From Dull to Playful: the Ciaramaglia Renovation near Piazza Mazzini

It doesn't look like any other building in Rome. You might not notice it in Los Angeles, Atlanta, or Miami, but it stands out in Delle Vittorie (sometimes referred to as Della Vittoria), a district of the city just north of Prati, and one characterized by the homogeneity of its buildings, most of them constructed between 1900 and 1930.

The building is only a short walk from the elegance (and traffic) of Piazza Mazzini.  Occupying a triangle of land, the official address is via Pietro Borsieri 2/A.  It's surrounded by via Borsieri, via Carlo Poma, and via Angelo Broffierio.

The site was for many years occupied by a 1925 villino built by reknowned architect Enrico del Debbio, who supervised and designed the monumental sports complex once known as Foro Mussolini and now called Foro Italico (further north in Delle Vittorie).

The Del Debbio building, 1925

And in disrepair, decades later.

Del Debbio's villino was torn down in the early 1970s, an era best known in architectural circles for "brutalist" structures built in concrete.  This 1973 building is the building--more or less--than exists today, though it's been throughly renovated, its appearance changed considerably.

Professor of architecture Mose' Ricci described the original building as "one of the few [buildings] in the city expressing a rugged modernity, and perhaps a bit dull.  A brutalist architecture in reinforced concrete and brise soleil [sun baffles], so courageous and yet so out of place for [the area], where the homogeneity of the urban context reigns."

The 1973 building, brise soleil intact.  They would be removed in the renovation.

According to one account, the architecture students of the day "loved it very much for the idea of modernity and internationalism it expressed."

The architect of the 1973 structure was a Roman, Alvaro Ciaramaglia, whose other contributions to the city include a residential building on via Cipro and others at via Crescenzio, 86 and via Cola di Rienzo, at the junction with via Alessandro Farnese.  He's considered unusual among architects because he combined diverse roles, including commissioner, designer and builder.  According to his son, he was also known for an almost "manic care for any kind of detail."

The Borsieri building expressed Ciaramaglia's interest in the architectural avant-garde, including  the English neo-brutalists and international architects Paul Rudolph, Louis Khan, and Kenzo Tange.  More concretely (excuse the pun), the building was actually two separate buildings, connected by two elevated walkways.  Ciaramaglia's building is sometimes compared to the Tree House (Casa Albero) by Giuseppe Perugini, in nearby Fregene.

The Tree House, by Perugini

Originally intended as a shopping mall, Ciaramaglia's complex was never used for that purpose.  For years it was occupied by government agencies, then, probably in the 1990s, fell into disrepair and was mostly empty and abandoned.  After the turn of the century, the building was purchased by the Ghella company, a major international construction firm specializing in tunneling, with the intention of renovating the building and making it the firm's international headquarters.

In 2007, the redesign project was given to the design firm studio Spaini:AA.  The interior was gutted and modernized, but the exterior--a cold, concrete facade, softened somewhat by its rounded corners--was the most serious challenge.  The brise soleil (baffles designed to reduce heat by deflecting sunlight) were removed.  Hi-tech windows were installed to produce an energy-efficient structure.  The first renovations were limited to one of the two buildings.  As of 2018, work was still being done on the 2nd building.


Most important for the current "look" of the building, colored balustrades were used at junctures in the facade, in part to cover places where disparate construction elements came together awkwardly, but also, according to RomaTre professor of architecture Albert Raimond, to "pull away from the
gloomy image [of the building] formed during the years."  Today, the colored balustrades are the building's most distinctive feature, and one unique in Rome.  It remains a symbol of modernism and internationalism--but it's no longer "dull."

Bill

The Best Contemporary Art in Rome is in the....State Department!

One is greeted on the ground floor by Michelangelo Pistoletto's "L'Etrusco" (The Etruscan), 1976, with Pistoletto's
classic use of mirrors, inviting one to join the Etruscan, we we did.

"La paura" (Fear), 2004 by Mimmo Rotella.  How could
  we--film reviewers, and one of us an author of an article
on Zombie films and the Holocaust--not like this one?

