem and the financial difficulties of the city. And on the subject of sventramenti, the PIan of 1909 was not exemplary in its restraint.
La Grande Roma
With the dismissal of the elected city administration and the institution of the governorship of Rome in 1925, the identities of the State and the city coin2ldedfor the firsttim: The Fascist regimehad at least two motives for its intense concentration on the refurbishing of Rome. One was practical. The capital must be the showplace of the great public works progTilmlaunched n 1926 to alleviate a serious crisis 'of unemployment. The State poured vast sums into 'the early projects such as Via del Mare and Via dell'Impero. Manuallabor was exalted, and mechanization spurned. The program was much drnired abroad. In 1930, Kenneth M. Murchison wrote in the Architectural Forum (October, pp. 407-408): Mussolini and his lieutenants have made a marvelIous change in Italy. Everything there is under the jurisdiction of a most intelligent leadershi p, Everything is regulated. Everybody is at work ... They are pursuing the work of excavating ruins with great fervor about Rome ... But I didn't see a steam shovel or a sucking dredge or anything else of that kind at work. AlI hand labor, and that seems to be the principle of the Mussolini governmentwork for everybody even though it has to be thinned out in the operation. The prohibition of strikes of labor unrest began to ment in the building of now called. Corporative and virtual disappearance encourage private investla grande Roma, as it was economy, officially em-
braced by the mid-thirties, put building trades squarely under State control, as one of twenty-two corporations, and simultaneously coerced major institutions into supporting public works. Monies were pooled into credit foundations, such as the Consorzio di Credito per le Opere Pubbliche or the Istituto di Credito per le Imprese di Pubblica Utilit. The rewards were commensurate with loyalty to the regime. Building contracts, expropriation programs, the construction of streets and residential complexes went to selected firms of proven faithfulnessTudini Talenti, Vaselli, Speroni. To.have a chance at major commissions, it was obligatory for an ar'~chtea t6l)e affiliated withhis professional syndicate (tantamount to being a party member), and, begt.nning .. with..1232,_to.express_puhlic disaPPIQval JO~the "transalpine ~~ti2n,ali?J!l'.'9f the International Style. The' perrnissiveness of form which had produced some public buildings of note in the progressive idiom of the Modern Movement, the latest example being Giuseppe Pagano's physic-;j;uildi~g at the new University compIe x (1933ff.), was overwhelmedby'the triumph ofthe neo-imperial style. In competitions for major building programs, j~ri~s in favor of this rhet-were now invariably ~tacked . 'oi:cal'alld lnflationary formallanguage. Often, competitions were dispensed with, and the architects hand-picked. Marcello Piacentini was appointed principal architecoiihemonumental project of the ,,1J..I.li'l~E?i!Y by no less an authority than Mussolini l:1imself, because, we are told, the Duce "knows the ?ifiic.llit art of judgi!lg IIlen~orrectlY:'31 The second motive for the Roman ventur~.!Y.s.~icje~l()g!~L We have touched on this subject already, "
March of Fascist troops under the Arch of Constantine, 1935. [International PhotosJ.
2<;
but should now particularize it further since it pertains to the main concern of the exhibition-the use. of the past environment of Rome in the making of the modern metropolis.The idea of Rome obsessed Mussolini's mind sincethe end of World War I, not only because it was the seat of government he sought to capture but ,also because of its mystic power around which the' new order could be forged. On this issue Futurists and Fascists, closely linked at first, parted ways. For Filippo P. Marinetti, Rome, like Venice and Florence, reeked of passatismo. The new ltaly was Milan, Genoa-cities of velocity and the Kingdom of the Machine?2 For Mussolini, Rome "is the name that contains ali of history for twenty centuries ... Rome that traces streets, indicates boundaries; and gives to the world the eternallaws of its immutable destiny" (speech at Trieste, 20 September 1920). lt is "eternal Rome, the city that has given two civilizations to the world and will yet give a third" (Bologna, 3 ApriI 1921).33 Once instalied in the city of his ambitions, the Duce set about, single-mindedly and passionately, to make the mystic manifest, "to show Rome to the Romans" 34 and through them to the rest of ltaly and the world. The classical spirit had been invoked before: in the court of Renaissance popes, in Risorgimento battlegrounds, political and military, in shoring up the confidence of the young Kingdom after the Breach of Porta Pia. Much the same holds true for the projects of la grande Roma: most of them had been proposed, in one form or another, before the advent of Fascism. The point is that Mussolini succeeded in having them realized, and imbuing them
"
with a programmatic fervor that transcended beautification and the reviyal of forms. Ancient Rome was not being mechanically resurrected. lt had, in a fundamental sense, never died: it had merely been diverted from its destiny. Mussolini's task lay in readjusting the course and carrying ono By the same token, the living reality of the ancient fabric must be disengaged from the environmental obfuscation of the irrelevant years and made to breathe and function again. And the conjuring worked. lt was not ltalians alone who were dazzled by the Roman legions marching again in triumph under the Arch of Constantine and past the fora of Caesar, Augustus, Nerva; the Markets of Trajan humming, after eighteen centuries, with the activity of a trade fair; the mausoleum of Augustus recovering its originaI circular form which had been encrusted and buried since antiquity. Rome was a universal tonico The West marveled and exulted. In a feature article in the New York Times (25 August 1935), a reporter describes a moonlit concert under the great barrel-vaults of th Basilica of Maxentius. The strains of the Eroica pour out toward the deep hollow of the Roman Forum which ... at night Cis]restored to a semblance of the Civic Centre it used to be when disputatious gentlemen in togas paced the pavement of the Sacred Way ... We sat close together, mostly on backless benches, black shirts, white shirts, workers' blouses, soldiers' tunics, light frocks of Roman girls, alI part of the pageant of the Rome of Mussolini, in which the past is not only unearthed, magnificently frame d, but used, made to work, tapped to
feed the national pride and energy as literally as the sources of the Tiber and the Arno are transmuted into electric power for modern industry. The faith beyond the form does not escape these observers from the outside. Mussolini wishes to resuscitate the material vestiges of ancient Rome because they are beautiful and invaluable, but also, and mainIy, because in so doing he hopes to revive the old virtues of the rugged men who under iron discipline once fashioned Roman power.35 In approving of the material theater and the pageant, the observers, perhaps unwittingly, adrnire the moral content as well.
