Rome's E-Prix and the Ghosts of Fascism

We are pleased to welcome back guest-blogger Paul Baxa, writing here on an all-electric (Formula E) car race to be held in EUR, a Fascist/modernist suburb to the south of Rome, on April 14.  Car racing is all about speed and roads, and Baxa, author of Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (University of Toronto Press, 2010), knows more about Fascism's enchantment with both than anyone else, as well as being an expert on Fascist architecture.  He teaches history at Ave Maria University, Florida. [A walk through EUR is one of the itineraries in our more recent book:  Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.]

Looks like a test run for the race.  The cars are on Viale
Cristoforo Colombo.  The Marconi Obelisk, the starting line for the race,
 is at right.  

On April 14, 2018, Rome will host a round of the all-electric racing car series, Formula E.  Created in 2014, the series is designed to promote the automobile’s supposed electric future.  In order to do this effectively, the series’ creators have sought venues in the world’s capitals and major cities.  The inaugural race was held in Beijing, and since then electric races have been run in London, Berlin, Paris, Mexico City, and Moscow, among others.  It was only logical that Rome would be the next desired site for an E-Prix and this came about in October 2017 when the Eternal City’s mayor, Virginia Raggi, announced that Rome would host an event in 2018.  Although the photo-ops of the announcement showed some of Rome’s familiar landmarks like the Coliseum and the Campidoglio, the race will be run in Rome’s “modernist” suburb, EUR [the letters stand for Esposizione Universale di Roma--more on that below], southwest of the city on the road to Ostia.

E42 (EUR) as it was imagined in the late 1930s.  It looks very much like
this, today.  The arch was never built.  

            That EUR was chosen as the site of the temporary, 21-turn, 1.77-mile street course came as no surprise.  When the possibility of a Roman Formula 1 race was floated back in 2009, EUR was tapped as the desired location for the event.  La Repubblica, one of Italy’s leading national newspapers, declared the choice as a natural given the wide streets, the “rationalist architecture,” and futurist atmosphere of the place.[1 - footnotes at end of post]  Since the 1950s, EUR has been Rome’s most concentrated area of steel and glass architecture, providing a home for some of Italy’s largest multinationals like ENI, and several government ministries.  Its public spaces and patrimony are managed by a corporation called EUR S.p.A which, since 2000, has attempted to make EUR a center of innovation as well as environmental stewardship.  One of its initiatives, Smart City Lab Eur, aims to implement European Union goals of sustainability in energy, which happens to fit in neatly with the aims of the Formula Electric series.  

           The chairman of EUR S.p.A, Roberto Diacetti, recently lauded the Rome E-Prix as part of the district’s goal to become Rome’s capital for conferences, leisure, and tourism exemplified by the long-awaited opening of Massimiliano Fuksas’ new conference center, La Nuvola ("The Cloud"), in 2016.[2]  All of this comes in the year that EUR celebrates its 80^th anniversary, as demonstrated by a slick video presentation on the corporation’s website.

            It is precisely this anniversary that raises questions about EUR’s past—specifically its Fascist origins.  In the midst of all this innovation and future-oriented work, EUR remains one of Italy’s most emblematic centers of Fascist-era architecture.  The “rationalist architecture” celebrated by the Repubblica article is, to be more precise, the Stile Littorio, a combination of modernist, classicist, and monumentalist architecture associated with Marcello Piacentini, Mussolini’s favorite architect and the

Under construction.  Top, the Square Coliseum.  Top right, Palazzo
Ufficci (see text below)

man in charge of overseeing what was, at the time, called the E42.  

          What is now EUR was the brainchild of Giuseppe Bottai, Fascist of the First Hour and Governor of Rome who, in 1935, suggested to Mussolini that Rome host the 1942 World’s Fair.[3]  The architecture and the overall design of the complex was informed by a desire to exalt the achievements of the Fascist regime and of Italian civilization.  First among these “achievements” was the recent acquisition of Ethiopia and the extension of Italy’s Empire in Africa.  As Richard Etlin has pointed out, this celebration of empire became the leitmotif of the project.[4]  Fascist ideology and pomposity informed every street and building in the original plan of the E42.  By the time World War II interrupted the work, several buildings were left in various stages of completion. 

