Mussolini for his first decade in power, wasn’t quite interested in architecture as his fellow dictators. While censoring film-makers, writers, academics and journalists, he let architects do as they please.
The resulting architectural output, between Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 and the late 1930s, when he began to exert more control, embodies an accidentally healthy pluralism. While Hitler rejoiced in the traditional völkisch kitsch of his imaginary master race, and Stalin revelled in over-iced baroque confections, Mussolini sat back and let historicist revivalism compete with the crisp forms of forward-looking modernism.
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| Sacrario di Monte Grappa. Photo: Nico Piotto/Flickr Vision |
This stylistic tension is introduced at the beginning of the programme in the form of two monumental memorial ossuaries designed by architect Giovanni Greppi and sculptor Giannino Castiglione, built just a few years apart to celebrate the Italian dead of the first world war. The Sacrario di Monte Grappa, completed in 1935, channels the form of prehistoric burial mounds in a circular mountain of stepped terraces, punctuated by arched openings.
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| Largest military cemetery in Italy, Sacrario di Redipuglia Photo: Alamy |
A hundred kilometres away, the Sacrario di Redipuglia, finished in 1938, is another gargantuan stepped ossuary, designed as an endless flight of steps that taper and narrow as they rise to emphasise the perspectival effect. But this time the composition is stripped of historical reference and wrought with a more minimal hand that makes it feel “cautiously futuristic”.
In Genoa we find the work of Gino Coppedè, “the undisputed master of more is more”, whose buildings groan under the weight of rustication and “frozen menageries of malevolent animals which belong to no known bestiary”. His architecture sampled styles from across the ages, giving the timeless impression of having been around forever. It is a kind of revivalism that finds its way into Garbatella, a garden city in Rome, in watered-down form. Stripped of excessive ornament, but retaining traditional motifs, the style seems to be attempting to define a national identity – a “romantic peasant unifying glue”.
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| ‘Mass-market modernism’ Armando Brasini’s Paris exhibition of 1925. Photo: Kachelhoffer Clement/Corbis via Getty Images |
Next one the “mass-market modernism” of art deco by Armando Brasini. He is swiftly followed by the futurists, who rejoiced in power of machines and the glamour of war. They are brilliantly and bluntly dismissed as a bunch of charlatans.
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| The 1916 Fiat factory, extended in 80s by Renzo Piano. Photo: Interfoto/Alamy |
It is an engaging survey, if sometimes dense and muddled, but one which strangely ignores some of the more prominent fascist architects, such as Giuseppe Terragni, whose Casa del Fascio in Como features on the syllabus of every architecture student. There’s not much on Mussolini’s grand infrastructure projects either, although the landmark Fiat factory in Turin (as featured in The Italian Job) gets a look-in – for embodying doctrines of Taylorism and Fordism, which started in the United States, but which only flourished under authoritarian regimes.
The picture painted in following article by an English writer Jonathan Meades is a battle of styles with no real winner, nor an interested audience. Each faction, we are told, pleaded that their architecture best represented nationalism, sacrifice and moral fervour, yet they were competing for an endorsement Mussolini was unwilling to bestow. Instead, Il Duce tolerated it all. He was “the tyrant who neglected to tyrannise,” a “dictator who failed to dictate,” a man who styled himself as a living god, yet was forever “stalled on the lower slopes of Olympus”.
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| Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the new home of Fendi. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images |
The painting of Meades end in Rome, the intended site of an international exposition planned for the 20th anniversary of the Italian fascist government, which was never to be. Its crowning monument is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a stripped back stack of arched colonnades that stands at the end of a grand axis like a cubic colosseum. It has the air of yet another ossuary, each framed opening waiting for a martyr of the regime, but like much of the stripped classicism that thrived under Mussolini, it is newly fashionable. Meades strangely fails to mention the twist: this fascist beacon was recently acquired by Fendi as a new headquarters for the fashion brand.
Source: 'The dictator who failed to dictate': free-range architecture under Mussolini
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