rnen whose political lives had a lasting impact. on Jl:ljs Jlistory, started .Qut as engineers. Several departments within city hall-water, roads, public works, and edilit-were the natural provinceof men with a background in engineering. For the first two decades of the Third Rome, the Ufficio Tecnico was headed by the engineer Alessandro Viviani who, ex officio, g.r9ited. the MasterJ?laIls of 1873 and 188~, _lswell as numerous working plans "for specific urban projects (piani particolareggiati). The Mast~r pIan of 1909 was also drawn up by aI" engineertpe Milanese Edrnondo Sanjust di Teulada. Even in the architect's traditional domain, the engineers made substantial inroads. To design and supervise the first major govemment building, the Ministry of Finance on Via :xx Settembre, Sella selected a hydraulics engineer, Raffaele Canevari, who is also responsible for the museum of agriculture (now Ufficio Geologico) nearby, one of the earliest iron buildings in the city. The competition for restoring the Piccola Famesina (Famesina dei Baullari) on the Corso Vittorio was won by Enrico Guj, who taught "technical architecture" at the Scuola di Applicazione. And finally, perhaps one of the main reasons why the influential conservation society, the Associazione Artistica tra i CuI tori di Architettura, could compete seriously before World War I with the official planning organs of city government may have been the fact that its guiding spirit, Giovannoni, derived his stand on the transformation of historic fabric from a thorough grounding in both engineering and architecture. Now the priorities of Fascist planning were differ.ent and as a consequence credit was distributed according to a different order of responsibility. Not that the problems of engineering were any less acute in the projects of Mussolinian grandezza. On the contrary, the isolation of the Capitoline, the construction of Via dell'Impero which involved earth removal on a vast scale and retaining walls for the part that cut through the eminence called Velia, the projection of a subway system, and other problems of this nature, required the supervision of gifted engineers. But .they were no Ionger the stars. For one thing, u-ban planning, at least insofar as it was equated with civic and landscape design, carne to be identified
as a branch of architecture. In the new Scuola Superiore di Architettura founded in 1921, a chair was created for this subject revealingly called "Edilizia cittadina ed arte dei giardini:' The first to hold it was Piacentini, who will later prove so ubiguitous as to qualify for the role of Mussolini's Speer. It is this notion of the street as a total design of architecture that makes possible the attachment of specific names to Fascist-initiated arteries-Foschini for Corso del Rinascimento, Piacentini for Via della Conciliazione-in a way that post-1870 arteries like Via Arenula or Corso Vittorio, conceived as the collective effort of private clients and public enterprise, could not be attributed to an individuaI designer. In these early modem streets of the capitat monuments were single episodes of historical and visual interest. No cohesive program of iconography bonded them contextually except in the most generic sense.Fascist planning is more pedagogica l. At _its.Jeast dogmatic, il regsters""as"historica:lscenog\ raphy. But it can also "undertake to convey more involved meaning, such as the parallelism between the deeds of the regime and its classical precedent. ~ince monuments acguire thereby narrative weight !he archaeologist and the historian farchitectur, 'as the recorders and interpreters of monumental topog"i-phy, enter the planning process in a primary role. Thu5 Roberto Paribeni and Antonio Munoz figure prominently in the commission that prepared the .Master PIan of 1931, alorig with the architects Ces'ire Bazzani, Armando Brasini, ai"id ()f course Piacentini. Sometimes the architect would be made to play second fiddle to the historian or archaeologist, or be absorbed in their identity. It is Corrado Ricci and Munoz we recall first for Via dell'Impero and Via del Mare respectively, not the engineers and architects who were also involved. The scholar embraces the chance to become the man of action. Ricci can now supervise in eamest the unearthing of the imperial fora, a project that he worked out on paper in 1911 and had an architect named Lodovico Pog-
liaghi "translate it into design:'36 Another archaeologist, G. Q. Giglioli, in the process of excavating within the heavily built up area of the mausoleum of Augustus, poses a challenge to the regime which he knows will be heeded. We have faith that on September 23, 1938 the Duce of the new Italy could, on the bimillennial of the birth of Augustus, admire the great ruin [of the mausoleum completely isolated and surrounded anew by those groves that Augustus bequeathed to his good people of Rome?7