The best collection of contemporary art in Rome is not in any museum--not in MAXXI, the nation's 21st-century art gallery, not in MACRO, the City's contemporary art gallery, not in the Gagosian, the city's largest private art gallery, but in the country's State Department building, colloquially known as The Farnesina. 


That's not the Palazzo Farnese, where the French Embassy resides, nor the Villa Farnesina, in the heart of Trastevere where Raphael painted rooms. The Farnesina is the enormous structure designed to be the headquarters of the Fascist party, across the Tevere (therefore, literally Trastevere) but up river adjacent to the Foro Italico, once the Foro Mussolini, the sports complex housing the city's soccer stadium, once its Olympic stadium.

Back to art.  Beginning in 2001, the government convinced artists to loan their works to the Ministero degi Affari Esteri (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, equivalent to the U.S.'s state department).  It apparently purchased some works, but most are on long-term loan, now comprising the Collezione Farnesina, and open from time to time (hey, it's Rome!).

"Battesimi Umanoi"  (Human
Baptisms) by Oliviero Rainaldi,
2006, cement.

The "di quando in quando" openings began just last year to include the last Friday of every month, except July and August, along with an early May weekend opening for Open House Roma, which is when we went.  I'd say run, don't walk, to make your appointment for one of these visits.

The work is also available on Google, but if you think you might go, save your first-time experience for the real thing.
Links are at the end of this post.

The collection is astoundingly rich and unabashedly contemporary.  The works fill the walls and halls of this building, whose construction began in 1937.  The building itself is filled with artwork from the period of its construction and decoration, which occurred mainly in the post-World War II period, with artists such as Sciajola.

From Elena Bellantoni's "The struggle for power, the fox and the wolf," 2014 video.  This video was
filmed in The Farnesina itself.

Our tour included an extensive look at the building and its hallways and rooms, which is essential to view all the artwork.

The large meeting room where Bellantoni's video was filmed.

Mosaics by Sciajola and ceiling art, part of the building decor.

Grand stairway, with original designs on sconces; classic
Fascist use of travertine marble, and use of Roman designs,
including the painting at the end, with a modernist take. 

The collection also includes some original drawings of the building by architect Enrico del Debbio (whose work we've admired in previous posts).

Del Debbio's "first solution" to the "Casa Littoria a Foro Mussolini." The building sits at the base of Monte Mario.

Today's exterior is not too different from del Debbio's "first solution" - minus the marching military, plinth and horses:

For visits, consult the Web site (it says it's in English, but it is not: http://www.collezionefarnesina.esteri.it/collezionefarnesina/it/visita/
Google's "virtual tour" is here: http://www.collezionefarnesina.esteri.it/collezionefarnesina/it/visita/google-art-visita-virtuale

Dianne

Mario Sironi's Il lavoratore  ("The worker"), 1936.

Shaping the New Man: Alessio Ponzio's new book on youth training programs under Fascism and Nazism

Buildings of the Foro Italico (nee Mussolini).  At left, the pool building.  At right, behind the obelisk, the training academy. 

On the side of the obelisk, the words
Opera Balilla, Anno X [1932].
This--and the rest of Foro Italico--
is on an itinerary in Modern Rome: 4
Great Walks for the Curious Traveler

Romaphiles with an interest in the modern, 20th-century city will be familiar with the northern-Rome complex once known as Foro Mussolini, and now as Foro Italico (#5 on RST's Top 40): a 650-ton obelisk of Carrara marble, engraved with the words "MUSSOLINI DUX"; a small, harmonious sports stadium (The Marble Stadium), surrounded by sculptures glorifying the male body; an indoor swimming pool, decorated with mosaics in a nautical theme (the building also houses Il Duce's private gym, which we've visited); a entryway of stone, now enjoyed by skateboarders, with marble markers announcing the foreign conquests of the Fascist regime; and, centering these and other athletic facilities, and linked to the stadium, a massive building in Pompeian red. Mostly designed by architect Enrico del Debbio, the complex opened in 1932.

