Fasces, Fasci: Trolling Rome for the Politics of the Past--and Present

Yes, that's the United States House of Representatives, and, on each side of the central podium, fasces, complete with the wreath that symbolizes victory.  Fasces (that's the English word, "usually construed as singular," according to my dictionary) also appear on the reverse side of the Mercury dime, on the doorways of the Oval Office, on the US Capitol Building, on the Supreme Court Building, on Lincoln's chair at the Lincoln memorial (surprise!) and (a more personal reference here), on the entrance to Buffalo, New York's Art Deco City Hall.  Fasces grace the cover of French passports and have served as national symbols for Ecuador, Cameroon, and Cuba.  Police forces in Norway, Sweden, and Romania use fasces to represent their orders.  I had no idea.

Nasone, Grottaferrata, in the Colli Albani
outside Rome.  Fasces beneath
the gold nozzle

The origins of the symbol are Italian, using that designation broadly.  The bundle of wooden sticks, bound together, and sometimes including the axe blade, has Etruscan beginnings but became prominent with its adoption by the Kingdom of Rome, then the Republic, then Imperial Rome.

The fasces were carried by Lictors (attendants), and their presence signified the power of the magistrate being attended.  Added in Republican Rome, the axe meant that the power of that particular magistrate included capital punishment.  When the fasces were brought into Rome's center the axe was removed, a sign that power resided with the people, rather than with an arbitrary and capricious magistrate.

Flagpole base, inside Cinecitta', Rome.  Naval
motifs, including fish

Millenia later, Mussolini's Fascism took its name from fasces. And that's the problem.  For a long time fasces connoted collective power, strength through unity, one out of many, e pluribus unum. Just the right symbol for an American nation constructed from a wide variety of religions and immigrants groups and states with different interests.  Then the Italian Fascists appropriated the symbol, signed a deal with the Nazis, and went to war.  They did badly, and the damage was done. The fasces symbol had been corrupted.

Fasces with modern flair, abandoned 1930s
water fountain, Colle Oppio, Rome

Doorway, somewhere in Rome

Fasces pattern in small stones.  A sidewalk in Piazza
Damiano Sauli, Garbatella (on one of Modern Rome's walks),

Intact inverted fasces, school, Centocelle, Rome

Trashing fasces in Milan, probably 1945

Plaque on wall, Garbatella.  Here, fasces are linked to the Case Popolari (public housing) built after the Great War.
The plaque (and its fasces) have been intentionally preserved.  Dated 1920, 2 years before the March on Rome.  

Underside of a marble table, Naval Ministry, Rome

High up on an industrial water tower, on the Tevere near the Industrial Bridge, Rome...

....fasces, carefully preserved

The Italian experience with a Fascist government ended in 1943, when Mussolini was deposed and, some time later, executed.  It would be comfortable to believe that Italians were united in celebrating an end to Fascism, but that's not the case.  Many Italians had deep personal (or political) investments in the regime--they had participated in it in some way, and were proud of its accomplishments--and for them Fascism's demise was unfortunate, sad, or threatening. Others, of course, were overjoyed that Mussolini's authoritarian government was gone and looked forward to living in a democracy. Still others no doubt had mixed emotions.

At upper right, this building on viale XXI Aprile, Rome, is marked with an E and F (Era Fascista)
and the date (XI, or 1933).  On the rounded pillars, fasces have been removed.
The building was the setting for Ettore Scola's 1977 film with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroanni,
 "Una Giornata Particolare" (A Special Day).

Chipped off fasces, Rome school, San Giovanni area

Three chipped away fasces, dating to 1934.  Near Castel S. Angelo, Rome
Also note upper left "A-XII" (year 12, 1934) and what looks like a chiseled off  "EF"
 (Era Fascista)  on the upper right.

