The master plan for Rome

"Rome is our point of departure and reference. It is our symbol or, if you wish, our myth.  We dream of a Roman Italy, that is to say wise, strong, disciplined, and imperial.  Much of that which was the immortal spirit of Rome rises again in Fascism:  the Fasces are Roman; our organization of combat is Roman, our pride and our courage is Roman: Civis romanus sum.  It is necessary, now, that the history of tomorrow, the history we fervently wish to create, not be a contrast or a parody of the history of yesterday.  The Romans were not only warriors, but formidable builders who could challenge, as they did challenge, their time." – Benito Mussolini, 1922

To create his dream of a 'Third Rome' Mussolini employed architects, archeologists and city planners to restore and rearrange the Eternal City so that it could be viewed in all of its majesty and modernity from the window of a modern automobile speeding down a newly widened street. This envolved the demolition of many Medieval sectors of the city, including neighborhoods. Mussolini conveyed Romanita with a particular motif of stripped neo-classicism, while outfitting the roads of Rome for future population expansion and cleaning up anything deemed unhygenic.

The concerns of the Master Plan regarded hygiene and aesthetics that conveyed art and art history. Mussolini’s picturesque Rome was best seen from the window of a speeding automobile on the new, widened roads cutting through Rome’s historic center where monuments stood tall in their newly isolated glory.

In architect Luigi Lenzi’s The New Rome, he reveals how both private and public architects presented separate plans that were combined to make the ultimate version of the Master Plan. The private Burbera Group consisted of younger architects that proposed isolating the ancient part of Rome to relieve congestion and make a new town square while the Roman Town Planning Society proposed leaving the current urban center untouched and building a new one elsewhere.  According to Lenzi, “both provided an ordered development at which the new growth was arrived at without harming the essential character of the old sectors.”

One of the central architects of the Master Plan under Mussolini was Marcello Piacentini, an artist established prior to the fascist era commissioned by Mussolini for many of the government buildings of the State. Piacentini gained fame as an architect after a 1911 exposition of architecture and for his design for the Cinema al Corso. During the Fascist era, he edited Architettura, the most influential publication for the Fascist Union of Architecture. He was a leader of the Master Plan commissions, including the Esposizione Universale di Roma. Piacentini’s littorio style was more of a “purified classicism” that invoked “sterile imitations of the past.” He employed the feel of romanitá through restrained modernism with similar materials used in Imperial Rome, but he believed “the architect must imply forms convenient for our era” and discard frivolities that “lacked meaning and life.”

Piacentini’s power as an architect and his influential voice in the architectural community made him a useful tool to mitigate between the avante-garde youth generation of Rationalists and the pre-established traditionalists. Ghirardo suggests that a style known as Mediterraneita is the origin of the modernist rational style, a tradition of Italy’s Mediterranean coast. This style included white walls and rectangular or squared space derived from formulas. Mediterraneita was based on the “spirit of precise form,” and “For Piacentini, mediterraneita meant reasoned, well thought out architecture based on technical and spiritual necessities, solemn and enduring forms, forms that expressed a renewed spirit gifted with close links with the Italian past”.

By destroying overcrowded areas and freeing up space with sweeping avenues, Mussolini exposed ancient monuments that would define his vision of a greater Italy. While demolitions were an “effort to rid the city of the mediocrity of past centuries,” these open roads revealed Mussolini’s excavations of ancient Rome, a grandeur he thought would infect the people of Rome.

One of the main fascist urban planners under the master plan, Antonio Munoz, believed Via dell’Impero and Via del Mare “defined the roles that the roads would play in the new Rome.” Roads such as these would serve to open up new visions of ancient landscape and act as arteries for modern automobiles to speed through the city. These roads, in short,  gave “new life to a dead city center.”