What is less well known is what happened inside the U-shaped red building.  As Alessio Ponzio explains in his recently published book, Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), that building housed the Fascist Academy of Physical Education of Rome, essentially an elaborate boarding school, with apartments for instructors and a dormitory for students, where the "political and pedagogical leaders" of the Fascist youth organization--then known as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB)--were trained.

One of Fascism's summer "camps."  The ramps at left
made possible elaborately orchestrated presentations.

During a two-year program of coursework and athletic activities, the instructors were trained not only to teach sports and to organize summer camps (Colonie di Vacanze), displays, and parades, but to "give lectures about Italian history, the Fascist regime, and Fascist ideology" and to manage and mold groups of children and adolescents into believers in the Italian New Order. The case del Balilla (Balilla houses), where the graduates of the Academy engaged the country's young people, were educational (or ideological, or propagandistic) in the broadest sense.  While sports were important, minds too were trained--in libraries, theaters, reading rooms, radio rooms, lecture halls. The experience was intense.  "By now we all have the same character," wrote one student, "we all think in the same way."

Boys training at a Fascist summer camp

In 1937, the ONB was replaced by the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL).  Between 1937 and 1939, years that Ponzio describes as the "totalitarian acceleration," the new organization, now directly run by the PNF (National Fascist Party), devoted more attention to military training and endorsed the race laws of 1938; Jewish youth and leaders were expelled.  The case del Balilla (named after Giovan Battista Perasso, a hero of the Great War, whose moniker was Balilla) were renamed case della GIL.  The slogan of the GIL, taken from yet another Fascist-era youth organization, was "Credere, Obbedire, Combattere" (Believe, Obey, Fight).  In 1943 there were about 40 GIL institutes for the training of youth leaders, though the Academy at the Mussolini Forum continued to have a major role.  While the ONB had operated independently of the public schools, the GIL "invaded and conditioned the schools" by organizing a variety of
educational activities during school hours.  It also subsidized summer camps.  And the attack on Catholic youth organizations sharpened, so that in 1940 members of Catholic Action were forbidden to wear badges of that organization in public.

Architect Luigi Moretti's stunning GIL edifice, as it
looked in the 1930s.  It's still there, in Trastevere,
at Largo Ascianghi 5 (and is #10 on RST's Top 40 and
on one of the RST itineraries)

The Academy was important, but Fascism's efforts to produce a "New Man," to shape the bodies and minds of Italy's youth had begun a decade earlier and was given official, legislative sanction in 1926, with the creation of the ONB and approval of a measure that gave to the organization an "absolute monopoly over male education in all extracurricular and extrafamiliar activities.  With the exception of some Catholic youth associations, all other youth organizations, among them the Boy Scouts, the Republic Youth Federation, and the Socialist Youth Federation, were disbanded.  Pius XI resisted decrees that included Catholic groups, arguing that education belonged to family, church and state, and in May 1931 the Vatican broke diplomatic relations with Italy over these issues.

But Mussolini was insistent:  "The Fascist state," he had announced in 1929, "asserts at full its own ethics.  It is Catholic, but it is Fascist. Rather, it is above all, exclusively, essentially Fascist."  An accommodation, if one can call it that, was reached in 1933, with Catholic organizations allowed to exist if they desisted from participation in union, political, and even sports activities.  The spiritual realm was theirs, but that was all.

Foro Italico complex.  The statues circle the small stadium, behind the main buildings.  

It would be tempting to assume that youth education was of minor importance to the Italian Fascist state (and for Germany, too), but it would be wrong to do so.  According to Ponzio, both regimes, and both Hitler and Mussolini, believed "that if states wanted to have a complete control of their citizens, they had to monopolize the education of their future generations."  In addition, Mussolini's commitment to youth education was grounded in the belief that the adult generations had failed (in the Great War, especially), and that the creation of the New Man could only occur when malleable young people were taught a new set of values.