That mix of perspectives can be revisited by noting how 20th-century Romans have dealt with the fasces in their midst.  Some have been chiseled off public and private buildings.  Others remain, reminders of Italy's 20th-century fascination with its Roman origins, and of the country's 20-year flirtation with Fascism.

For Americans who grew up with the fasces on the back of the Mercury dime, these Rome

remnants of Italy's disagreeable past might offer a lesson, or lessons, on our own past: was American use of fasces different from the Italian Fascist use--that is, more innocent, more positive, essentially benign?  Or was there more to the Mercury dime (1916-1945, roughly corresponding to the Fascist era, and featuring the axe), and to the fasces in the US House of Representatives? Something unsettling?

Bill

In Piazza Augusto Imperatore (in RST's Top 40).  Perhaps Rome's best known fasces.

Round Rome: An Architectural Guide

Architects of all ages have favored square or rectangular buildings; they're easier to design and cheaper to build, and everything from bookcases to sofas fits better against a straight wall than a curved one.  Nonetheless, Rome has its share of round or rounded structures, or structures with distinctive round features.  Some are churches--older ones and newer ones alike--but the modernist architects of the 20th century, with their investments in geometric forms, were also fond of round forms.

Below, RST presents 24 examples of Rome in the round.  If you can identify--by name, general location, or architect--any 10 of them, you can take credit for having a solid knowledge of Rome architecture.  Get 15 and you're ready to guide tours.   Look at the photos and make some notes before reading the text and captions!   Bill



The Pantheon is the mother of all Rome's round buildings. At least this is true chronologically, and the structure has been influential over the centuries in encouraging the city's architects to construct round buildings.

Pantheon, exterior

Pantheon, interior

Other buildings of ancient Rome have round or
rounded features.  The ruins of this Roman bath
are located on Colle Appio.

Churches often have round features--most obviously the dome. The church at the right, probably constructed about 1940, is simply weird.  You can find it--assuming we recall correctly--in Piazza Lecce, intersecting Via Bari, southwest of Piazza Bologna.

This dainty little round building is actually a temple, inside the courtyard of a church. It's called the Tempietto (little temple), and it was designed by Bramante.  Scholars consider it a nearly perfect structure and by all accounts it has been enormously influential for architects.  It's on the Gianicolo, a stone's throw (assuming you've got a major league arm) from the Aqua Paola fountain.  (And Dianne insisted on including it on the stairways walk, one of the 4 itineraries in Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.)

Santo Stefano Rotondo, exterior

At right, Santo Stefano Rotondo (round).  It was the first Rome church with a circular plan. The original incarnation dates to about 475, but it's been through numerous restorations.  Even so, the interior, especially, is powerfully evocative.  Perhaps because that most famous of round Rome buildings, the Pantheon, was pagan rather than Christian, some scholars--and for a while RST--thought Santo Stefano Rotondo was coverted from a pagan temple.  Nope.  It was always Christian.  (Almost directly south from the Coliseum.)

Santo Stefano Rotondo, interior.

The round church  below--exterior and interior--is on the University of Rome's main campus.  Likethe rest of the campus, it was constructed during the 1930s, when modernism was in fashion in Fascist Italy.  The rounded windows--a common feature of modernist buildings for the period, perhaps referencing ship portholes--add to the effect.  

A 21st-century church on Rome's periphery.

A round, modernist tower graces the church of Gesu Divino Lavoratore in the Marconi district, just off Piazza della Radio. c. 1940s

One of many buildings that make up the Foro Italico (once Foro Mussolini).  To repeat: the architects of the era reveled in geometric forms. The fascinating complex is located on the right bank of the Tevere, just across the river from the big bulge in the Flaminio zone.  In the shadow of Monte Mario.

More rounded forms--and more of that classic red/rose paint. This structure was originally an outbuilding for the Foro Italico.  Today's it's a privately owned business: Officine Farneto.  A two-minute walk from Stadio Olimpico, up via Monti della Farnesina.  You'll walk right into it.  Looks better today than in this photo.

