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The empty-eyed gaze of this building’s façade, with the insistent repetitive blankness of its stacked rows of arched openings, is a powerful, pure and slightly absurd merging of rationalist modernism, Imperial Roman grandeur, and the stillness of a De Chirico painting: of beauty with bombast.
Rapidly gaining the nickname of Colosseo Quadrato (the Square Coliseum), the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana or Palace of Italian Civilisation, was designed by architects Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula and Mario Romana for the 1942 Esposizione Universale Roma, Mussolini’s Expo to celebrate 20 years of Fascism and the “return of the Roman Empire” which was thankfully cancelled due to the Second World War.
Clad in travertine stone, allegedly the six by nine arched formation on each of its four sides was not accidental but reflected the number of letters in Benito Mussolini’s names. It was designed to be the centrepiece, not just of the Esposizione, but of a whole new district for Rome, later known as EUR. However had the Exposizione gone ahead, this Palace would have remained a bit player, dwarfed by the colossal Arch of Empire, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi and Adelchi Cirella, which was planned to be 240 metres high and span 600 metres, and intended to rival the Eiffel Tower.
In a new chapter for the building, it will soon reopen as the headquarters of fashion label, Fendi – a comment perhaps of where the money is now in Italian culture. I (rgw)
Photo: Wikicommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
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