IN A CURIOUS CORNER OF ROME there’s an extraordinary model of the city as it appeared around the reign of Constantine, in the fourth century AD. It’s enormous—the rectangular platform beneath it has a diagonal of 15 meters—and the city’s principal buildings are skillfully reconstructed, with circuses, theaters, baths, basilicas, triumphal arches, columns with spiral bas-reliefs, fora, and broad expanses of residential neighborhoods. The model is viewed from a balcony, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the ancient capital and a sense of the monuments, now mere ruins, in their original urban context. It’s surprising to see that some parts of the city—the Via del Corso, Via del Babuino, and the Archeological Promenade, for example—are still more or less the same as they were seventeen centuries ago. Many marvels of engineering are plainly visible, including the 19-kilometer circuit of city walls, the many watchtowers, and the long course of the Claudian Aqueduct as it crosses the city from east to west, bringing water to the imperial palaces; the last arches of this impressive construction are still visible, just within the city walls, along the Via di San Gregorio.
The model is strikingly beautiful, and helps us understand the grandeur of the ancient city, orient ourselves within it, and see how much of the ancient Urbe remains in present-day Rome. Created in 1937, the model is now in the Museum of Roman Civilization in the quarter called EUR (an abbreviation of Esposizione Universale di Roma, the Universal Exposition of Rome), which also has a stunning planetarium with an equally spectacular vision of the skies above us.
Paradoxically, this vision of ancient Rome is located in the capital’s newest neighborhood. It’s not that other building complexes weren’t constructed after it—on the contrary, postwar Rome literally exploded in every direction—but EUR nevertheless remains the greatest achievement of twentieth-century Italian urban planning. It was carefully designed by some of the best architects of the day to house the 1942 expo, a huge fair intended to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the “Fascist revolution” of 1922. The area was originally to be called E42—as in “E” for exposition, and 42 for the celebration’s date. Hitler had assured Mussolini war wouldn’t break out before then, and the Italian dictator trusted him. Instead, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and one of the many things wiped out by the invasion was Mussolini’s exposition.
Mussolini first conceived of the exposition in 1935. Planned for 1942, it was to follow Paris’s 1937 expo and New York’s 1939 World’s Fair. It differed from the others in that the monumental buildings erected for it were meant to be permanent—not just pavilions of ephemeral material rigged to last a few months, but robust buildings of stone or reinforced concrete with solid facings. They were also designed as the core of a new neighborhood planned southwest of the city’s ancient center, halfway between it and the sea. It was a nice idea in its own way, if only because it so strongly anticipated later concepts of regional decentralization. EUR was also envisioned at a time when no one had a clue of how intense and chaotic automobile traffic would become after World War II. Creating a new neighborhood planned as a magnet for businesses and residents in the open countryside meant enlarging the city, drawing Rome out from the narrowness of its seventeenth-century streets and freeing it from the overcrowding bound to intensify over time. The plan was to “decentralize” the city’s historical center, shifting it toward the periphery.
The project basically failed, and not just because of the war. It was a failure because postwar urban development was like a vortex, growing in concentric circles like an oil stain on pavement, leaving the center at the center—with all the consequences (of traffic, circulation, and movement through the city) Romans now know all too well. But even if it was a failure, a glimmer of what EUR could have been is still easy to see, and becomes even more evident as the passage of time transforms it into urban history.
For those who really want to see EUR, rather than just look at it, a good starting point would be the Palazzo degli Uffici, on Via Ciro il Grande. It was the only building completely finished, furnishings and decorations included, before war broke out. The inscription across its imposing facade reads, “La Terza Roma si dilaterà sopra altri colli lungo le rive del fiume sacro sino alle spiagge del Tirreno” (The Third Rome will expand across other hills, along the banks of the sacred river, all the way to the beaches of the Tyrrhenian), and verifies Mussolini’s intention of pushing urban development toward the southwest. In front of the building’s colonnade is a fuguelike series of eighteen basins with black-and-white mosaics designed in 1939 by Gino Severini, Giovanni Guerrini, and Giulio Rossi; it represents a mixture of myths about “Roman spirit” and other narratives dictated by Mussolini. Their depictions are quintessentially Fascist in content: the destruction of Carthage; Roma, goddess of the seas; Flora; Time; Victory; but also include scenes of Italic youths, land reclamation, construction projects, and so on. The mosaic cycle comes to an end at Fausto Melotti’s figure of a nude youth leaning on a club. Its proposed title was Si redimono i campi (The Fields are Redeemed), and was conceived not as an isolated sculpture, but a group of three figures, with the youth accompanied by a woman and child. All three statues were ready, but only the first was installed in its intended location; the train carrying the other two ran into a bombing raid and was turned around. These other two figures are now in Versilia, a costal area in northern Tuscany, in the warehouse studio where they were created.