Pier Lugi Nervi's Palazzo dello Sport 

            
          When the new Italian Republic again began working on the project, the Fascist buildings were joined by modernist skyscrapers, residential apartments, parks, a picturesque lake, and sports complexes to host the 1960 Rome Olympic Games.  

Originally conceived as a Fascist showcase, the newly-named EUR became, instead, a site to celebrate the Italy of the Economic Miracle in the 1950s.  Some famous celebrities and cultural figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Giuseppe Ungaretti took up residence there.  Muore recently it has been the home of one of Rome’s most celebrated football icons, Francesco Totti.  EUR has also served as the setting of classic Italian films directed by Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni among others.  [Clips from their films are in the video on the EUR S.p.A. site linked above.]

EUR as seen from the roof of the Square Coliseum.  The white building with the rounded top (center left) is Libera's
Palazzo dei Congressi--the pit stop area for the race.  The street in front of it, leading back toward the Square
Coliseum, is part of the race course.  The Marconi Obelisk is at center right.  

          The Stile Littorio buildings have become “heritage sites” blended into the landscape of EUR’s modernism.  Only days before the E-Prix announcement last October, a leading expert on Italian Fascism, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU, published an article in New Yorker Magazine asking why Fascist landmarks remain standing.  On the article’s front page was a photograph of EUR’s “Square Coliseum”, the Palazzo della Civiltà, probably Fascism’s most distinctive architectural landmark.[5]  After standing vacant for many years, the building is now the headquarters of one of Italy’s leading fashion houses, Fendi.  The flood of condemnation for Ben-Ghiat’s article in Italy reflects the unwillingness or inability of some Italians to think critically about the Fascist heritage that surrounds them.[6]  Whereas Americans are tearing down Confederate-era statues—the context of Ben-Ghiat’s article—Italy seems content to keep its Fascist landmarks up and even use them as contemporary symbols of the new Italy.  

The Square Coliseum, c. 1950

Dianne and Bill at the race starting line (the obelisk is behind
the camera.  The foot was part of a temporary public sculpture.
Looking north, toward the city center.  2010.  

The design for the Rome E-Prix’s course seems to confirm this desire to use the Fascist buildings in such a manner. Despite Diacetti’s desire to promote EUR’s future-oriented vision, the course is almost entirely located in the “Pentagon” section of the district, which is where the highest concentration of Fascist architecture is located.  The course’s starting line is on the Viale Cristoforo Colombo (formerly the Via Imperiale) under the shadow of Arturo Dazzi’s Marconi Obelisk, dedicated to the pioneer of modern communications.  Although the obelisk was inaugurated on the occasion of the 1960 Olympic Games, it was conceived in 1939 to honor the celebrated inventor and Fascist fellow traveler who died in 1937.  

Fuksas' Cloud, nearing completion, 2016

The course then goes past Fuksas’ La  Nuvola and snakes its way past the museums built by the Fascist regime to celebrate Italy’s heritage. Here, the drivers slow down to negotiate a chicane (a sharp double-bend) directly in front of the prominent colonnaded portico that links the museums.  

1957.  These famous folks (sorry, Bill and Dianne can't recall

their names; perhaps some of you recognize some of them) appear

to be crossing Viale Cristoforo Colombo, walking away from the

 Square Coliseum and toward the Palazzo dei Congressi.  

The pit stop area, meanwhile, goes around Adalberto Libera’s celebrated Palazzo dei Congressi, a good example of a structure that attempts to harmonize classicism and modernism in the Stile Littorio.  In recent years, the building has become a prime night spot with a rooftop theater.  