The year was 1930. Four years later, on 22 October 1934 which marked the beginning of celebrations for the twelfth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome, the Duce climbed on the roof of a building on Vicolo Soderini and raised a ceremonial pick to start the demolition that would liberate the great mausoleum from the accretions of centuries. When the pick had don e its work, an open space larger than Piazza del Popolo had been carved out of dense urban fabric around the mausoleum of. the first emperor of Rome, freestanding again after at least twelve hundred years. The bimillennial of his birth was brilliantly honored, with Giglioli in charge of the eventful pageant and the elaborate memorial exhibition. Only the groves of Augustus, the sylvae et ambulationes in Suetonius' description, never materialized . Here and everywhere else in the planning of Fascist Rome, the apotheosis of history was thwarted only by the traffic expert. He was present by grace of Mussolini's directive that projects such as the liberation of the mausoleum were not mere havens f archaeology but modem urban spaces "where flows the imposing and continuallife of the city;' namely traffic?8 With typical Fascist cussedness reminiscent of Walt Whitman' s /'00 I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myselt (I am large, I contain multitudes.);' the giant bones of antiquity which were to stand "in their necessary solitude" in fact
32
carne to be nodes of clamorous traffic at the confluence of major arteries. In the case of the mausoleum, the unfinished work of opening these arteries doomed the new piazza to. the fate of a parking loto In other cases, the marriage of traffic and glory succeeded too well, as the now threatened structure of the Colosseum, victimized for forty years by the tremors of furious Roman driving, will testify. But in the end, when credit has been apportioned among architects, historians, archaeologists, engineers, and traffic experts, th~gj?Q:n:e.?.':lpreme pla~!l~r_.9f~qgrandeRoma:Benito Mussolini. ~' consider myself without false modesty the spiritual father of the Master PIan of Rome;' he said in 1932; and he was right:'l It was his vision that was being concretized: that misery and mediocrity will be made to disappear from Rome, grandezza returned, Rome extended once more to the utmost limits of its physical size and imperial power.It was his decision to move his office from Palazzo Chigi on Piazza Colonna to Palazzo Venezia that made the urban space in Front of the Vittoriano the indisputable heart of FascistRome, and diverted toward it the energies of all the major routes into the city. And it was his power,-'Centralizedand unequivocaI, that made possible staggering urban operations concluded in a matter of a year or two, paths of glory cut through the most recalcitrant of urban tissue according to schemes that previously would have languished in the familiar Roman thicket of special interests and involved legislation. In the planning of his city, we might distinguish three successive attitudes of the Duce toward history:Thefiist is vident' in' the opening decad of Fascist power: a reverence for the classical past; conlerItJor itsexhumation and pro per display; the determination, confused and misguided in hindsight, to be authentically ancient. Demographically as well as physically, the city must recapture its former self. 1he population must match that of anci~.ntRorpe.
The .area of the Mausoleum of Augustus at the start of demolitions in 1934. [Courtesy of G. SantoroJ.
33
34
The built environment must spread out to touch the outposts of its originaI myth, to make contact with the Alban hills and the sea. Archaeology and modem construction both assisted in this romantic view of regenerating history. As early as 1925, Mussolini was saying: Rome has already a different aspect. Tens of new guarters have sprung up in the periphery of the city which has thus hurled its advance guard of houses toward the healthy hill, toward the reconsecrated sea ... In five years Rome must appear marvellous to all the peopIe of the world: vast, ordered, powerful as it was in the time of the first emperor Augustus. tWe] will continue to free the trunk of the great oak from everything that stains it stilI. .. The Third Rome must spread onto other hills along the shores of the sacred river until the beaches of the Thyrrhenian Sea... A straight highway which must be the longest and the widest in the world will move the incentive of mare nostrum [the Mediterranean] from the resurrected port of Ostia to the very heart of the city~O An aeriai view of southem Rome conveys well the image of this expansive vision. Qn one side, Via dell'Impero shot out of Piazza Venezia toward the Colosseum like a straight arrow. Beyond this first point of arrest it forked into Via dei Trionfi and Via dei Monti. The first started out with the Arch of Constantine and a redesigned Via San Gregorio, heading south along the Ieft bank of the Tiber; the secondI never executed, was to reach the Walls by means of a widened and monumentalized Via di San Giovanni Laterano and spill into the open country to the southeast, in the direction of the Alban hills. 6.t the opposite end, Via del Mare Ieft Piazza Venezia and skirted the liberatd flank of the Capitoline, wenfpastfhe theater of Marcellus and the so=called TempIe of Fortuna Virilis ("This is my tempIe;' Mussolini said, thinking of the duai blessings of itsputative dedication, manliness and good Iuck), and Iinked up with Via dei Trionfi for its dash to Ostia and the sea. The idea of a maritime port had been around since 1870. lt formed an integraI part of projects for the Tiber embankments and the taming of its course.