The wall-sized travertine bas-relief in the building’s entrance is also striking. Publio Morbiducci designed it in 1939, drawing inspiration from the Roman tradition of historical reliefs like those that spiral up the columns of Trajan and Antoninus Pius. It represents the history of Rome through its building projects: from the furrows Romulus traced with his plow to the great projects of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire; from the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (the Fascist Racial laws had been passed the previous year) to the erection of the obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square; from the construction of E42 (represented by its best-known icon, the Colosseo Quadrato, or Square Coliseum, as the Palace of the Civilization of Labor is almost affectionately called) to an image of Mussolini on horseback standing warriorlike in his stirrups. The anecdote of the bronze statue of a young athlete next to it is also interesting. His arm is raised in a so-called Roman salute, and its sculptor, Italo Griselli, meant it to be a portrayal of the Genio del fascismo, the Spirit of Fascism. After the war the athlete was fitted with simple boxing gloves in an attempt to modify the meaning of his gesture, and he is now called Genio dello sport, the Spirit of Sports.
This building’s furniture would look right at home in a museum of decorative and applied arts. Many of the original pieces survived the war and the successive occupations, beginning with the Germans, followed by the Americans, and finally the refugees from the Dalmatian coast temporarily housed here. The furnishings include beautiful exhibition tables designed by Guglielmo Ulrich, solid-glass balusters along the grand staircase, marble door frames, rare wooden doors and floors, intarsia decorations on the walls, and elegantly functional aluminum door handles designed by Gio Ponti. In one of the reception rooms on the second floor an entire wall is decorated with a splendid mural painted by Giorgio Quaroni in 1940; it’s yet another representation of the founding of Rome, envisioned here under the protection of a goddess draped in a rich red mantle.
Even the building’s basement has a few things worth seeing: five enormous bronze heads, two of King Vittorio Emanuele III, three of Mussolini. Both men are represented with and without helmets, and with varying degrees of realism in their features. A few rooms down there’s a space with a reinforced concrete ceiling used as a bomb shelter during air raids. It’s heart-wrenching to see, but worth the visit, as it’s an emotional reminder of what it was like to live with the constant threat of ever more frequent bombing raids as the war worsened.
The Viale della Civiltà del Lavoro ends at the Palace of Italian Civilization, better known as the Palace of the Civilization of Labor or, as mentioned earlier, the Square Coliseum. This dazzling cube has become the icon of EUR, but has also occasionally been used as the logo of Italian architecture in the first half of the twentieth century. Built between 1938 and 1943 by the architects Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula, and Mario Romano, this massive building is faced entirely in travertine and stands atop a podium with a particularly imposing staircase on its west side. The four facades are identical, sheer, and free of any ornamentation, cornice, or stringcourses. It’s pure geometry, verticality, and volume—a metaphysical abstraction that has been associated (and not by mere chance) with the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Each facade is six stories tall, and each story has nine rounded arches—for a total of 216 arches on the building’s four facades, representing nothing beyond the void they’ve created in the travertine’s solid mass. On the front is an inscription as famous as the building, with a phrase that has been imitated and parodied in countless ways: “Un popolo di poeti di artisti di eroi / di santi di pensatori di scienziati / di navigatori di trasmigratori” (A people of poets, artists, heroes / saints, thinkers, scientists / navigators, travelers). Four groups of figures representing the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) stand at each corner of the podium. They were sculpted by Publio Morbiducci and Alberto Felci and were based on the ancient Horse Trainers sculpture in the Piazza del Quirinale. The ground-floor arches have twenty-eight statues that personify the arts, crafts, and values—music, astronomy, history, physics, handicrafts, heroism, the spirit of the military, and so on.
The basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, designed by the architectural office of Arnaldo Foschini, is another notable building, erected on high ground, making it highly visible. It has a square layout, and its cupola—32 meters in diameter, making it the second largest dome in Rome after Saint Peter’s—was cast in reinforced concrete. It’s a lovely church, and one of the most successful and appropriate examples of more recent sacred architecture. Postwar churches built in Rome have generally been quite modest, and sometimes embarrassingly ugly, as if sacred architecture had lost the ability to represent itself after so many centuries of glory.