In the final pages of this rich, detailed, and thoroughly researched comparative history, Ponzio briefly assesses the memoirs and oral histories of students and teachers that participated in the ONB and GIL programs.  So "multifaceted" were these experiences, he concludes, so "diverse and various," that "it is not possible to find a common voice."  The results were "uneven," and "the idea of Italian and German youth being blindly mobilized by Mussolini's and Hitler's regimes is artificial."  That's a comforting perspective, but not, I think, one entirely consistent with, or supported by, the Ponzio's own powerful, underlying narrative.

Ponzio explains, too, how knowledge of Fascist programs of youth education--and the comparison with similar Nazi programs--can help in evaluating the idea of "italiani brava gente"--the "myth of the good Italian." Assembled in the postwar era, the myth had several components: compared to the horrific behavior of Nazi Germany, the Fascist regime seemed relatively benign--a pale imitation, really, of its wartime ally.  In addition, Italy's early withdrawal from the conflict was easily interpreted as a sign that Italians were ill-suited to combat and warfare--just too nice to fight.  Finally, the resistance movement--celebrated and revered to this day--allowed Italians to believe that opposition to the Mussolini dictatorship had been widespread, the norm.  

The Italian experience with youth education makes the myth of "italiani brava gente" hard to accept.
Italian Fascism was a pioneer in this area, and the program it created was, for much of a decade, the envy of the Nazis--and of many other European regimes.

Despite what the word implies, totalitarianism is never "total."  But Fascist efforts to reconstruct the bodies and belief systems of youth were, by Ponzio's own accounting, elaborate, invasive, and pervasive, and in Italy they were in place for a generation--long enough to create a substantial cadre of believers, of New Men. The "New Men" who survived the war must have had quite an adjustment.

Bill



Shaping the New Man was published September 29.  It is available for purchase through the University of Wisconsin Press and amazon.com.  

Michael Graves: The Rome Connection

Graves's studio at the American Academy (#9)

We've never met Michael Graves, the famous architect.  But we have had a close encounter, or so it seems, looking back fifty years into the early 1960s.  We were Stanford students then, doing the current version of the European tour: undergraduates on a "junior year abroad" (actually my sophomore year), thinking that Europe would always be dirt cheap.  Our base was Florence, but they insisted on taking us to Rome, and in the fall of 1962 we got there, astonished by the Coliseum and the Forum but also confronted with the city's excursion into modernism: Pier Luigi Nervi's Palozetto dello Sport, which had recently been completed.  We had no idea what we were seeing. 

The Portland Municipal Building (1982)

And we had no idea, of course, that we had just missed Michael Graves, who had months early departed, having spent much of 1960, 1961 and early 1962 (we arrived in the fall of that year) at the American Academy in Rome and elsewhere on the continent, absorbed in his own European tour.  He was not famous then.  He had not yet designed the Portland Municipal Building--one of the founding works of "postmodern" architecture--nor the Humana Building, nor the Denver Central Library, nor dozens of other important structures, and it would be decades before he became one of the world's foremost designers of commercial products, producing designs for Alessi (teapot, 1985), Steuben, Target, Dansk, Disney (the Swan and Dolphin hotels), and Delta Faucet (I was repairing a Delta faucet this afternoon--perhaps one that had its origins as a  Graves sketch).  While in Rome, he was already thinking about product design.

Graves, sketching in Rome, 1961.  He sold some
to tourists for $50. 

No, at the time of our near-crossing in Rome, Michael Graves was mostly an intense 28-year old full of expectations and dreams, a Harvard M.A. in Architecture (1959), and good enough to win the Rome Prize at the American Academy, but not yet really an architect--not yet really anything.  I wish we had met him then, before he became, well, "Michael Graves."  We could have shared our drawings. 

