Restoring the glorious national past – with this beckoning perspective, populists at home and abroad seek to entice their following. For example, the Italian dictator Mussolini wanted to literally make the city of Rome great again. A new neighborhood in classical style was supposed to seal fascism.
In 1935, when Benito Mussolini's fascist rule was firmly established after more than ten years of dictatorship, the Duce and his party cadres decided to organize a major world exhibition in Rome. To the credit and glory of his regime. Mussolini's political and artistic pretensions are far-reaching:with the arrival of fascism, the heyday of the 'Third Rome' has begun.
This is the new Rome that once again elevates the city to the undisputed center of global power and culture. On top of the ruins of classical antiquity (the 'first Rome' of the emperors) and in line with the universal civilizational mission of the Catholic Church (the 'second Rome' of the popes).
The 'third Rome' must be reflected in a large-scale exhibition for an international audience, a world exhibition such as in London, Paris and Berlin, where participating countries presented their most modern technical inventions in their own pavilions and showed how far they were developed in social, economic and cultural area.
Fascist Italy likes to fight:Mussolini sees a real Olimpiade delle Civiltà for itself, the Olympic Games of Civilizations, in which Italian culture naturally emerges as the winner. The exhibition district in Rome should represent this Italian superiority as grandly as possible.
Restore Roman Empire
The existing map of Rome has already been turned upside down by Mussolini's master builders:construction and demolition are taking place all over the city, gigantic government buildings are being erected to propagate the power of the regime, residential areas are being demolished to make way for wide boulevards that offer views. bid on the remnants of Rome's illustrious history.
For example, in the heart of the city, between the Colosseum and Mussolini's own office in Piazza Venezia, a broad road crosses the ancient Imperial Forums to forever anchor the alleged link between the classical past and the fascist present in the street pattern. Aristotle Kallis wrote about it in his The Third Rome, 1922-1943:The Making of the Fascist Capital (2014).
The aspirations of the regime are further strengthened when Italian troops conquer Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936, in order to restore the Roman empire. Rome is once again the capital of a world empire, and this must be sealed.
No stone without the Duce
That same year, Mussolini's city planners, architects and engineers came together. On an unexplored site a few kilometers south of the city, they will create an entirely new neighborhood where fascism will be on permanent display. The target year for completion is 1942, twenty years after the fascist seizure of power. The EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma) project is born.
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Architects of all sorts immediately throng to win one of the prestigious design assignments for EUR. The totalitarian temptation of fascism is difficult for many Italian artists to resist from the start. They believe that in Mussolini's revolutionary new order they perceive the political counterpart of a permanent revolution in art and architecture.
Leading artists such as Filippo Marinetti and Mario Sironi see fascism as a pre-eminently modern movement that creates a synthesis between the individual and the collective. As a "third way" between the extremes of parliamentary democracy and communism. And because fascism is modern, modern art cannot be other than fascist, is the prevailing thought.
Architects such as Adalberto Libera and Giuseppe Pagano also preach dynamism, decisiveness and daring, the victory of youth over the sluggish ornamentation of previous generations who did not develop future-oriented architecture. The most progressive of them adorn themselves with the name "rationalists" to put an end to the timid sentimentality of Romanticism and the Belle Époque once and for all. In the new regime they find a benevolent client.
Sleek, modern buildings are emerging all over Italy, especially public buildings with a distinct public function such as post offices, train stations and sports complexes. These are pre-eminently the places where the fascist regime wants to see the new social order portrayed. Architects retain quite a lot of artistic freedom, although no stone can be laid without the final approval of the Duce himself.
The imposed order of fascism
The first design for EUR exudes the revolutionary spirit of these rationalists. It provides a series of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, a modernist complex the likes of which had never been found anywhere in Europe. However, it is never implemented:Mussolini initially agrees, but in 1938 a more conservative design that does more justice to the monumental and classicistic objectives of the exhibition district is honoured.
Fascism has by then lost much of its previous revolutionary fervor and the regime, in line with its increasingly close relationship with Nazi Germany, is moving in an ever more conservative direction. Moreover, it is not possible to get the building materials for the first design together, because of the international sanctions that have been imposed on Italy since the war in Ethiopia.
Under the leadership of chief executive Marcello Piacentini, the builders are starting work on the new complex. The neighborhood plan follows the patterns of a classical Roman fortified city, with a long central axis, a wide entrance gate and a series of large squares, and rectangular blocks for buildings along parallel side axes. Long colonnades and repetitive arch constructions hark directly to the visual language of classical antiquity.
As a modern variant of the 'ideal city' from the Renaissance, the EUR should overwhelm every visitor with the vastness and symmetry of majestic buildings and extensive parks. Tight, compelling lines and exuberant ponds depict the imposed order of fascism and the triumph of man over nature.
This 'new Rome' fulfills the ideals of Roman history, but at the same time it stands in stark contrast to the narrow, winding streets of the old city center. By uniting tradition with modernity, the exhibition district puts Rome back on the map as the pre-eminent place where present, past and future merge.
EUR makes Rome 'the eternal city' again. The whole radiates the individual's servitude to the state, or rather:the state is the individual, because outside the state there is nothing. This is how EUR gives shape to the totalitarian idea.
Immersion
Given that totalitarian dream, it was not surprising that Mussolini's regime chose a World Expo district as a location to set fascism in stone. Because it is precisely such large exhibitions that give their organizers absolute control over the incoming public. The millions of visitors to previous world expositions and other large (colonial) expositions had undergone a voluntary immersion in modernity.
This almost ritualistic experience offered the organizers of the exhibition the opportunity to present political ideology as an alternative meaning, as a secular cult. Moreover, an exhibition resembles a theatre, it offers a stage where politics can play a role and where the public can dream away, overwhelmed by the actors, the lighting, the decor. In short, a world exhibition such as the EUR was an ideal tool in the fascist propaganda technique.
Fellini and a picnic blanket
The irony is that precisely in 1942, the year in which the district was to be completed, construction had to be stopped because of the war. Mussolini's dreamed world exhibition would never happen. Only the first part of the district was standing, the rest of the site fell fallow again due to a lack of manpower and building material.
Construction was not resumed until 1952, with offices, housing blocks and ministries. However, the original designs had become obsolete:large steel colossi and other fruits of post-war architecture now rose between Mussolini's classicist colonnades. Nevertheless, the original street pattern with its broad axes and symmetrical structure is still largely intact, and some of Mussolini's architects, such as Piacentini, made an unscrupulous contribution again after the war, albeit in a very different style.
The EUR's theatrical function has also been preserved:filmmakers such as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni found the district the perfect location for their surrealist creations from the early 1960s, such as La dolce vita and L'eclisse. “Living in EUR is like living in a painting,” said Fellini, “in a painting there are no laws, except the laws of aesthetics, no relationships except the relationship with loneliness, with the things themselves.”
For him, the EUR was therefore the ultimate film set, a set of improbability and improvisation, a set that can easily be removed and exchanged for another:the ideal habitat for those who, like Fellini, make use of the fleeting expressiveness of images and somewhat alienating decors. And so the EUR of a fascist utopia has become the epitome of postmodern alienation, where everything is representation but nothing tangible, nothing real.
In 2017, the EUR is populated during office hours by officials from ministries and bank employees. On weekends, the parks turn into one big picnic blanket of immigrants of all origins. At night, the streets offer entertainment to Rome's hippest nightlife crowd. That is what now remains of Mussolini's totalitarian dream.