Another noteworthy building, originally called the Palace of Receptions and Congresses, faces the Square Coliseum and is the masterpiece of architect Adalberto Libera (1903–1963), a major proponent of rationalism and designer of Curzio Malaparte’s villa on the island of Capri. The construction of this congress center was interrupted by the war, but started up again in peacetime, and the building was completed in 1954. Even though the original architect didn’t approve all the changes made to his design, the building, with its unusual sail vault, is nevertheless one of the most significant examples of twentieth-century Italian architecture. There are two symmetrical entries on opposite sides of the structure that allow access to different parts of the building (the areas for receptions and congresses, respectively). Everything is coordinated and happily harmonious—the fourteen granite columns without capitals, the tall windows, Achille Funi’s frescoes (unfortunately unfinished), and the grandiose interior space, whose vastness, according to some calculations, could enclose the entire Pantheon.
The Palazzo della Luce, or Palace of Light, was planned to stand in the middle of the Via Cristoforo Colombo (originally named the Via Imperiale), on the hilltop now occupied by the sports arena. It was never built, but the design description tells us it was to be, “a fantastic vision made only of glass, light, and water: it will be a radiant beacon above the entire Exposition, and with its modern contents and technologies will be one of its most unusual attractions.” The plans for a large, futuristic arch designed by Adalberto Libera to symbolize peace and universality were also abandoned before construction. The arch was to include an incredible 200 linear meters of lighting (later extended to 320), and would have been 103 meters tall at its highest point. Set against the horizon toward the sea, the arch would have crowned the whole of the exposition complex. Libera rejected the idea of building it in reinforced concrete, and considered using aluminum, although he had to give up on that plan because of insurmountable technical obstacles.
These are just a few summary notes; EUR is there for all who might want to see it (and I mean really see it). Its enormous buildings survived the terrible events of the war and immediate postwar period—survived, we might say, their own troubled histories—including the ups-and-downs of their planning and construction, in which technological and practical difficulties were added to by political necessities and personal rivalries.
Right after Mussolini had the grand idea of holding a universal exposition in Rome to highlight Italian culture, he immediately had to face the question of where to put it. The Villa Borghese was considered, as were the Janiculum Hill and the Foro Italico (then called the Foro Mussolini) toward the Milvian Bridge, north of the city center. The idea of building it on the southern edge of town took root slowly, and was initially promoted by Virgilio Testa, Secretary General of the Governorship of Rome and a proponent of pushing urban development toward the Tyrrhenian Sea. Places like the Magliana neighborhood and Lido di Ostia were considered, but in the end the Tre Fontane area—supposedly named for three fountains—was selected, in part for logistical reasons. The industrialist Vittorio Cini described the site in a report sent to Mussolini in November of 1936: “The area to the left of the Via del Mare sits on high ground around the Ponte della Magliana, between the eucalyptus woods of Tre Fontane and the Rome-Lido railway line. This land is about 30 or 40 meters above sea level, and thus dominates the Tiber Valley with a variety of graceful sites that offer picturesque and panoramic views. It also offers practically unlimited possibilities for urban development toward the sea.”
The little-known history of this part of Rome is extraordinarily interesting because it represents a cross section of the layered religious and military events that formed the city. The valley of Tre Fontane, including a tract of about 250 acres of land along the Via Laurentina, has had several names over time. In ancient times it was called Ad aquas salvias, probably because of a spring or bath complex there. According to legend, this is also the place were Saint Paul was decapitated. The blow of the sword was so powerful that his severed head bounced three times, and each time it touched the ground a spring appeared—the first was hot, the second warm, and the last cold. Three small structures were built in the fifth century, each with a fountain in it, giving the area its later name. Shortly afterward a group of Greek monks particularly devoted to the relics of Saint Anastasius, a Persian martyr, founded a monastery here in his name. Subsequently the remains of the Spanish martyr Saint Vincent were also interred at the monastery. After the year 1000 a group of Cistercians, the order founded by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, occupied the monastery, which was abandoned at the time. The repopulated abbey grew wealthy enough to acquire properties in the hills south of Rome, around the Castelli Romani, including Nemi, which served as a retreat for the monks during the hot summer months. When Tre Fontane was again abandoned, stagnant water made the terrain swampy, and the area became infested with malaria. In 1868, Pius IX ordered a community of French Trappists to take up residence in the old monastery; they undertook large-scale land reclamation projects and planted vast plots of eucalyptus trees, laying the seeds of the forest still there today.
Of all the churches around the abbey the most striking, if not the most beautiful, is Santa Maria Scala Coeli, built in the late sixteenth century by Giacomo Della Porta on the site where 10,203 Roman soldiers who converted to Christianity were supposedly martyred by Emperor Diocletian. The church was named for a vision Saint Bernard had: after praying for the salvation of a sinner’s soul, he saw a long staircase and the same unfortunate soul ascending it as the Madonna waited at the top, blessing him. An underground chapel dating back to the twelfth century was consecrated in honor of this event.