The paving of the beveled stones (sanpietrini) outside the building to accommodate the E-Prix pit lane, has sparked outrage from those concerned with the site’s heritage.[7]  Libera’s building was central to the Fascist vision of the E42.  It was placed at one end of an axis opposite the “Square Coliseum” with two esedra (semi-circular)-like structures on the Viale Cristofero Colombo in the center of the axis.  In what is now the Piazza United Nations the two main axial roads of the E42 project intersect in a manner that echoes Ancient Roman urban planning.  Fans of the E-Prix, sitting in the grandstands or atop Libera’s Palazzo in the hospitality area of the race will thus have an unobstructed view of the E42’s original plan.  The circuit, meanwhile, on its return leg to the start/finish line will use the opposite side of the axial road showcasing the “Square Coliseum”. 

The Fascist salute, it seems, on display at the Palazzo
Uffici.  The mosaic is at right.  

But it doesn’t end there.  As the cars snake through the back end of the course through turns 8 and 9, they will pass in front of Minicucci’s Palazzo Uffici, designed to house the administrative offices of the Ente E42, the forerunner of today’s EUR S.p.A.  This building, whose main hall is today rented out for luxury banquets, includes a large, stone mosaic dedicated to Eternal Rome which boasts a prominent image of Mussolini on horseback giving the Fascist salute.  Near this mosaic is a bronze statue of a young athlete giving a similar salute.[8]  

Thus, the course seems to be designed to exalt the “heritage” section of the EUR, and this means the Fascist-era sites.  Mussolini’s E42 lives on in the design of the Rome E-Prix, which is fitting considering the Fascist regime’s strong support of motorsport in the 1930s.  The ghosts of Fascism are everywhere, including the promo video of the race which shows the series’ leading drivers walking down the Via dei Fori Imperiali ("Way of the Imperial Forums") in the center of Rome.  This road, once called the Via dell’Impero ("Empire Way"), was inaugurated by the Fascist regime in 1932 on the occasion of the its 10^th anniversary.  After their short walk, the drivers then get into their cars and make their way to EU,  past the ruins of the Roman Forum.[9]  Unbeknownst to them, they have taken the Fascist itinerary to the New Rome. 

           

Paul Baxa

P.S.  Dianne has an upcoming post that features both the Palazzo della Civiltà and the Palazzo degli Uffici, which we toured last year.  We will cross-link these posts when the second one is published.

---

[1] Marco Mensurati and Eduardo Lubrano, “Formula 1 Roma. Ecco il circuito,” La Repubblica, 5 febbraio 2009: http://www.repubblica.it/2008/12/motori/formulauno/stagione-2009/f1-roma/f1-roma.html

[2] Askanews, “Formula E: Diacetti (Eur Spa), accende i riflettori sull’Eur,” 23 marzo 2018: http://www.askanews.it/cronaca/2018/03/23/formula-e-diacetti-eur-spa-accende-i-riflettori-sulleur-pn_20180323_00078/

[3] Luigi Di Majo and Italo Insolera, L’Eur e Roma dagli anni Trenta al Duemila (Laterza, 1986), 11.

[4] Richard A. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890-1940 (MIT Press, 1991), 483-85.

[5] Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Why are so many Fascist Monuments in Italy still standing in Italy?” The New Yorker, October 5, 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-are-so-many-fascist-monuments-still-standing-in-italy

[6] “Perchè l’Italia ha ancora così tanti monumenti fascisti? Il New Yorker provoca, la rete lo stronca,” Il Sole 24 Ore, 8 ottobre 2017: http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/notizie/2017-10-08/perche-l-italia-ha-ancora-cosi-tanti-monumenti-fascisti-new-yorker-provoca-rete-stronca-121459.shtml?uuid=AEiYSLhC

[7] ANSA, “Formula E, sanpietrini coperti è polemica,” 18 marzo 2018: http://www.ansa.it/lazio/notizie/2018/03/18/formula-esanpietrini-coperti-e-polemica_324443c7-f6ec-4b94-a9d2-c38a3e39b3ad.html

[8] Borden Painter, Jr., Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 130, 160.

[9] The promo video can be viewed on the Rome E-Prix’s homepage: http://info.fiaformulae.com/it/rome and on YouTube.