By the end of World War l there was a royal decree for the creation of the port and the promise of fortyseven nillion lire in State aid.41The site varied, and Ostia was not the favorite. Cesare Cipolletti, in 1905, proposed abandoning Ostia and moving the mouth of the Tiber to Coccia di Morto to' the north, with port facilities developed just south of this new point at Fiumicino.42 Dario Carbone preferred Fregene on the mouth of the Arrone.43 There was even an elaborate scheme to create a long Iand canal that would follow the coast northward for some sixty miles, with the major port in the promontory at the foot of Monte Argentario, site of the ancient Portus HerCUliS.44 But for Mussolini the choice had to be Ostia, . the porttrom- which tIle fleets of ancient Rome had conductE~d 1he' business of its overseas empire. At the time of the Fascist March on Rome, a small community of one hundred and twenty-fishermen and their families-constituted the town of Ostia. This resident population rose to 3,500 within a decade, and a master pIan was drawn up for its future growth. But the beaches drew many more thousands of Romans every summer. They carne by train on the line opened in 1924, or by car on the new autostrada of Via del Mare. Beyond the basilica of St. PauI' s outside the Walls, Via del Mare tumed into a fourteen-meter-wide tree-lined highway that ran parallei to the ancient Via Ostiense unti! the porto It was inaugurated with great fanfare in 1928. "Of one thing l am proud;' Mussolini would say; "to have reconducted Romans to the sea:'45 The second attitude develops around 1933.Jtdrnanifests itself in the emulative juxtaposition of Classical 'and Fascist monuments. This is not to say that modem buildings did not rise on the newly carved arteries before. The urban section of Via del Mare, for exampk had a series of them at the end toward Piazza della Bocca della Verit. But these innocuous office blocks pretend to Iittle more than defining a street whose planes suffer badly from the discontinuity caused by the practice of isolating the historic monuments on alI sides. Suggestions of encroaching formally upon antiquity would be turned down. A 1907 proposai for the liberation of the Capitoline had envisaged replacing the sordid tenements along the slopes with upper class villas and terraced gardens.46
Munoz' executed scheme merely landscaped these slopes after the demolitions, and added the melodramatic detail of two cages at the foot of the Tarpeian Rock with a she-wolf in one of them in memory of the she-wolf that had suckled Romulus and Remus (a practice that goesback to 1818), and in the other, an eagle to represent the Roman legions of antiquity. Again, tll~__ idea of erectingrn()g.ern R.a}~zi .on Via dell'Impero, next to the fora of the emp~rors<lnd the Basilica of Maxentius, was rejected. "''The liberated monuments could be used on occasion for activities approximating their initial functions, but could not be regularly occupied. The Markets of Trajan would house weekly shows of books, toys, or peasant embroideries, but the humble shops that for centuries had foundshelter in the ground-story arcade of the theater of Marcellus were deemed insulting to the noble frame and torn down. Now, however, !l1 this. secoIlduphase, a competiti\(e or even combativesprrit takes hold. It was decided toconstiilct a nE'Wbuilding onVia: dell'Impero across -g()m the Basilica of Maxentius, to serve as headquarters for the Fascist party. This Palazzo della Rivoluzione, or Palazzo del Littorio, was to equal the Olsseum in size and height, and cQnj:aintwehLe hundred rooms on nine floors. A widely publicized c'ompetition in 1934 yielded sev~nty-one spectacul?T entries which, at one leve!, illustrated the millenni al 'strtiggle of th modern against the ancient, and at .another the specific confrontation of the two mode.s
36
of architecture in the thirties-the InternatiQnal ~e =:rnd--the rreo:.:imperi~l or nationalist style. The win'ning designs prove that, at least for the latter of these contests the outcome, in th eyes of the regime, was r\ot indoubt: That the pala'e of Fascism never stood where it was intended to may be taken as the somewhat circumstantial triumph of neighboring antiquity in the other contest. In the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore around the liberated mausoleum, shortly thereafter, not only did the modern buildings of the ; Istituto Nazionale Fascista della Previdenza Sociale enclose the north and east sides, but there was talk of setting up on the hollowed interior of the monument, which had been in continuaI use since the Middle Ages as fort, hanging garden, bullring, and concert hall, a Torre della Littoria, the triumphant standard of Fscist dominion that was projected for "thecenters of manyltalian cities.47 That tower, too, was never raised. The iconography of Fascist architecture has not as yet been studied. The Piazzale Augusto Imperatore would be an excellent starting point. Mosaics, sculpture panels, and inscriptions underline here the progressively irnperial charater of this iconogrlphy since 1935, ~hen Mussolini acquired an empire,of "his ()VJn;and the parallelisrrl between Augustus and the Duce. They are the material equivalent of contemporary tracts, such as Emilio Balbo' s Protagonisti dell'Impero di Roma, where the two men are represented as "heroes of the same story, the Oioscuri of the same constitutional and political crisis:' Both established authoritarian mIe after years of civil strife; abolished elected offices; retained the Senate as a symbolic institution; ennobled labor, and recognized the benefits of public works; disapproved of celibacy, and rewarded productive marriages; strengthened the moral and religious fiber of the State, Augustus by reviving the cults of ancestral gods and the respect that is due them, Mussolini by appeasing the Vatican. The presence of three churches on the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore assisted in weaving this Christian content into the marriage of Fascism and antiquity, and the fact that one of the three was 55. Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso, the "national" church of Lombardy in honor of the two great saints of Milan, sharpened the program of interfused mean-
The competition for Palazzo del Littorio, 1934. [From Architettura, 1934, specialissue].
ings. For Pius XI who signed the Lateran Accords was once Achille Ratti, archbishop of Milan and an early supporter of the Fascist cause. In an ultimate hubristic chapter of his extraordinary '_career, Mussolini resolved to supplant the past. Tradition carne to cramp his will: he spoke of tl1e Church as a Durden, and his retai.n.ing of the mon~rchy as a mistaK. The standing on the shoulders of illustriousancestors, uplifting and inspirational at finitI seemed to hamper now his historical progress; the Roman emperors turned surrogates of his own greatness. To display the achievement of the Rome of Mussolini, it was tempting to go outside the theaters of past grandeur, which he had used and amen.ded, and to fashion pristine theaters or Fascist grandeur. The Master PIan of 1931 did not meet the image of an imperial capital which Rome had once again become . .fE~shproj~ct?IllUstproduce th~ Fascistenvironment, and the world must be asked , !o compare. The idea of an international audience suggested an exposition which would bring the world toRome. In June 1935 he gave the order Uto obtain a concrete international adherence to [the] idea [of an exposition]. Victory in Abyssinia, the affirmation of the Italian will in the world, the Foundation of the Empire, are alI certainties for him, so that he is able to anticipate the celebration of them with mathematical security.ff48 Turning down sites in the immediate periphery, and rejecting plans to disperse the exposition into various parts of the city where space and facilities were available, the Duce approved of a hilltop five miles south= east ofPiazza Venezia, at Abbazia delle Tre Fontane. Word carne down that over au area of about one thousand acres a small city was to materialize by 1942, the date of the universal exposition. This city of permanent buildings would house ffthe Olympic Games of Civilization:'~? ,the Esposizione Universale di Roma or EUR was to be m6w1i. AIld ai the close ofthe festivities the city would be transformed into the new monumental core of Rome, a concrete step in its march toward the sea. EUR ffis above alI an act of faith in the destiny and constructive capacity of the Italian Nation, a solemn affirmation of its will to act. .. ff49 A highway called Via Imperiale would connect EUR
Project by E. Del Debbio, A. Foschini, and V. Morpurgo. Project by B, Del Giudice, G. Errera, A. Folin.
