Sites of Anti-Fascism: Trionfale, Garbatella, and San Lorenzo

Post Office on Via Marmorata, 1940 photo

Regular readers of these pages are familiar with the remaining reminders of the Fascist era in Rome, of which the Foro Mussolini/Foro Italico, the grand complex of EUR, Luigi Moretti’s House of the Italian Fascist Youth (l'ex GIL in Trastevere), the Ostiense Post Office on Via Marmorata, the University of Rome, the Via dell’Impero, and what was once the Ministry of Corporations (improbably on Via Veneto) are only the most prominent (see links at end). 

Public Housing in Trionfale

Less well known are the sites of resistance to Fascism.  They were all, at the time, areas of the city populated by and identified with the city’s working class, students, and youth.  Two—the near-in “suburbs” of Trionfale and Garbatella—were the sites of major public housing developments built or completed under Fascist auspices.  

Garbatella is one of the itineraries in our new book, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler; see below for more information.

One of Mario Mafai's "demolition" paintings, late 1930s

Significantly, these “projects” (to use the American term) housed many families that had been driven from the central city when their living quarters were razed to make way for the broad avenues favored by Mussolini and other Fascists.  Artist Mario Mafai, whose own family was forced from the Monti quarter by the demolitions (in Italian, sventramento/tearing down), did a series of paintings on the subject. 

The Red Hotel, Garbatella

In Garbatella, four of the largest buildings, including the famous and still-standing Albergo bianco (white hotel) and Albergo rosso (Red hotel) now and then served as detention centers for communists and others deemed dangerous to the state.  When Hitler made his one and only visit to Rome in 1938, potential dissidents were rounded up and brought to the “hotels,” where they were placed under police guard.  The hotels also housed ex-prisoners returning to Rome after incarceration elsewhere.  In addition, living conditions in the hotels contributed to anti-fascism.   Residents not only resented being forced out of their former neighborhoods, but also disliked having to leave their own furniture behind for the iron tables and chairs provided by the complexes. 

Anti-fascist graffiti on Garbatella's old marketplace,
2009 (now being renovated)

Moreover, the great majority of the men living in the new housing in Garbatella were proletarians--ordinary, poorly paid workers struggling to keep their jobs and feed their families under the difficult conditions of the worldwide Great Depression.  These workers were especially vocal, and most likely to incur the wrath and intervention of the police, as May 1—Europe’s labor day—approached.   In 1943, with Fascism disintegrating  and the city occupied by the Nazis,  some 270 of the most disaffected—from the working-class neighborhoods of Ostiense, Testaccio and San Saba, as well as Garbatella--formed a resistance organization with like-minded anti-fascists.  Even today Garbatella is known as Rome's most socially progressive neighborhood. 

San Lorenzo

But it was another working-class quartiere, this one to the north of the Centro, and close in, that caused the Fascists the most trouble.  San Lorenzo was a dense neighborhood of narrow streets, just the sort of place that the Fascists imagined was full of left-wing troublemakers.  In this case they were right.   In 1921, the year before the March on Rome, the Fascist Party congress came to the city, and some 30,000 blackshirts roamed the working-class sections of the city, bashing heads—especially in San Lorenzo—in what proved a deadly effort to keep dissidents in line. 

The following year, according to historian Paul Baxa, the arrival in the city of the remains of Enrico Toti, a hero of the Great War, killed on the Carso and a Fascist icon, brought another confrontation in San Lorenzo.  As the procession with Toti’s body moved along Via Tiburtina, through the heart of the district to the nearby Verano cemetery, anti-Fascists fired from windows and alleys.  Five months later, in the epic March on Rome, a unit of Fascisti, heading west and south on Via Tiburtina and warned to stay out of San Lorenzo, entered the area anyway and again faced fire from San Lorenzo’s socialists, communists, and anarchists.   

The center of the University of Rome, built,
so the story goes, on the ruins of San Lorenzo. The
sign in the foreground advertises the Rome version
of the "Occupy" movement (October 2011)

After the second of these events, an angry Mussolini announced in the newspaper Il Popolo that “all obstacles [to Fascism] will eventually come down.”  Not even Mussolini could tear down all of San Lorenzo, but he came close, or so the story goes.  In the 1930s the regime tore down most of San Lorenzo that lay to the northwest of Via Tiburtina for its new University.   Although Mussolini was capable of such venality, we’re just a bit skeptical, if only because our early-20^th century map of the area destined to house the university shows it to be nearly empty of buildings. 