This impressive rounded structure dominates Piazza Bartolomeo Romano, in the Garbatella neighborhood.  The Teatro Palladium (1927) was designed by Innocenzo Sabbatini, who did other buildings in Garbatella.  It was originally a movie house, with apartments behind, and is now a cultural center owned by the Third University of Rome. (Again, part of one of the itineraries in Modern Rome.)






The two buildings below are not round, but they do have round flourishes, round decoration.  The first is just a supermarket, construction date unknown.  The circular decoration fits nicely with the 1950-ish apartments behind the store.  The other building, the Banca Popolare di Milano (1972-73), is standard late modernist box-style--two boxes, actually--but given a bit of style with three round constructions atop the structure. Although it's not a particularly interesting building, the architect is one of Rome's most famous: Luigi Moretti.  Moretti's best-known Rome work is the Casa Della GIL (House of the Italian Fascist Youth, now often referred to as the ex-GIL).  Built between 1933 and 1936, it's a lovely example of Fascist-era modernism.  The ex-GIL is in Trastevere.  (Moretti's best-known work in the US is the Washington, D.C. Watergate complex, which has given us all our "-gate" scandal names, and which has round features.) The bank is just outside the wall at Piazza del Popolo, in Piazzale Flaminio.

Another late modernist structure, just up the road from the bank (above) in Flaminio.  A true classic: Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport (1956/57).  Nervi was an engineer as well as an architect, and he had to be to produce this elegant building out of reinforced concrete. Because the roof needs paint, it looks a bit shabby in this photograph.  It's gorgeous at night when there's an event taking place inside.  We wrote about this building and many others in the area in our book, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler (2014)

We have no idea who designed this building or when.  But we--Bill, especially--loves the lines created by the white fencing around the apartment balconies.  On, would you believe, the current route of the old road, via Latina.

This mushroom-like building is, or was, a dancehall.  This is the back of it.  It's crammed into a small space (obviously) somewhere (we might be hard pressed to find it again) in Appio Latino.

Another mushroom facility.  Not sure what it's for.  Exact location is unknown, but it would be quite close to the intersection of via Boccea and the Circonvalazione Aurelia, near the entrance to Parco del Pineta Sacchetti, in the city's northwest quadrant.

Renzo Piano's Parco della Musica.  Location: Flaminio, just steps from Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport.

Parking garages don't have to be circular, but Rome has two that are.  This beauty by architect Riccardo Morandi is on via Magna Grecia, just south of San Giovanni in Laterano.  It was built in 1957, and we wonder if it inspired Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim, completed a few years later.

Another parking garage, architect and
date unknown.  Hard to find, because it's hidden
except from one angle.  Location: a few blocks
northwest of Piazza Fiume.  Good hunting!

Not really a round building, but the circular ceiling cutout is so lovely that we couldn't resist. Another Luigi Moretti creation.  Part of the ex-GIL (1933-36) in Trastevere, next to Nanni Moretti's theatre.

Rome's gazometri (literally, gas meters) are among Rome's best-known Rome structures: very visible, and quite strange.
As we understand it, they are essentially shells that once housed and contained large bags of natural gas.  Such structures are not unique to Rome.  In the Ostiense neighborhood.

Above and below, two of Rome's finest staircases in the round mode.  Above, a Luigi Moretti staircase in the ex-GIL (around back on the left, beyond the entrance to the athletic complex).  Below, the staircase that leads up and out of the parking garage beneath the Villa Borghese.  Incredibly, it, too, was designed by Luigi Moretti.   

Colle Oppio: In the Shadow of the Coliseum

So you've "done" the Coliseum.  It's not yet lunchtime [1-3 in Rome outside the tourist areas], you've given the fenced-in Arch of Constantine its due, and you're tired of being surrounded by tourists and badgered by folks wanting to sell you stuff. Where do you go?  What's next?