with Piazza Venezia, and would form one half of a vastly extended new north-south axis. Jhe other half .9f this cardo would terminate exactly five miles away frornPiazza V~nezia to the north, at the Foro Mussoli.ni. Under construction since 1927, thi:>.forum was 'an imposing compIe x of stadia and' cultur~rbuild'ings foc:used by an obellsk anCl decked with dozens -Of heroic male nudes representing the spring oJ Fascist youth. Qverl()Qking the Forum, the white mass of the Palazzo del Uttorio, moved here from -its intendd site across the way from theColosseum, -beconed the Due' s newfound goal to set up the -unadulterateCl'Rome of his own empire. An enormous model was now built of this Rome, inclusive of the two emerging anchors of the Foro Mussolini and EUR. Its whereabouts have been unknown since the end of the War; Piacentini said that it was destroyed.;J At any rate, it was to be the companion
37
Stadio dei Marmi. The mechanism devised by Costantino Costantini far the erection of the obelisk.
ing frigid masses, like the embodiment of some ghostly classical ved(Jta by De Chirico. The prototype was of course the Greco-Roman city, but not a rigid . grido "The exceptional character of this new arm of Rome has been kept in mind, [and] the guiding conception has always been lo see it grandly and as a single whole."51 The grand axis of Via Imperiale entered the city at the Porta Imperiale, the main propylon of the Exposition; it was framed at the opposite end by an enormous semicircular arch of reinforced concrete, with a span of two hundred meters and a height of one hundred. The cross-axis climbed the sides of the valley and terminated with a group of communications museums to the east, on the rise overlooking Via Laurentina, and with a church to the west, overlooking the Tiber valley. A secondary east-west axis was framed by the Palace of Labor and the Palace of Congresses. There was, in addition, a residential section, with an artificiallake serving as its focus. The world did not have the chance to compare. The Olympics of Civilization were never held. me dream tumed nightmare and soon was over. On 19 July 1943 the first Allied bombs fell over Rome. They hit the suburb of Tiburtino, the church of St. Lawrence outside the Walls, and the new University. On 25 July, after the Grand Council had voted for his resignation, the Duce appeared at the Villa Savoia, the private residence of Victor Emanuel IIt for consultations: he was arrested and shipped off to the island of Ponza. The rest is a familiar story. For our purposes what is important is that, after the end of the hostilities, municipal govemment was~ reinstituted in Rome. A planning commission ap=-pointed in 1946 formally renounced th remaining projects of sventramenti in the historic center; but the Master PIan of 1931 remained otherwise in effect, until the new one was adopted fifteen years later. EUR, following a polite lult continued to grow. It had been planned from the start outside the jur~sdiction of the Master Plan, and the autonomous corporation which directed it could therefore resume their development of it, now as a controlled residential community. The Foro Mussolini, renamed Foro Italico, fell into disuse for a time. Then the Olympics of 1960, held in Rome, brought it back
piece to a model of ancient Rome which survives. From 1937 on, EUR started to take form in the open country, a formal city of marble and travertine. Eatly photographs of it show a spectral image of gleam38
to life, and also reactivated the great cardo of the Fascist city, from here to EUR. The Duce's damnatio memoriae was halfhearted. His name disappeared from most inscriptions, and the fasces chiseled or painted out. But his imprint upon the Eternal City was ineradicable. He had said that Rome's glory would be revivified by him "to pass it on as the legacy of the Fascist era to generations to come:' And this, for better or for worse, he had done.
Postlude
The story of the Fourth Rome is not ours. The urban battles ofthe post-War decades are fought essentially outside the Walls. !t is unlikely that anything dras~ tic or flamboyant will be lmposed upon the historic c:ity by future planners. The Master PIan of 1962, as we mentioned at the beginning, has provided categorically for the conservation of this city, in which _~lS mduaed,- wiselyind inevitably, the fabfit- of the ThirdRome. A recent scheme by Leonardo Benevolo to pull down much of the Third Rome in order to create a green belt around the pre-1870 city, insulating it forever against the encroachment of the suburbs and destroying the centripetal dependence of their street structure upon it, seems destined to remain at the theoretical plane.52 Some form of extraurban relief, like the asse attrezc - z~to of the latest Master PIan, is the more probable alternative. This may dry up the native life of the ity, and turn the center into a ghost town for tourists and pilgrims. But that is what it is already, in a fundamental way. The Rome of the"Romans is the periphery; it swamps the nugget within the WalIs, now a tiny fraction of the untidily sprawled metropolis. The immediate and modest hopes of most of us extend no further than a ban on cars within the older city and vigilance in the restoration of the historic buildings. The law is lenient about interior remodeling, and externalIy the skin can be demolished provided that it is reconstructed in the originaI formo We may end up with an urban illusion, a kind of Roman Williamsburg. But in our age even that may stilI prove plenty to be thankful for.
Museo della Civilt Romana, principal entrance (architects: Aschieri, Bernardini, Pascoletti, and Peressutti). Palazzo della Civilt del Lavoro, detail (architects: Guerrini, La Padula, Romano).