Fascist Design--in Miami Beach

RST is pleased to once again have Paul Baxa, an outstanding scholar and interpreter of the Fascist experience, as a guest blogger.  Here, Baxa takes us through the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, currently (through May 18) hosting 3 exhibits on the Fascist era.  A smaller, fourth exhibit on Italo Balbo's air exploits, closes April 29.  Baxa is Associate Professor of History at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida and the author of  (University of Toronto Press, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (20l0).  

Mural study, Antonio Santagata

Ferruccio Ferrazzi's Il Mito di Roma, 1940

For those interested in the intersection of Modernist design and twentieth-century politics, a visit to current exhibitions at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach cannot be missed.  This museum, run by Florida International University, was established by Mitchell Wolfson Jr. who collected documents and artifacts of modernism and was especially interested in materials that connected modernist design with totalitarian regimes.  As a result, there is a wealth of material from Fascist Italy.  I’ve had the good fortune of spending many hours in the Wolfsonian reading room this past fall and also to visit their three special exhibits pertaining to Italy:  The Birth of Rome; Rendering War: The Murals of A.G. Santagata; and Echoes and Origins: Italian Interwar Design.  All opened in the fall of 2013 and will close May 18, 2014. 

The Birth of Rome exhibit displays materials related to Mussolini’s attempts to revive ancient Rome in a Fascist mode.  On display are renderings of the E42 (EUR) as it might have been—including sketches of the never-to-be-built arch.*  Next to these are posters, sketches, and photographs of the Foro Mussolini and its sports complex.  Included are maquettes of statues from the Foro Mussolini designed by Eugenio Baroni.  The centerpiece of the exhibit is a massive detail for Ferruccio Ferrazzi’s tempera on paper drawing, Il Mito di Roma, designed in 1940. Spanning two floors of the Wolfsonian's atrium, the detail is an allegory of the Tiber River holding the twins with the she-wolf at its feet.  To be sure, Baroni and Ferrazzi were not star names of the interwar generation of artists but they figured prominently in the attempts to make a Fascist aesthetic.

Antonio Santagata.  Fascism looks back at the
Great War 

Off to the right of the Birth of Rome exhibit are several rooms filled with large-scale mural studies by Antonio G. Santagata.  These superb studies were designed for the walls of Marcello Piacentini’s Casa dei Mutilati in Rome (on the Tevere, sandwiched between the Palace of Justice and Hadrian's Castle).  The subjects of the murals all deal with the First World War and provide a glimpse of the myth of the Grande Guerra under Fascism. 

Up a floor, one finds the Echoes and Origins exhibit.  This is a perfect complement to the propaganda of the previous exhibits as it demonstrates another side of Fascist Italy—that of consumerism and style.  Here one finds vases and furniture by Giò Ponti, as well as exquisite cupboards by Gustavo Pulitzer Finali.  There is some wonderful kitsch here as well including a 

Fascist-inspired wall lamp

wall lamp designed as lictors rods.  A magnificent La Cimbali espresso machine is one corner next to artifacts from the famous ocean liner Rex.  Posters advertising FIAT, chocolates and cruises are plastered on the wall.  This was another face of Fascist Italy—no less propagandistic than the Imperial Roman bluster but revealing a desire to create a modern, consumerist culture. 

The magic of the Wolfsonian exhibit is found not just in the materials on display but also in the mounting of the exhibits.  The curators create spaces that enhance the impact of the displays.  For example, the Birth of Rome exhibit is displayed in an all-white, minimalist space which emphasizes the Novecento (20th-century) style of the drawings.  In the Echoes and Origins space the visitor is greeted by a massive, amber-glass bowl and pedestal from the Fontana Arte group next to a pillar containing the famous, Futurist-style bust of Mussolini by Renato Bertelli. 

The effect of the exhibits is to immerse the visitor into the visions of the Fascist regime as interpreted by less famous artists and sculptors.  None of these artists had the fame of the likes of Piacentini, Terragni, Sironi et al, but they all in their own way contributed to the Fascist program of reviving Rome in a way that harmonized modernism with classicism.