Mussolini attended the site inspection himself, and on December 15, 1936, Tre Fontane was approved as the site for E42. Giuseppe Pagano, Marcello Piacentini, Luigi Piccinato, Ettore Rossi, and Luigi Vietti—the same group of architects who planned the new campus for the University of Rome—were commissioned to oversee the project. Their earliest designs reveal their indebtedness to the plans for the royal chateau at Versailles, designed by the major French architect André Le Nôtre (1613–1700). The first drawings for E42 included a large entry plaza on the side of the development closest to the city center, to be called the Imperial Gate; a network of streets laid out following the Roman grid system, based on two principal intersecting axes, the cardus maximus and the decumanus maximus; a lake at the center of the project; and a gate leading to the sea, the Porta del Mare, on the side opposite the Imperial Gate. The lustrous Square Coliseum would rise from a hilltop with a panoramic view over the Tiber Valley, forming an ideological and scenographic pair to the basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, the valley’s second dominant structure. E42 co-opted the dual symbolism, Catholic and secular, established in the ancient city center by the Coliseum and Saint Peter’s. The project as a whole is characterized by its rationalism and rigorous use of geometry, both in its general layout and the designs of individual buildings. The development was also meant to be clearly different from the Renaissance city, as well as its early-twentieth-century neighborhoods, with their winding, narrow streets. The sense of rigor was underscored by the use of “modern” materials like glass and aluminum which, like travertine, meant the exteriors of the buildings would generally be light in color.
During the Fascist period the ongoing conflict between modernity and tradition in architecture often took on truly bitter tones. E42 expressed the idea of a rationally defined city without ceding any ground to the increasingly predominant International style. Marcello Piacentini, the chief designer, succeeded in creating a balance between classical models, the qualities of the ideal city as described by Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, and the monumentality the regime so desired. Renaissance theories of the ideal city were characterized by rigorous symmetry and a rational relationship between buildings and the surrounding urban spaces. The famous painting Ideal City, by an unknown Central Italian artist and now in Urbino, is a perfect example of what those spaces were meant to look like. The qualities of purity, harmony, and balance were essential; solids alternated with voids, as did straight and curved lines, and churches and palaces, forming a whole that became both exemplar and canon. E42 was the only modern attempt to re-create these ideas.
Motifs from classical architecture were then thrown into the mix; they included the two exedras (now the corporate headquarters for the INA and INPS companies) at opposite sides of the Imperial Gate, and the tall colonnade across the facade of the Museum of Roman Civilization. The large square at EUR’s center (now called the Piazza Guglielmo Marconi) recalls the fora of ancient Roman cities, as well as Greek cities’ agora.
The regime’s architects were excellent at their jobs, and already had accomplishments like the University’s Città Universitaria, the Foro Mussolini, and Cinecittà—all Fascist projects—under their belts. The architect and urban planner Enrico Guidoni noted that these earlier projects, although created to serve different ends, demonstrate “the success of a formula based both on artistic form and the persuasive force of representation.” E42 was conceived as a representation; it was to be the stage of an exhibition designed to show the rest of the world the design capabilities and dynamic capacity of Mussolini’s Italy.
Yet all twentieth-century dictators used architecture as an instrument of political propaganda. Hitler did it through his talented architect Albert Speer, whose projects were derived from neoclassical rhetoric. He constructed the monuments of National Socialism, and the Nuremberg Parade Grounds, inaugurated in 1935, are one of the most important examples. Leni Riefenstahl made a documentary, titled Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), about the 1934 Nazi party congress using Speer’s unfinished parade grounds as a backdrop; two years later she also filmed the 1936 Berlin Olympics with sinister perfection. Hitler strongly believed in the exemplary and admonitory value of “his” architecture, both for Germans and the rest of the world. He made this clear in a 1937 interview published in the architectural journal Baubilde: “National Socialism, which beyond its original societies represents the biggest collective of peoples and nations … prefers public buildings to private ones. And as the demands the state makes on its citizens grow larger, it must in turn appear that much more powerful in their eyes.” Had Mussolini pondered the threatening subtext of this discussion of architecture, rather than just the political manifesto in Mein Kampf, he might have avoided the unspeakable tragedies he caused both the Italian people and himself.
Those, however, were the ideological guidelines, and the E42 project pointed in the same direction. In the years leading up to the war, the two future Axis allies would scrutinize each other based on their respective building projects. Having won thirty gold medals to the twenty-five won by the United States, Germany dominated Berlin’s 1936 Olympics, and did so against an unprecedented backdrop. Rome was booking itself as best candidate for the 1944 Games (the 1940 Games were canceled because of international events), and Mussolini was already planning an entire Olympic city at Ostia.