A Graves sketch of the Villa Borghese, c. 1961

It is not too much to say that Michael Graves was made in Rome, transformed by that year or two (however long it was) at the American Academy and by the tour of Italy and Europe that followed.  Nothing gets written about Michael Graves that does not emphasize that formative Rome moment, and Graves has fed the myth with his own words.  In the introduction to a recent book that recounts and fixes the architect's Rome experience with his drawings, sketches, and photographs, Graves begins right there: "The extraordinary experience of two years at the American Academy in Rome in the early-1960s transformed how I looked at the world around me.  In that rich and marvelous city, I came to understand architecture as a continuum from antiquity to the present day, and thus as a language.  I discovered new ways of seeing and analyzing both architecture and landscape.  I also developed an urgent need to record what I saw and created hundreds of photographs and drawings." 

A Graves-designed school building

Enrico del Debbio building, 1931-33

The Rome drawings that fill the early pages of Brian M. Ambroziak's Michael Graves: the Grand Tour (2005) are mostly of ancient Rome--the Coliseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, the Arch of Constantine--or of Renaissance/Baroque Rome--the Aqua Paola Fountain, Santa Maria Maggiore, Villa Borghese.  He was particularly taken with the buildings and ornamentation of Francesco Borromini.  But Rome's monumental and rationalist architectures of the 20th century were there to be seen, too, and it seems to us that some of Graves's later works draw as much on these buildings--essentially, the aesthetics of the Fascist era--as they do on earlier periods.  (See comparison in photos above).   

Graves,  the Denver Public Library

By 1967 Graves had emerged from obscurity, joining Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk (with Philip Johnson as mentor) in The New York Five.  He was mostly a house designer in the 1970s.  1982 was a breakthrough year.  With the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, the Portland Building, and two major museums, he quickly became an exemplar of the movement known as postmoderism.  He came to terms with Alessi in 1985, agreeing to design the whimsical tea kettle for 1.5% of each sale; over 2,000,000 have been sold. 

Rome transformed Graves, but that experience was iconic in a larger way, too.  By 1960, existing movements in architecture and the arts had reached a point of exhaustion.  In painting, abstract expressionists had reduced the form to an extreme of simplicity: a canvas painted in one color.  There was nothing beyond, except perhaps not to paint the canvas at all.  The rectagular glass box had done the same in architecture, showcasing a rigid and extreme modernism that suggested that the form, having been perfected, was untouchable.  They ran out of ideas in Detroit, too, desperately attaching huge, space-like fins on the new models in an awkward, failed effort to tap the future. 

Rome gave Graves--and, in the larger sense, architecture--its new direction: it would draw on the past, the collective past, on the buildings of Rome and Athens, on Egypt's pyramids, on the monumentalism of the ancients, on the towers of medieval Europe, on English furniture of the 18th century, on the fascist aesthetic, on the colors of Italy.  The past was complex and seemingly limitless and, for better or for worse, it would fuel the architectural resurgence of the late-20th century.  What Graves found in Rome was the raw material of the postmodern aesthetic experience. 

Why Graves would start thinking about designing commercial products while in Rome is less clear, but he was hardly alone in connecting the artistic and commercial.  In 1962, while Graves was wrapping up his European sojourn, Andy Warhol was having his first important solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York, featuring representations of Campbell's Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles.  Graves designed products; Warhol used products to make designs.  Both understood the limits of modernism; both had a playful side; both drew on the unparalleled dynamism of American consumer culture to revitalize aesthetic forms.

There was one big difference--well, surely more than one, but one that's especially relevant here.  Warhol cared little about the past, and he had not been to Rome--at least, not that we know of.  Where Graves discovered the a glorious past that could be fashioned into the future, Warhol imagined only irrelevance.  "They call Rome 'the Eternal City,' he wrote, "because everything is old and everything is still standing.  They always say, 'Rome wasn't built in a day.'  Well, I say maybe it should have been, because the quicker you build something, the shorter a time it lasts, and the shorter a time it lasts, the sooner people have jobs again, replacing it.  Replacing it keeps people busy." 

Bill

We highly recommend Brian M. Ambroziak's lovely book, Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour  (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).  Foreword by Michael Graves.