Paul Baxa 

*  The arch for E42 was intended to span the multiple lanes of the via Cristoforo Colombo, a task that proved beyond the skills of Italian engineers at the time.  Many designs were offered, among them a poster rendering by architect Ludovico Quaroni (left), which closely resembled Eero Saarinen's winning entry in a 1948 competition to honor Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase--the design that in 1966 became the St. Louis Arch.  The site of the E42 arch is on Walk 2, "EUR: Mid-Century Spectacle," in RST's new guidebook, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler  (2014).  On the Quaroni/Saarinen controversy, see William Graebner, "Gateway to Empire: An Interpretation of Eero Saarinen's 1948 Design for the St. Louis Arch," Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, vol, 18 (1993).  Ed.

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.

Massacre in Tuscolano: Rome's Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead)

RST welcomes Paul Baxa as guest blogger.  Baxa is Assistant Professor of History at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and the author of Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (University of Toronto Press, 2010), a wonderfully creative and perceptive book on the cultural forces that created 20th-century Rome.  A review/treatment of that book is at http://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/01/fascism-and-reconstruction-of-rome.html.   Here, Baxa explores an event - and its legacy - that took place years ago in one of Rome's many "ordinary" neighborhoods, and one with which he's very familiar: his relatives live there and he visits often. 

Entrance to the former MSI youth office.

Acca Larenzia is a rather anonymous street in the vast periphery of Rome.  On January 7, 1978 this otherwise quiet street was rocked by violence as an assailant on a motorbike opened fire on a gang of young men, members of the Fronte del Gioventù, the youth wing of the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI).  Two were killed on the spot while a third died later during the unrest that followed.  The gunmen were members of a Marxist revolutionary cell and their action was the latest round of tit-for-tat violence between extremist political groups that had plagued Italy and Rome in particular for several years during the so-called Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead).  With the “strage” (massacre) of Acca Larenzia, as neofascist youths would call it, the suburban streets of Rome were turned into a battleground for the next several weeks. 

     The Quartiere Tuscolano, where the via Acca Larenzia is located, is like any other quarter of Rome, a massive conglomeration of low and medium rise buildings mostly constructed since the Second World War.  These high density neighborhoods served as a breeding ground for the extremist politics of the period.  Teenage girls and boys in the local licei (high schools) spent their weekends and evenings listening to political speeches, and pledging war on their rivals.  Often, these groups clashed and gunfire erupted leaving some of them dead.  Today, one can see in these quartieri popolari (working-class neighborhoods) plaques and memorials commemorating those who died in the cause of extremism.   The ubiquitous graffiti on the walls of the apartment buildings recalls their names for a new generation of militants.

      The events at Acca Larenzia, however, have had an impact on Italian politics today.  Many current politicians like Gianfranco Fini (Deputy Premier under Silvio Berlusconi), Ignazio La Russa, and the current mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno were present at Acca Larenzia in the days following the attacks.  Today, the Acca Larenzia commemorations held every year on the anniversary of the shootings attract important names like Giorgia Meloni, the former Minister of Youth in the most recent Berlusconi government.  Alemanno, meanwhile, has recently named a public garden in Rome after another young neofascist killed during those Years of Lead.  Alemanno justified this by pointing out that his predecessor, Walter Veltroni, had named a piazza in honour of Walter Rossi, a member of Lotta Continua (ongoing struggle) who had been murdered by neofascists in that same year of 1977.

A column decorated with Fascist symbols,
including a schematic fasces and an ax,
the latter reflecting the the Celtic/Germanic/Nordic
mythology of the Italian far right.

I visited the site at Acca Larenzia one evening in June 2007.  It was near 10pm and the neighborhood was eerily quiet despite being a stone’s throw from the always busy Via Tuscolano.  The spot where the shootings occurred was dimly lit.  It was a rather odd place made up of a small cortile (courtyard) separated from the street by low columns.  On the far side was a staircase which led up to a terrace looking over a parking lot.  At the foot of the staircase was the entrance to the former MSI youth office.  It is here that every January a ceremony commemorating the shootings is held by neofascists. 