Meanwhile an ingenious public relations campaign for the upcoming exposition was launched, and baptized the “Olympics of Civilization.” If the Germans had dominated on the playing fields, Rome made clear its intention of winning on the larger stage of intellectual achievements. Hitler got a hint of this during his 1938 visit to Rome, when Mussolini showed him a series of spectacular projects, including the ex novo construction of Ostiense Railway Station.
E42 was a piece of this larger picture, and also an integral part of the imperial airs Fascist Italy assumed after its campaigns in East Africa. Giuseppe Pagano, architect, urban planner, and director of the architectural magazine Casabella, wrote, “When Rome finishes this city, so boldly aimed at the future, it can take pride in its traditions and consider modern architecture the concrete expression of a renewed Italy.” Mussolini was not alone in seeing these new constructions as useful instruments of propaganda, and his shrewdest architects were fully aware of the political value of what they were planning.
Most of the E42 designs involved permanent structures meant to last and be used for the fair. In a press conference given in January of 1937, Vittorio Cini, commissary of the project’s supervisory board, said that the exposition need not be (as was so often the case) “an end in itself … but rather can contribute to resolving important urban planning problems.” In late 1938 Plinio Marconi published an article in Illustrazione Italiana claiming, “What distinguishes [this exposition] is its practical basis and the lasting quality of its urban plan.” Piacentini himself repeated this idea in a 1938 article in the journal Architettura:
The urban plan of E42 has its own particular character, which differentiates this exposition from those all over the world that have come before it. The plan of this great exhibition of civilization, which Italy will offer on occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Fascism, goes hand in hand with the plan for a new and monumental quarter of Rome, capital of the Empire … The piazzas and streets, with their underground fittings, paving, sidewalks, trees, and lighting will be fixed and definitive. The parks, gardens, fountains, staircases, and decorations (sculptures, mosaics, bronzes) will be permanent, as will the large lake with its waterfalls, jets of water, porticoes, and terraces. A large number of the buildings will also be permanent.
This permanence was not really as novel as was claimed. The architectural historian Ezio Godoli has observed that the tendency to use an exposition to build something useful for the city was fairly common; this was true in Paris, for example, although the permanent buildings constructed there were largely intended as exhibition halls or museums. The Grand and the Petit Palais were built for the expo of 1900, and the Pont Alexandre III, which crosses the Seine directly in front of them, was also constructed for the same event. The Palais du Trocadéro, across the river from the Eiffel Tower, was built for the expo of 1878. (A noteworthy photograph taken in 1940, just after the Nazi arrival in Paris, depicts Hitler posed on the esplanade in front of the building with the tower as a grand backdrop.)
A precedent for building permanent fair structures also existed in Italy. A number of buildings went up in Rome in 1911, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Kingdom of Italy, which were also important for the city’s development, including the high bridge crossing the Viale del Muro Torto, connecting the Villa Borghese and the Pincio; the new plan for a neighborhood called Vigna Cartoni, where the Piazza Don Minzoni and Viale Bruno Buozzi now stand; the National Gallery of Modern Art in the Valle Giulia; numerous national academies of fine arts, all of which still exist and lend a pleasantly cosmopolitan feeling to that part of Rome; the development of apartment buildings and houses along the Lungotevere delle Armi, between Ponte Risorgimento and Ponte Matteotti (which won a national award for architecture); and plans for the Mazzini neighborhood, including the star-shaped Piazza Mazzini, a smaller version of the Place d’Etoile at the head of the Champs Elysées in Paris. These new constructions also included Ponte Risorgimento (originally called Ponte Flaminio), the first single-span bridge to cross the Tiber, designed by the French engineer François Hennebique (1842–1921), a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete.
The 1911 expo resulted in several significant permanent building projects. No neighborhoods were built from scratch, as EUR later was, but it did establish the infrastructure for several neighborhoods set up shortly afterward. We can also see from examples in Barcelona, Cologne, Brussels, and New York that the decision to make E42 a real opportunity for large-scale urban planning was part of a broader trend in the 1930s.