3S
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SOME
PRINCIPAL EXHIBITS
Via Nazionale
The inception of this first modern artery of Rome is due. t9_._Monsignor .Francesco Sa veri o De Merode, prominister of arms under the administration of Pius IX. Ijaving acquired extenslv.~ ..territorY- arouncl-ie 'iailrad station, De Mer()de laid ou~. a.,g~jd2f several blocks depenclent on a main ~fieeCc'aned Via Nuova PLI'affertftl~ reigning J'ope"which p~gaIl..at Piazz,a 'di Teiinini, a part of the ancient'l:,aths fDlocletian, and extended in a straight Line.until it ITl~T:\11aar:siij1.~,?:!!~le:"Tts width was twenty-two meters. In Aprii 1867, De Merode reached an agreement with the city whereby he vvould cede free' of charge the land of this and adjacent streets and the eity would buy the land within the exedra at the start of Via Nuova Pia. The first building of the new artery rose at the corner of the present Via Torino, between 1868 and 1870. After the Breach of Porta Pia, the city returned to the agreement and ratified it, agreeing furthermore to build the streets and maintain them ..,l2.yAI?~il .1872 Via Nuova Pia, now baptized ViaNazionale, . was completed until Via delle QuattroFontane. The Ufficio Tecnico under Alessandro Viviani now drew up a proposal to continue the artery up to Via del Quirinale, and then divert it northward to the Trevi fountain and from here west until it met Via del Corso at Piazza sciarra (south of Piazza Colonna, along the present Via Marco Minghetti), with the option for a future extension until the Pantheon. The Viviani proposal was approved by the city 'couneil on 5 July 1872. f-. subs,!;quent variant to end Via Nazionale at Piazza Venezia instead, offered by the Ministry of Public V'{~!:k.s,was turned do""n. on.9 ..Ma~ -:j.873. On IS'September the Viviani prjeet was proclaimed in the publie interest by royal deeree and expropriation began. In 1874 a first hotel, the Albergo Quirinale, was inaugurated. And two years later G. E. street's High Victorian ehurch, st. Paul's, oceupied the eorner of Via Napoli, its alien 52 striped patterns and non-Catholic affiliation testifying the tolerant internationalism of the young Kingdom of ltaly. Then, unaeeountably, the city couneil decided to reopen the issue. On 22 Aprii 1875 it took under submission projeets by Luigi Gabet, Mario Moretti, and others advoeating the PiazzaVenzia alternative;' thi;~itrn~tive was now aoopTduln.'amajor reversal, and its final ratification by the government carne on 9 July 1876. In 1882 the Pal.. azzo delle Esposizioni by the arehitect Pio Piacentini, under construetion sinee 1878, was eompleted. By then Via Nazionale was already a busy thoroughfare, earrying traffie from the railroad station into the heart of the eity.
;>'
The area at 1860, before the laying out of Via Nazionale; detail of the offidal eensus map of 1860.
Two alternate solutions; Via Nazionale terminated at Piazza Sciarra and at Piazza Venezia.
54
The Quartiere del Rinascimento before the Breach; detai! of the census map of 1860.
Variant of 1886.
5S
Map of 1870 overlaid with present lines of Piazza Venezia and the Vittoriano.
ects for a final run-off. The winner wa~ Sacconi, who was officially appointeg "Direttore sopraintendente" of the work on 30 December 1884. The laying of the cornerstone took pIace on 22 'March 1885, and demolition started soon thereafter. Meanwhile, a separate competition for the equestrian statue was woa by Enrico Chiaradia. The Vittoriano required digging into the slope of the Capitoline and reorganizing the area between it and Piazza Venezia. At this time the piazza had a long and narrow shape, enclosed by the fifteenth-century Palazzo Venezia to the west, its adjunct the Palazzetto Venezia to the south, and on the east side the later pile of Palazzo Torlonia. Via del Corso from the north entered it at this eastern corner. According to the PIan of 1873, the Corso was to be widened in part, and its eastern pIane lined up with the facade of Palazzo Torlonia. The PIan of 1883 went further . AltI-lough its approvaI preceded the decision to pIace the. Vittoriano against the Capitoline, the piazza was to be nearly doubled with the destruction of thePalazzo Torlonia, so that the space, cmld be symmetrically disposed in relation to the Corso. By the time of the PIan of 1909, the monument was still unfinished. Site difficulties and the choice of the white stone which had to be brought in at great expense from quarries at Brescia pushed the estimated budget to 26.5 million lire by 1891. A large area had been cleared around the construction; .streets and buildings of consequence such, a~ the Tower of Paul III, the clois:.!r--f Santa'Maria Aracoeli, and the socalled house of Giulio Romano, disap~ 'peared. But mounting costs and the disastrous ltalian venture in Africa interrupted all activity throughout the last decade of the century. The Royal Commission was dissolved in 1900, and by a special bill of 21 February the monument was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Works.
In the fall of 1905, shortly after the resumption of building, Sacconi died. A trinity of well-known architects-Pio Piacentini, Gaetano Koch, and Manfredi-was appointed to supervise the remaining work. A variant pIan, sanctioned on 6 ApriI 1908, proposed to put up a modernpalazzo reflectingthe -form oLPalazzo Venezia on the east side, thus rendering the piazza bilatl;r'ally uriiform. The PIan of 1909 incor'porated this idea, as well as a project by the engineers G. Crimini and A. Testa for the reordering of the neighborhood, A competition was held in 1913 to decide on a final designo The victorious scheme, by Pio and Marcello Piacentini, was laid aside, however, because of the War. What did go through was the proposal of the PIan of 1909. fO!,;ull-down the Palazzetto Venezia and 'rebuild it further to the east, so as to 'open up the south end of Piazza Venezi~ toward the monumento The Vitto. riano was inaugurated during the Universal Exposition of 1911 (4 June) but work on it continued sporadically until 1930 when the quadrigas were hoisted into pIace. The PIan of 1931 returned to the question of the periphery. Additional demolition cleared the two flanks of the Vittoriano, and the PIan proposed to set up two framing columnar exedrae that would echo the order of the top story colonnade of the monument. But an alternative solution of landscaping, by Raffaele De Vico, prevailed instead, and executed in time for the inauguration of Via dell'Impero (28 October 1932). Later projects, including one by M. Piacentini to redesign the flanking blocks to the Corso, and one by V. Civico and R. Lavagnino to create a trident of streets at Piazza Venezia recalling the trident at the other end of the Corso, remained on the boards,
58
The same view today, after the demoIitions of the early 1930s. (Courtesy of F. QuiIici].