Below the names of the those killed, the plaque reads:
Fallen for Liberty
Today as yesterday, in our hearts
for a better Italy

Over the door, next to the staircase is a plaque which lists the names of the three men killed that day with the phrase “Caduti per la libertà” (fallen for liberty).  (NB: there is a new plaque there today which has an accusatory statement below the names which reads “Assassinato dell’odio comunista e dei servi del stato” (assassinated by communist hatred and its servants in the state).  Around the plaque and on the columns are spray painted lictors, celtic crosses and Roman standards.  At night, the effect of the place was unnerving.  I took a few photos and gazed at the posters and artwork on the walls.  It was here that I felt for the first time the sinister vibes of fascism’s legacy, a feeling that I never experienced at the more famous fascist sites in Rome like the EUR or the Foro Italico despite their pervasive fascist symbols.  Rather it was here, in this dark, quiet suburban street in the Tuscolano—which strictly speaking had nothing to do with the fascist regime of the Ventennio—that the violent legacy of Mussolini’s regime continued to live.  I was glad to leave.

Paul Baxa

Cinema Barberini

Cinema Barberini, before the restorations. Photo by
Truus, Bob & Jan too!

Cinema Barberini, as seen from Via Veneto

Cinema Barberini sits at the foot of Via Veneto, across the street from the elegant, and isolated, Bernini fountain in the oddly-shaped piazza.  We've walked by this movie house dozens of times, and seen movies there, but until recently the building remained for us a utilitarian space in which we could indulge our taste for film. 

Closed for several months, the Cinema Barberini will soon reopen, refurbished ("Il restyling," according to la Repubblica) inside and out.  We're less concerned about the interior modification, which retains the 5 theaters with which we're familiar, though we found it interesting that the theater will reopen with about 20 black luxury seats ("poltrone" or "posti vip") in each theater, for which patrons will pay an additional 1 or 2 Euro.  Just another example of pay-extra-for-everything, class-based culture that favors and pampers the wealthy.  Thanks Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Silvio Berlusconi. 

A Fascist event, held in the theater
in the 1930s.  Mussolini's picture
prominently displayed. 

More important, the restoration has stripped away much of the advertising paraphernalia that has decorated the building's exterior for many years, revealing and displaying the original 1929/30 facade by architect and city planner Marcello Piacentini, who worked all over Italy under Fascist aegis. 

The restored facade. 

Although the facade is usually described as Art Deco, it is at best a limited, incipient example of the style.  The repeated arches are often found in 1930s architecture, but the faux columns are a neo-classical touch more associated with the 19th century.

The facade's most interesting feature--and not exactly a thrill, at that--may be the decorative plaster bees ("api") atop the scroll above each arch [detail at left], the architect's allusion to the Barberini family symbol, seen also in the bees that grace Bernini's nearby fountain. 

Piacentini (1881-1960) had a major role in the structuring of EUR (1938-42), the massive complex south of the city, and he designed the rector's office at the new University of Rome (1936).  He created the Cinema Barberini for its owner, the father of film director Roberto Rossellini.  The grounds on which the Cinema was built became available when--as was happening all over the city--the Barberini stables that housed the family's horses and carriages were rendered obsolete by the automobile (and the broad, Fascist-built avenues on which they traveled). 

Besides designing the theater, Piacentini was also, apparently, responsible for widening the square on which it stands, and for the asymmetrical piazza that resulted.  "Rendering a square asymmetrical," writes Paul Baxa in his new book Roads and Ruins, "offended conventional urban design, but in the fascist scheme it was perfectly acceptable.  Marcello Piacentini would later declare the Piazza Barberini a truly great square because of its 'fantastic irregularity created over time.  One of those squares that is infinitely suggestive, more plastic, and more human.'  Respect for the traditional order of the square," concludes Baxa, "had no place in fascist urban planning." 
Bill