But Fascist Italy was facing a problem other nations hadn’t; on October 3, 1935, Italian troops commanded by Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani invaded Ethiopia, launching a war that lasted seven months. Large-scale bombing raids and poisonous gas attacks were used to quell indigenous resistance. Badoglio took Addis Ababa in May of 1936, and on the ninth of the same month Mussolini proclaimed the foundation of the Italian Empire from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Ethiopia became part of Italian East Africa, which already included Eritrea and Somalia. Just after the invasion the League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy, a move driven largely by Britain, which wasn’t interested in seeing a greater Italian presence in East Africa. The effects of the sanctions were largely mitigated by the United States and Germany, which continued to sell industrial products and raw materials to Italy. They did cause some problems, and for EUR this meant a scarcity of building and finishing materials. The competition outlined for the Palace of Italian Civilization was explicit, for example, when it said that the building would have to be constructed “in large part with local building materials, permitting only the most essential use of iron, and in compliance with the directives intended to establish national self-sufficiency.”
Given the scarcity of valuable raw materials locally, such as iron and oil, the directives meant that competing architects had to use their imaginations in employing other products available domestically to reduce Italian dependence on imported materials. This meant that the majority of buildings in E42 were built of reinforced concrete and then faced with more precious materials. In addition to travertine, which was available in large quantities from quarries (still in use today) in Tiburtina, to the east of Rome, they used wood substitutes, including fiberboard and masonite, as well as glass, ceramic glass paste, reinforced concrete with glass tiles to create translucent surfaces, linoleum for flooring, and artificial marble made from plaster or concrete mixed with other materials. Aluminum alloys were also widely used; considered “young and modern” metals, they ultimately represented the regime’s sought-after self-sufficiency.
The fact that Tre Fontane wasn’t uninhabited terrain was another obstacle for the grandiose EUR plans. The land was mostly divided into small plots with underground tunnels, wells, and tufa and pozzolana quarries, as well as rudimentary housing not unlike the primitive huts in the recently conquered colonies—indeed, these hovels were derogatorily called “Abyssinian villages.” Like East African huts, they sheltered the poorest peasant and working-class families, who lived in dire circumstances. In its quest for an imperial image, Fascist Italy obviously couldn’t tolerate their presence, and Mussolini ordered that the “deplorable inconveniences” be removed as quickly as possible. In a note dated June 1937, he ordered, “by July 15 these shacks must be gone from the site of the exposition, which will soon be overrun by workmen and engineers from all over Italy and abroad. In the next fifteen days ten or fifteen masonry hovels [for the displaced inhabitants] can be built somewhere else.”
Resorting to this solution, Mussolini repeated a tactic used before. In the early 1930s large sections of the city’s historical center had been demolished, and this involved moving huge numbers of people from areas like those around the Roman Forum and the Piazza Augusto Imperatore. These forced transfers gave rise to the so-called borgate ufficiali rapidissimi, impromptu developments that were essentially improvised towns of very basic blockhouses—San Basilio, Gordiani, Tor Marancio, Pietralata, and others. This was meant to be a temporary solution, but in the end (as so often happens) it became permanent. Borgate became a pejorative term for large sections of the city’s suburbs, and after the war they were used as sets for many of the neorealist films. Pier Paolo Pasolini recorded the tragedy evident in these areas, and at the same time elevated them to a state of almost literary dignity.
The end of rent control in 1930, and the large number of evicted tenants that followed, forced another wave of people into the borgate. The same thing had happened during preparations for the 1911 celebrations. The area of the city that later became Prati, for example, was completely emptied, creating a wave of evacuees who found shelter in the hovels around Porta Metronia and along certain sections of the Aurelian walls. A bit more recently, people were again displaced as preparatory work was carried out for the 1960 Olympic games in Rome.
But getting back to E42, a census was taken that counted about eighty shacks in the area. Some were used to store farming equipment or chickens, but others were actually improvised residences that housed twenty-four families, for a total of 102 people. Pietro Colonna, governor of Rome at the time, explained in a report to Mussolini that many of these people “cultivated small plots of land to supplement their wages.” Driven by some humane sense, or perhaps worried about the civil disorder forced evacuations might cause, Colonna added, “in the case of immediate evictions, these twenty-four families will likely find themselves deprived of their livelihoods … inasmuch as they will no longer be able to count on the small parcels of land that now sustain them.… If Your Excellency believes it necessary that they be cleared in July, this administration will seek the least damaging provisions to accomplish this.” Mussolini read the report, thought about it, then made a nervous annotation with red pencil in the margin, “Tend to it! M.”
Collateral projects were tied to E42, and one of the most important was the excavation of Ostia Antica. The Tyrrhenian Coast, including the area around the mouth of the Tiber, had for centuries been as plagued by malaria as the more famous Pontine Marshes to the south. Everyone knew that the predictably impressive remnants of Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, had been buried for centuries. There had been some excavations at the site, but they weren’t systematic, and bureaucratic inertia, the large number of competing plans, and a lack of funding had delayed any real exploration of the ruins at Ostia.