Another site, not visual but oral, is the resistance anthem, Bella Ciao.

Bill
Links to other posts include Foro Mussolini/Foro Italico, Case Popolare (on Fascism's housing projects), L'ex GIL (the Moretti youth center), the via Marmorata post office, and the University of Rome (Gio' Ponti's mathematics building). Via Veneto's Fascist corporate buildings are on Itinerary 5 in RST:  The Nazis and Fascists in Central Rome.

And for more on Garbatella and Fascist architecture in Rome, see our new print AND eBook,  Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.  Along with the tour of Garbatella that includes the Red Hotel and the old marketplae, Modern Rome features three other walks: the 20th-century suburb of EUR, designed by the Fascists; the 21st-century music and art center of Flaminio, along with Mussolini's Foro Italico, also the site of the 1960 summer Olympics; 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.

Fascism: Patron of the Arts

Prompolini, Carpanetti, Terragni, Libera, De Renzi, Maccari, Sironi, De Chirico, Marini, Torres, Casorati, Guttuso. We would be surprised if you'd heard of more than one or two--De Chirico perhaps, or Sironi, or, less likely, Libera or Guttuso. But even these are not household names, and the others--and the list we've offered is only a beginning--rest in obscurity. Yet between the great wars, in the Fascist era that began with the March on Rome in 1922, all did significant work as painters, sculptors, muralists, or architects, and the products of their labor can be found in Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna or, in the case of the architects, in the city's public buildings.

We have often wondered why these men, and their contributions to 20th-century culture, aren't better known. We found one answer in Marla Susan Stone's The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, 1998). As Stone explains, until quite recently the artists who designed buildings under Fascism or made paintings for its exhibitions were understood as having subordinated their talents and artistic interests to a Fascist dictatorship, damaging themselves and producing inferior, politicized work in the effort to generate a Fascist aesthetic.

According to Stone, something like that happened during Fascism's later years, after 1935, when Italy's invasion of Ethiopia signaled a new determination to be a colonial power, and especially during the war, when the alliance with Hitler's Nazi Germany led the Italian Fascists to advocate a public art that celebrated the unified national state and glorified Fascism's imperial and military ventures. One result, in architecture, was a turn toward a monumentalist style designed to link Fascism with the power and splendor of ancient, imperial Rome. The best example is the complex of buildings designed for E42 (below right)--the Exposition of 1942, intended to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the March on Rome--constructed south of Rome's center. E42 never opened; construction was abandoned during the war.

But before 1934, as Stone makes clear, Fascism proved a tolerant patron of a wide variety of artistic and architectural styles, practicing what she calls "aesthetic pluralism." In architcture, the regime embraced and supported the rational language of international modernism, though sometimes with a monumental flavor. In the early 1930s, rationalist architects designed four post offices in Rome and one in nearby Lido di Ostia, accessible through YouTube.

At the Venice Biennale and other exhibitions, Fascism patronized (and purchased) the works of a wide variety of artists from every major movement, including the Novecento group, which incorporated modern and traditional expressions around Italian themes. Top left, a 1918/19 work in the Novecento vein by Felice Casorati.

Fascist patronage also included aeropittura, which emphasized images of flight; the concretisti, a group that opposed Mussolini but participated in Fascism's national exhibitions; and the scuola Romana (Roman school), which tended toward images of ordinary urban life. At left and below, Mario Mafai's Demolizione dell'Augusteo (1936), from the scuola Romana. The title refers to demolitions carried out in the 1930s near the tomb of Augustus, apparently to make way for the monumental, Fascist structures that now grace that piazza.

This sort of pluralism was unique among the dictatorships of the day. The Nazis followed a very different course. Stone offers the example of Giorgio De Chirico, whose stylized, metaphysical modernism was purged from German museums yet welcomed and celebrated by Fascism.

So, that's a partial explanation for why there's so much excellent 20th-century Italian art and architecture, and for why nobody knows about it. For those with an academic bent and interested in pursuing the matter, we recommend Marla Stone's important book.

Bill