You wouldn't know it, but you're just due passi--literally two steps, but generally meaning "nearby"--from Colle Oppio [Oppio Hill], a fascinating, compact, Roman park, filled with attractions from the historic to the funky.  You can get onto, or into, the Colle Oppio through the gate, and then the path, that runs roughly north from the Coliseum, paralleling via Labicana. This is one of Rome's famous seven hills, and some say one of the most inspiring in Rome, with the Coliseum as its backdrop.

One of the first things you see, on your left, is a statue to Alfredo Oriani [1852-1909].  On the side it says A Roma Madre Ravenna.  It's a creation of the Fascist era--XIII, the 13th year of the Fascist regime, or 1935.  A novelist, poet, and social critic, Oriani's work received little attention until the end of the Great War, when it was discovered by the Fascist regime and, with Mussolini as editor, republished in 30 volumes.  Oddly, Oriani was also appreciated by leftist and anti-Fascist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote about him in his prison notebooks.  When we saw the statue, it had been lightly defaced with a right-wing symbol.







Shortly after the statue, turn up to the left.  Ahead is a large pool/fountain--another, somewhat earlier Fascist-era monument.














Perhaps its outstanding feature is the amphorae that decorate it--symbols of ancient Rome, when clay vessels of this kind were used to transport oil and other commodities.  The smaller fountains at the sides of the larger ones are of interest as well.  Above each of them is the letter "A" [for Anno, year] and the number VI [the sixth year of Fascism, or 1928].









Beyond the fountain, on a wall to the right, is some intriguing and, we assume, relatively permanent graffiti: Omnia Vincit Amore [sounds to us, who have never studied Latin, like Love Conquers All/Colle Oppio, and in the center a symbol we haven't seen before.  And just ahead, the remains of a substantial and once-elegant complex of ancient Roman baths.  These are what remains of the magnificent, 10,000 square meter Baths of Trajan (Emperor 98-117 AD), designed by the brilliant architect Apollodorus of Damascusa in 109 AD above Nero's famous - or infamous - Golden House (closed/open/closed - we think now truly closed - the conservationists can't seem to prevent its collapse.  Luckily we saw it in its brief open period a few years ago). [See Marco's update in the first comment below - there may be hope here.]  There's another piece to your left and back--we'll get there in a moment.






This park has another aspect, one that you may--or may not--appreciate.  It's a gathering and resting place for black immigrants, some of them the itinerant merchants who are ubiquitous in Rome's tourist areas, others, perhaps, unemployed or underemployed.  When we visited in May, the field next to the baths was dotted with sleeping young men.





As you move more or less back toward the fountain, and somewhat to the right, you'll find a second set of
ancient bath ruins.  These are more of the Baths of Trajan.  When we last were there, the city had put up some informative placards near the various ruin sites.  Since the baths covered 10,000 square meters and had gyms, saunas, hot and cold rooms, etc., you will find ruins dotting Colle Oppio, which has been called an archaeologist's dream.  No crowds here.

Next to this piece of the baths is another treasure, from the 1930s: a stone fountain in the modernist style, once elegant but now broken and defaced.  The marble bowl is beautiful, nonetheless.  And the fasces on the side of the fountain are remarkably well preserved.












Two more sights to see.  One is a modest, 2-story building of unknown origins--it could be hundreds of years old, or only a century--fenced in and circled by bushes and trees.  As the sign says, it's the property of the Comune di Roma--the city government--and houses the Centro Anziani "Colle Oppio": a social center for the neighborhood's population of older, retired people--of which Italy has plenty.




Our last stop is a small athletic field, in sight of the Coliseum, where we began our journey.  On our visit it wasn't being used for soccer or any other sport, but rather as a meeting place for the the area's itinerant merchants.  They often carry their wares in blue plastic bags.  On this day, these merchants also hoped to sell umbrellas.  A broader view of the field is at the end of this post.

Bill