Dante Vaglieri, Superintendent of Antiquities, was the first to tackle the excavation of Ostia in any modern, systematic way. Although a rather rotund and somewhat ridiculous figure, this scholar from Trieste was both a gifted Latinist and a tenacious worker. With the tools of the day (essentially a pick and a shovel), Vaglieri undertook the first real excavations there in 1907. When he died, in April 1913, the excavations continued under the direction of other capable archaeologists, including Italo Gismondi and Guido Calza. Funding remained scarce, however, and as a consequence the excavators’ finds were a bit thin.
Simultaneously with the start of work on E42, in 1937, some serious attention was finally paid to Ostia. Calza presented a “complete and organic plan for all the work involved in the excavations at Ostia,” including the restoration and restructuring of the ruins themselves. The excavation, he wrote, will focus on “an area of about 45 acres, which is more than has been uncovered in the last twenty-five years of digging (a total of 38 acres). The city’s walls contained an area of about 120 acres, and so at the end of the excavation we will have uncovered almost two-thirds of Ostia Antica.”
Over a period of four years, from 1938 to 1942, he worked on an area of about 400 by 300 meters; 60,000 square meters of it were excavated between March 1938 and June 1939, a task that included moving 22,000 cubic meters of dirt almost literally by hand. Through their efforts, Calza and Gismondi uncovered one of the great vestiges of antiquity, its ruins almost as significant as those of Pompeii. A Corriere della Sera correspondent named Alberici commented on the results of the excavation in one of his articles, “A visit to Ostia Antica is an amazing experience; its vastness and buildings are an extraordinary surprise, as are the solemnity of the ruins and the sincerity with which they represent the Roman spirit.”
Rome’s ancient port has an extraordinary history. Augustus endowed the original settlement, which dated back to the reign of Ancus Marcius, the fourth legendary King of Rome, with a theater, a forum, and an aqueduct. Two ports were later built there, first by Claudius, then Trajan, and they enhanced Ostia’s importance as a place for the sorting and storage of goods shipped on to Rome. The numerous and spacious warehouses (horrea) testify to this role. Because of silt deposits, by the beginning of the fifth century the branch of the Tiber that flowed through Ostia was no longer navigable, and vast parts of the city (which at its height reached a population of about fifty thousand people) were apparently abandoned. It’s also hard for those who visit Ostia Antica today to imagine that it once stood at the edge of the sea; the silting in of the river has steadily pushed the coast line almost two kilometers out, and the course of the river itself also changed over time, moving away from the northern side of the settlement.
Unlike Pompeii, in Ostia there aren’t any shadows of human presence to perpetuate the sense of a great tragedy. What remains are the ruins of numerous public buildings, houses, and shops, as well as streets and squares that document life as it once was. Several guidebooks to Rome (the Italian language Red Guide issued by the Touring Club of Italy is the best, and innumerable English language guides now exist) enumerate the remarkable monuments at Ostia, but I’d like to mention a few of them here, even if just to repay a personal debt. It was here that a particularly enlightened high school teacher introduced me and my classmates to the beauty of Latin poetry. Two or three times he took the class to the ancient theater at Ostia, where we studied Horace’s satires, and the most talented students read a few verses aloud. Even the less gifted understood they were seeing the pure grandeur of life, or at least an echo of it. A few of the most resounding verses of those compositions still ring through my head, even after so many years, thanks to those warm, sunny mornings among the ruins.
The grandeur of the theater, rebuilt several times and greatly restored in the modern period, remains largely unchanged, even in its ruinous condition. The stage’s columns, the steps of the cavea (which have been partially restored), and the remaining ambulatories all speak clearly of the prominent place theater held in Roman society and culture.
The Baths of Neptune are another remarkable nearby monument. Built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (117–138 AD), they stand just to the right of the theater. There are at least two beautiful mosaics there worth admiring: one represents Neptune and Amphitrite; the other, on the east side of the baths, depicts the four winds and the four provinces that supplied Rome with grain (Sicily, Spain, Egypt, and Africa). Close by is the House of Cupid and Psyche, named for the statue of the divine lovers found there, now on exhibit in the local museum. This domus is a relatively recent structure, dating back only to the fourth century (Aurelian’s reign). Its owners must have been rich, because they decorated their home with colored mosaics, vibrant wall marbles, and enjoyed the luxury of a verdant indoor garden.
