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A timeless, glorious and fascist Rome: this was the neighborhood that Mussolini dreamed of for his imperial capital

2021-08-03T04:27:44.818Z


The EUR42 is today a no-place that houses the frustrated dreams of the dictator for the Italian future, as well as the recent and award-winning Massimiliano Fuksas Congress Center, which its creator considers "a drama" and "a conflict"


The portico of the

Tre Fontane

Hall

is inscribed with a promise: "The third Rome will extend on other hills along the Sacred River to the bank of the Tyrrhenian." That was the great desire of Benito Mussolini in the capital, to lay the foundations of a utopian city beyond the modern and the ancient, one that was close to the sea. And it would start with EUR42, south of Rome and towards the port of Ostia, a neighborhood transformed into a tiny city to host the 1942 Universal Exposition, which stopped the bombs of World War II. This would have been the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome, sweetened by a soundtrack (Passo Romano) that claimed the Empire looking to the future.

Il Duce

entrusted the architect and urban planner Marcello Piacentini with the construction.

Expropriating more than 400 hectares from monks

Trappisti

and accelerated the works of the metro line B, which would connect the Colosseum with the contemporary area, that is, the ancient Forum with that of the 21st century.

The Palazzo delle Civiltà, also known as the Square Coliseum, is the symbol of fascist culture in Italy.julio ocampo

Basilica San Pietro and Paolo in the EUR42 neighborhood, in Rome.julio ocampo

"Mussolini was a journalist, he controlled the media, but above all he saw in architecture a megaphone to send messages," explains Antonino Saggio, professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. "Fascism had many souls: first on the left and anticlerical, then on the contrary ... Initially it supported young rationalist architects inspired by Le Corbusier, but later it focused more on the Littorio style." A style that emphasizes dogmatic, rhetorical and monumental language to represent the greatness of the regime, simple architecture to evoke ancient ancient ideals. With this mixture of classicism and rationalism it was intended to homogenize cities or public buildings, most of them inspired by the metaphysical painting of Giorgio De Chirico.

“It is interesting to see in which direction Mussolini [who came to power in 1925] turned when he came into contact with Hitler [around 1937] and met the architect Stern. In a certain way, the pure rationalist functionality was abandoned in favor of the decoration and cladding, in travertine. The walls appeared perforated and dynamic, not purely structural. All in the middle of an orthogonal urban layout: squares crossed by avenues that in turn connected with other remote areas. Nothing to do with some Le Corbusier bedroom neighborhoods, where the street area is completely independent from the habitable one, sometimes it even leaves it isolated, as in the Villaggio Olimpico in Rome ”, points out the professor.

It also underlines the success of the De Chirico touch, instead of the Futurism of Marinetti, more in vogue at that time, to highlight the message of

il Duce

: reason with time and create a timeless Rome that leans on a glorious past.

The skeleton of the neighborhood was formed, together with the Basilica San Pietro and Paolo, the Palazzo Uffici and the one of the Congresses - realized by Adalberto Libera.

Construction was completed in the 1950s and grew significantly beyond the post-war period, specifically with the Olympic Games in Rome in 1960, a crucial moment to discover its own lake and make way for another architectural genius: Pier Luigi Nervi.

That place that served as inspiration for important Italian film directors, such as Michelangelo Antonioni or Federico Fellini.

The latter defined it as a no-place, a theatrical set that is and is not there.

Always in tense calm.

Palazzo dei Congressi, by Fuksas, perhaps, the first major construction since Rome 60. Julio Ocampo

The Palazzo delle Fontane in the EUR42 area of ​​Rome.julio ocampo

Fuksas cloud

It is precisely in that timeless Rome, trapped in time, with impersonal and apocalyptic pieces, cold, bleak and at the same time full of profuse vegetation, that Rome turned into a financial center with abandoned gas stations, alone and heartless like a Hopper painting, where the Architect Massimiliano Fuksas finished building the New Congress Center in 2016, known as

la nuvola di Fuksas

(

Fuksas

cloud).

Perhaps the first major construction since those Olympic Games in Rome.

30 meters high and longitudinally oriented, the parallepiped is a set of steel nerves.

A suspended cloud with an outer envelope based on simple lines that pay homage to the rationalist architecture of the 1930s, that which, together with monumentality and classicism, made up the specific

Littorio

style

.

"Think that my cloud is where Fellini placed the huge panel of Anita Ekberg in the film

Boccaccio 70

", warns the architect at the beginning of the interview.

The renowned Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas.

julius fields

Thirty meters high and longitudinally oriented, the 'nuvola di Fuksas' is a set of steel ribs.

Leonardo Finotti / studio fuksas¶2016

“I tried to understand and respect the great work of Piacentini and Mediterranean painting. They were a sculptural Mediterranean painting and architecture, possessing strength. Urbanism follows a rationalist logic for me. Also the architecture, although with particularities of home ", he explains. Perhaps closer to the concretism and exclusivity that Professor Saggio cited from the painting of the expressionist Mario Sironi, who in turn had been trained with the futurists Balla and Boccini.

The EUR42 is a neighborhood cut by Cristóbal Colón street, which starts at the Termas de Caracalla and reaches Ostia. “Mussolini did something new, never seen before, and that's where I put my cloud. It was born of some studies that did of quantum physics. Before, I had worked in China (at Shenzen airport) and in Milan at the New Milan Trade Fair, but here I had done nothing. The clouds, their geometry of chaos, the existing algorithms caught my attention. From what has been built, I am interested in the space that is created between the steel covered in transparent glass cloth and that of the parallepiped… ”, he meditates. Something like the blue sky that sneaks between one cloud and another. The space that gives meaning to everything, where the air is, a kind of invertebrate interstice that is lost between fractals.

"Inside we have built an auditorium with excellent acoustics for the opera, the book fair is also organized, now it is a

hub

for vaccines ... I wanted a place, like the Marcello Theater or the Mausoleum of Augustus, reusable so that I could live forever" , sentence from his Roman modernist study, located in a Renaissance building whose walls appear torn to rescue the frescoes of the past. It's a perfectly neat mess, blurred and bare, but well thought out. “The walls, mysterious, vibrate. They seem to say something ”. Like the EUR, always in question, with that aura of mystery. “This is my cloud: a drama, a conflict. Outside it is rational and inside it is

20th century Roman

barocchetto

”.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-03

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