,. hundred meters long and thirty wide, from the eastern flank of the Vittoriano to the Colosseum. By the time it was inaugurate d, on 28 October 1932, 280,000 cubic meters of earth and 50,000 of rock had to be moved; 5,500 units of housing demolished; and 12,000 cubic meters of retaining walls erected to shore up what remained of the Velia on the two sides of the road. Three churches - Santa Maria in Macello Marlyrum, Sant'Urbano dei Pantani, and San Lorenzuolo ai Monti-were pulled down, as well as the base of the colossus of Nero and the ancient fountain called Meta Sudans which impeded the viewof the Arch of ConsJantine. At the orders of the Duce, bronze statues of the emperors associated with the fora were lined up along the new road, and stone maps of the growth of Roman power, from antiquity to the Fascist present, were affixed to the northern wall of the Basilica of Maxentius.
Via dell'Impero as seen through a second-story arch of the Colosseum. [Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, E/ 41220].
61
Aerial photograph of the region between the Vittoriano (extreme right) and the Colosseum in 1929, before the construction of Via dell'Impero. [Alinari,41242].
The Tolomei project, 1903. [From A. Tolomei, La Via Cavour e i fori imperiali].
62
The York Company project, 1857. [Archivio di Stato di Roma, Disegni e Mappe I, Cartella 82, no. 369].
The arteries of Via dell'Impero and Via del Mare cut through existing urban fabric, pIan. [Museo di Roma].
63
64
The embankments and the 'lungo/evere today: stretch along Castel Sant'Angelo, Palazzo di Giustizia, and the neo-Gothic church of S. Cuore del Suffragio (1890). [F.Rigamonti]. Vescovali project for embankments and the lungo/evere; detail at Castel Sant' Angelo, 1875. [From O. P. Conti, Sis/emazione del Tevere, Rome, 1876].
Ripa Giudea, the left bank at the Ghetto; as seen from Ponte Fabrizio (Quattro Capi), before the lungo/evere. [Museo di Roma].
67
Demolition began on 22 October 193L,L and -proceeded from th~ periphery ~nward. The last concert was held in the mausoleum on 13 May 1936.Soon afterward the foundations far the LN.F.P.s. buildings were laid. In ]anuary 1937, Palazzo Valdambrini (Soderini), built by Cardinal Riminaldi in 1774, was brought down; Palazzo Correa followed suit in March. The last to be c1eared were the buildings along Via Tomacelli and Via di Ripetta. When the bimill~l1nial celebrations startdeJn 23 Sep~ tember 1937, a final dcision was made to set up the Ara Pacis in a glass cage pn the river side of Piazzale Augusto Imperatore; at the c10sing of the ceremonies, exactly one year later, this too was done. By 1940 the building of the Piazzale was complete d, with the last major structure to rise being the Collegio degli IlIirici on Via Tomacelli in a line with San Girolamo. But Via Vittoria was never enlarged and the circulation rationale of this vast and costly square was thus thwarted.
69
71
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..
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The origin of this monumental complex on the right bank, between the river and the hills of Monte Mario and Macchia Madama, is linked to the institution of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Fascist party's system for the training of Italian youth. The planning of this area for the Rome Balilla began modestly. Enrico Del Debbio's first project of 1927 consisted of an Academy for Physical Education, meant for the instructors of this emerging national program, with adjacent fields. The notion for a grander scheme should be attributed to Renato Ricci, Undersecretary of National Education and head of the O.N.B. In 1928 a second project by Del Debbio already encompassed most of the major elements of the later complex: two stadia, one large and one small, swimming pools, educational facilities, and an obelisk. At this stage the ceremonial entrance along the river was not as yet linked with the left bank by means of an axial bridge; instead, a bridge was projected further south, in line with the swimming pools and the open-air theater. The ceremonial entrance was roughly equidistant to this new bridge and the ancient Ponte Milvio to the north. The axial bridge makes its first appearance in the 1930 version of the scheme, which also retains the southern bridge. The entrance to the complex at this southern point was now formalized with a piazza and a reception building that would also accommodate the three hundred students of the biennial fencing course. (Assigned to the architect Luigi Moretti in 1932, this building, known as Casa delle Armi, was completed in 19341936.) The theater was moved north of the stadia. More peripheral modifications were introduced in 1932. This version extended the area of the Foro Mussolini ali the way from Ponte Milvio to the edges of the residential quarter of Piazza d'Armi, for a total of 850,000 square meters. In pIace of the open-air theater, a train station was now projected.