The well-preserved Mithraeum of the Seven Spheres stands just to the left of the theater. The cult of the god Mithras, whose origins are buried deep in the ancient history of Persia, was so important that in the years before the Christian era it became the most popular alternative to Rome’s state religion. Widely practiced in the capital, where it arrived from the Greek world, Mithraism also spread to the northern provinces (Mesia, Dacia, Pannonia, Germania, and Britannia), carried abroad by soldiers and slaves. Like many Eastern religions, Mithraism involved mysterious initiation rites and secret rituals. Its sanctuaries, called Mithraea, were always underground, to symbolize the cave where the god was born. Mithras was the protector of rights and contracts, as well as patron of livestock and righteous men, to whom he promised eternal salvation. The central ritual of the cult was the sacrifice of a bull (be it actual or symbolic), whose death was supposed to encourage life and universal fecundity. Subduing the wild bull also represented the victory of order over chaos and barbarity. The culmination of the rite was a collective meal of bread and water, or perhaps wine. Some Mithraea had sanctuaries beneath the main room called fovea sanguinis, or blood pits, which were probably used for some sort of baptism in the blood of the sacrificed bull that drained down through special conduits.
At the end of his time on earth, Mithras ascended into heaven with the help of the Sun, and from the heavens he continued to protect human beings. The annual festival to mark his birth fell around the winter solstice—in other words, close to December 25. Even though a number of Roman emperors tolerated Mithraism, it never became an official religion of the state. It did enjoy a vast following, and included soldiers, but essentially drew from the lower strata of society—slaves, freedmen, workmen, artisans, and small-time merchants. These were the same ranks that, moved by similar religious needs, became interested in the other great monotheistic religion of the time, Christianity. Indeed, Mithraism represented its most direct and dangerous competition. The French historian Ernest Renan put it this way: “If Christianity had somehow been stopped in the course of its expansion by some fatal disease, the world would be Mithraic.”
There are certainly indisputable similarities between the two religions, both in their inspiration and the miraculous events on which they are constructed, and it has even been suggested (albeit without any documentation) that Mithras was born of a virgin. It’s true, though, that the two communities viewed one another with suspicion and even fought amongst one another. Beginning in the third century Christianity absorbed some aspects and rituals of the cult of Mithras, and finally gained the upper hand over it, first under Constantine, and then definitively under Theodosius the Great (347–395) who persecuted any and all expressions of paganism, from visiting temples to the cults of the household gods, making Christianity the official state religion and in the process transforming the Church into a temporal as well as spiritual power.
The widespread presence of Mithraism in Rome is demonstrated by the large number of Mithraea throughout the city. In addition to the one beneath the church of San Clemente, I can also point to the one below the small church of Santa Prisca, on the Aventine Hill. Visitors enter through a narrow passage, and it’s one of the few that still has some of the original fresco decorations representing the seven steps of initiation for the faithful, a procession in honor of Mithras, and the sacrifice of the bull.
So what effect does EUR have today? The Austrian writer and adopted Roman Ingeborg Bachmann defined it “an empty and macabre complex of buildings.” Perhaps the place wasn’t yet finished, or perhaps its architecture seemed too far from the forms, style, and fullness of the baroque style foreigners have come to expect in Rome. What I like about EUR is its sense of the metaphysical (Michelangelo Antonioni used it for his 1962 film Eclipse), even if it’s now a little tarnished by traffic and advertising posters. Its avenues, boulevards, and the impression of the ideal city set by its orthogonal intersections remain crisp and clean, even though life has left its marks on them, humanizing their outlines and smoothing their corners where the predominant white of the travertine is tempered by the vivid green of the gardens, the cerulean blue of fountains and waterfalls, and the multicolored cars passing by.
The architects who designed the complex were aware both of classical models and the most recent twentieth-century experiments. They knew how to appreciate the Renaissance’s legacies, and were capable of using its harmonic sense of symmetry and proportion, the rich legacies left to all arts.
EUR is also one of the few largely secular places in a city profoundly wrapped up in the presence of religion over so many centuries. Only twice in Rome has anyone built a neighborhood where the secular prevails over the religious; the first time was when the Piemontesi built the Macao neighborhood around the Piazza Indipendenza, and the second time was the Fascists’ construction of EUR. Rome is Rome—there’s no questioning that—but E42 remains the greatest attempt by extraordinary architects to bring the city to more closely resemble other important European cities.
But bringing it closer doesn’t mean making it the same. We need only detach ourselves for a moment from the almost abstract geometry of EUR, abandon its avenues and take a stroll through the surrounding areas, and we run into some of the marvels mentioned in this chapter, from the monastery of Tre Fontane to the excavations at Ostia Antica. This contiguity, these temporal short circuits, this instant flight through the centuries occurs only in Rome with such extraordinary frequency and impact; this is a privilege to remember a bit more often, and perhaps this book can help us do just that.