Del Debbio's hidden masterpiece - out-buildings at Foro Mussolini

A few years after restoration, still in
need of TLC

           Officine Farneto (“Farneto Offices”) is a recently restored out-building from the construction of what was Foro Mussolini (now Foro Italico) in the 1930s. It's a shining example of Fascist era architecture that continues to be rediscovered and rehabbed in 21^st century Rome.  Note RST gave Foro Italico its #5 position in RST’s Top 40.  At the time, we didn't know about this complex of out-buildings.

[A new expanded itinerary of Foro Italico (including Officine Farneto) and the area across the Tevere from it, Flaminio, is now one of 4 walks in the new guide: Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.  See more information below.]

            We found Officine Farneto a couple years ago (while meandering off the more beaten paths, as we are wont to do).  More recently the developers, who saw us poking around their complex, invited us in, gave us a tour and showed us their library of information about the architect, Enrico Del Debbio.  We found Del Debbio's work has been given new life here as an exposition and office complex – perhaps more a labor of love by the developers/architects than a profit-making proposition at this point.

Multi-use visible here

           Del Debbio, who designed this construction site warehouse and office, was one of the premier Fascist era modernist architects and the chief architect for Foro Mussolini.  It’s amazing that a simple out-building had such architectural attention paid to it, and that the current owners have restored it so faithfully. 



One of the developer/architects showing off
the roll-in ceramics kiln that they kept - part of
industrial chic

            Post World War II, the building housed an artisan ceramics factory up until the 1970s, and the owners have left the enormous kiln in place. 

Former Fascist sports complex construction warehouse,
then artisan ceramics factory, now "open space" for
exhibitions - or wedding receptions (we saw one in process)

            Officine Farneto was called by one web site “the chicest open space in Rome.”  The owners are pitching the space for weddings, exhibitions, any type of show or conference.  In addition to their architectural offices, there’s also a wellness center with gym and roof terrace.  When we asked the architect/restorers/owners how they were doing from a business perspective, they shrugged their shoulders.  They have hopes for the future.  Modern Romans still shy away from Fascist buildings, they said.

            Bill made an interesting comparison of a Michael Graves building to Officine Farneto in his 2011 post on Rome’s influence on Graves. 

            The complex now sports a bistro and restaurant; so during most reasonable (for Rome) hours, you can stop for refreshments.

            Officine Farneto is definitely worth a visit.  The address is Via dei Monti della Farnesina 77, the street that shoots up directly north in back of the Olympic Stadium.  Or you can use our hyperlinked map of Itinerary 9 (Monte Mario) from the eBook version of Rome the Second Time.  

For more information, Officine Farneto has its own, rather too elaborate, Web site, which includes historical photos and a zip version of the current brochure.  Some of that brochure is in English.

Another Foro Mussolini out-building along the road (via dei Monti della Farnesina)
to Officine Farneto; this one is now a riding club

Dianne
Along with the tour of Foro Italico and the 21st century art and music quarter, Flaminio, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler features three other walks: the 20th-century "garden" suburb of Garbatella, the Fascist-designed suburb of EUR; and a stairways walk in classic Trastevere.

This 4-walk book is available in all print and eBook formats The eBook is $1.99 through amazon.com and all other eBook sellers.  See the various formats at smashwords.com. 

Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler now is also available in print, at amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, independent bookstores,  and other retailers; retail price $5.99.]

           

RST Top 40. #5: Foro Mussolini/Foro Italico

A new expanded itinerary of Foro Italico and the area across the Tevere from it, Flaminio, is now one of 4 walks in the new guide: Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.  Along with the tour of Flaminio and Garbatella, Modern Rome features three other walks: the 20th-century "garden" suburb of Garbatella, the Fascist-designed suburb of EUR; and a stairways walk in classic Trastevere.



This 4-walk book is available in all eBook formats for $1.99 through amazon.com and all other eBook sellers.  See the various formats at smashwords.com.  Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler now also is available in print at amazon.com and other retailers for the retail price of $5.99.

Dianne and Bill