By 1934 the originaI core building of the Academy, the small stadium called Stadio Mussolini or Stadio dei Marmi, the larger stadium (Stadio dei Cipressi) whose seating grades consisted of landscaped terracing, and the obelisk were ali completed. In contrast to the sober .underplayed Academy, made largely of exposed brick, the rest was of shining Carrara marble. The seventeen-meterhigh monolith of the obelisk stood toward the river, between the Academy and the covered swimming pool by Costantino Costantini. It was Costantini who was also responsible for the feat of erecting the obelisk. The Stadio Mussolini, with a capacity of 20,000, had ten rows of marble seats topped by sixty statues of male nudes, each four meters high, contributed by individuaI Italian cities. Its long axis ran through the two symmetrical wings of the Academy building. In 1935, a fountain comprised of a monolithic sphere three meters in diameter set in a sunken circular basin, was placed behind the obelisk, in the space between this stadium and the Stadio dei Cipressi. Its designers were Mario Pani coni and Giulio Pediconi. The same year a competition was held, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Public Works, for the bridge on axis with the fountain, the obelisk, and the ceremonial entrance. Eighteen projects were submittd, and the winning design by Vincenzo Fasolo and the engineer Antonio Aureliwas built in 1938-1939 (Ponte Duca d'Aosta). The southern bridge wasnever built. AIso in 1935, the decision was taken to move the site of the Palazzo del Littorio, headquarters of the Fascist party, from the corher of Via dell'Impero across the Colosseum, as specified in the competition of 1934, to the Foro Mussolini. The building by Del Debbio, Arnaldo Foschini, and Vittorio Morpurgo, was now designed to stand north of the two stadia, in a vast rectangular piazza one hundred and fifty by two
hundred meters, capable of holding 600,000 people. In the middle a Fascist tower, the Torre Littoria, was to be erected. Stili another bridge, between Ponte Milvio and the new Ponte Duca d'Aosta, was to connect this piazza with the left bank. Groundbreaking was on 28 October 1937, but the building, now destined for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was finished only in the late fifties-minus the tower and the bridge.
72
Ethiopia in 1937. This Piazza Axum opened into a stII larger Piazza Imperiale, surrounded by museums and a theater and leading out into the two arms of the mai n cross-axis. In the subsequent revision of this pIan, the picturesque elements disappeared in favor of a rigidly orthogonallayout. The inspiration carne, of course, from the cross-axial arrangement of ancient Roman castra and colonial foundations, and the generaI c1assical grid of Hippodamian towns Iike Miletus and Priene. The grouping of major buildings emulated openly the monumental complexes of Rome itself, specifically the imperial fora at the other end of Via Imperiale, the great. highway that was to Iink Piazza Venezia with EUR and head on to Ostia and the sea. In recognition of the fact that the northsouth axis of EUR was only one stretch of this highway, its ends were. opened up in the revised pIan. The grand hall (palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi), and the pala ce of Italian Civilization (Iater Palace of Labor) were now set up as terminaI features of a secondary cross-axis immediately within the north entrance, the Porta Imperiale. The main cross-axis carne halfway between Piazza Imperiale and the now formaI lake, and was framed by a complex of communications museums to the east and the church to the west. The obelisk was moved to Piazza Imperiale. It was not to be that ofAxum,.which had meanwhile been slated for erection at thesouthern en-dof Via dei Trionfi, balancing the Arch of Constantine at the opposite end; instead, a marble slab was to be dedicated to the memory of Guglielmo Marconi, and covered with reIiefs 1Iustrating the theme of communication history. This revised pIan was the brainchild of Piacentini, named Superintendent of Architecture by the corporation which had been created through a special bII of 26 December 1936 to direct the development of EUR. The corporation,
m a t?x-foranew:'enfer
Ci
Rom~, both cerem~nial and residenti~I, that would rival the physical greatness of the historic city and act as the stag-. ng area for the extensio'n of Rome toward the sea, a major objective of MussoIini's program. The preliminary master pIan for EUR was drawn up in ~il.~:IyI937bya team consisting of Giuseppe Pagano,Mar: cello Piacentini, Ettore Rossi, and Luigi Vietti. It was approved by the Duce on8, 'Aprii, and groundbreaking ceremonies were held on 28 ApriI. The pIan was a mixture of picturesque and formaI design, marrying the possibilities of an irregular site with the rigor of a hierarchical grido The basic scheme was cross-axiaI. Major buildings c10sed off the main north-south axis at either end -the grand hall for receptions and congresses and the pala ce of Italian CiviIization, respectively. Both were set on high ground. In front of the palace, a glass structure called the Palace of Light overIooked an artificial lake of picturesque outline which the axis crossed by a bridge. The grand hall fronted a long piazza focused by the obeIisk of Axum brought from this holy city of
calle dEnte Autonomo Esposizione Universale di Roma, was overseen by an advisory Commissariat with senator Vittorio Cini as its president; otherwise, it functioned completely independently of the administrative and juridical control of the Pian of 1931, even though it was heavily subsidized by the State. Drectly under Piacentini carne Gaetano Minnucci, in charge of the execution of parks, gardens, and individuaI structures. Some of the buildings more or less completed between 1937 and 1943 were assigned to specific architects by the Ente Autonomo. Minnucci himself did the offices of the Ente; Arnaldo Foschini, the church of Saints Peter and PauI. For others, the Ente held competitions. Of these, the most important are the following: Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi, Adalberto Libera the winning architect; Palazzo della Civilt Italiana, Giovanni Guerrini, Ern~sto La Padula, Mario Romano, the winrring team; Piazza Imperiale, and surrounding buildings, executed according to a finaI design by the two projects that placed first, that by Luigi Moretti and that by the team of Francesco Fariello, Saverio Muratori, and Lodovico Qua~ roni; and finally, Piazza delle Forze Armate, with two winning designs by Mario De Renzi and Gino Pollini (not executed). The post- War activity of the Ente, selfsupporting since 1951, is outside the scope of this exhibition.
EUR today.
[Courtesy of F. Quilici).