Tour time with Mussolini

ROME —  Along the wide, straight Via dei Fori Imperiali near the Colosseum, sightseers often stop to look at a series of maps showing the growth of the Roman Empire: just a dot on the west coast of the Italian peninsula in the 8th century BC, larger in the next two panels, then at its most expansive in the fourth tablet when the Roman world stretched from Spain to Mesopotamia.

Nothing remains of the fifth map placed here in 1936 to commemorate Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia under the direction of Benito Mussolini.

Like so many other emblems of Italy’s Fascist era, the plaque disappeared shortly after Allied troops liberated Rome in 1944, consigned to the scrap heap of a discredited time most people would rather forget. Only historical scavengers seek the remaining Fascist icons, such as the obelisk, still bearing the inscription “Mussolini Dux” (Latin for “leader”), leading to Il Duce’s Foro Italico sports complex north of the historic city center.

But after living in Rome the last 18 months, I’ve realized that the city outside my window bears the clear imprint of the Fascist dictator, who rose to power in 1922 backed by squads of black-shirted vigilantes. He dissolved parliament in 1925, forged the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany in 1939, and fled Rome when the Allies began their drive up the Italian peninsula.

Il Duce left ugly black marks on the modern history of Italy. But he was, nonetheless, a visionary builder who sought to imbue Italians with a sense of patriotism by reconfiguring their ancient imperial capital.

“In five years’ time,” he proclaimed in 1925, “Rome must astonish the peoples of the world. It must appear vast, orderly and powerful as it was in the days of Augustus.”

After the crowds of tourists have left for the summer is a good time to see a different Rome, one that many people don’t know or choose to ignore, the one Il Duce created.

So lately when I cross Piazza Venezia, the city’s traffic-clogged aorta underneath the grandiose Vittoriano monument, I don’t think of King Vittorio Emanuele II, who ruled newly united Italy from 1861 to 1878. I think of Il Duce, who cleared out the area below the Vittoriano, creating an open space where crowds gathered to hear speeches from this squat, florid man who held his finger on the pulse of discontent.

Stray cats padding through the four ancient temples at Largo Argentina, a square just west of Piazza Venezia, inhabit another frame of Il Duce’s dream: archaeological Rome. The Largo Argentina site was discovered when Mussolini ordered the clearing of what was then a slum as part of a wide-ranging project to facilitate traffic and improve hygiene.

But after visiting the square in 1928, he vowed that new construction would never obscure the truncated columns and scattered capitals of the Republican-era temples. Largo Argentina remains a time-warping, mind-bending place where the modern and ancient worlds collide.

Excavating and opening access to ruins -- especially those from the age of Il Duce’s hero Emperor Caesar Augustus -- became a Fascist fundamental. Mussolini cared little for the art and architecture of subsequent, decadent periods, resulting in the now-lamented demolition of Baroque churches and whole medieval districts, including the winding lanes on the west side of the Tiber River that took pilgrims to St. Peter’s Basilica. In 1936, these were eradicated to make room for the soullessly broad and straight Via della Conciliazione.

Archaeological site “liberation,” as it was called, peaked in the Roman Forum area, which looks as it does because of Il Duce. The legions of city planners, engineers and architects he commanded flattened a densely populated district around a saddle of land between the Palatine and Quirinale hills, then drove the Via dei Fori Imperiali through it.

As a result, the ruins take center stage, but as I walk along the boulevard, I often wonder how the neighborhood looked before the Velian Hill was obliterated by Mussolini’s pickax and the denizens who lived on its flanks were moved to apartments in the suburbs.

And I think of how our judgments change through time. Many people now rue Mussolini’s blunt stamp, but some welcomed his building scheme. A 1937 article in National Geographic magazine acclaimed Fascist urban renewal as “Imperial Rome Reborn.”

Meanwhile, Il Duce was making the trains run on time, exhorting Italians to have big families, censoring the press, eyeing potential Italian colonies in the Balkans and North Africa, mounting colossal Fascist exhibitions and welcoming Adolf Hitler to Rome in 1938.

At the same time, Mussolini was constructing harbors, railways, aqueducts, roads, schools, stadiums, hospitals and post offices, often in a cutting-edge, modernist style that makes many visitors cringe. Buildings such as Rome’s Fascist-era Termini train station “stand out like monsters people strenuously try to ignore,” said Terry Kirk, author of “The Architecture of Modern Italy.”

Kirk and other art historians have begun to reassess the aesthetic meaning and value of Il Duce’s monsters.

Termini station on the east side of town was to serve as the terminus of a new subway line, now called Metropolitana B, linking the historic center to a site about five miles southwest where Mussolini chose to stage Rome’s 1942 World’s Fair. Conceived to showcase the glories of Fascist Italy in a self-styled “Olympics of Civilization,” the Esposizione Universale di Roma never took place because of the war. But before work stopped, the 420-acre campus was laid out on a classical Roman model. Ten monumental buildings were completed, and an acronym for the exposition stuck as the name of the district: EUR.

Tourists rarely venture to EUR, though it remains a stunning showcase for early modern Italian architecture. I took to coming here because EUR has a health club with an indoor swimming pool, a rarity in Rome.

Leaving the subway at the Magliana stop, I cut through the hillside park leading to the iconic Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, a mystification of a building often assumed to have been inspired by the surrealist art of Giorgio de Chirico. The cube-shaped building has six stories lined with identical rows of columns and is known here as the Square Colosseum.

Its four corners are flanked by huge equestrian statues with naked Greek heroes, sculpted in the same style as the 60 colossal athletes surrounding the sports stadium at Mussolini’s Foro Italico, with smoothed-over details arousing none of the curiosity of more realistically rendered classical nudes.

Once I peeked inside the nearby Building of Offices, a handsome L-shaped edifice designed by Gaetano Minnucci in 1937, the only EUR building to have been realized in every detail, from its sleek door handles and balustrades to its then state-of-the-art pneumatic tube message system.

On another day I visited the Museum of Roman Civilization in a pair of identical buildings connected by a columned portico. Inside I found a remarkable, idiosyncratic collection of reproduction Roman artifacts, including a full set of casts from Trajan’s Column in the Forum and the Plastico di Roma, a gigantic 3-D model of the capital created for a 1937 exhibition celebrating Fascism’s imperial Roman roots.

Wandering around EUR was a strange, dislocating experience. Though the area is a thriving business district surrounded by parks and upscale villas, its Fascist-era monuments seem to reflect an experiment with the future that was abandoned, That may be partly why filmmakers (including Michelangelo Antonioni and Julie Taymor) have been attracted to it.

To understand the architecture, I asked Terry Kirk, who lives and teaches in Rome, to walk me through it. We began near the Piazza Marconi at the axis of the EUR master plan conceived by scores of architects who grew up in early 20th century Italy.

The director was Marcello Piacentini, a gifted and prodigiously productive architect who made room for a full spectrum of approaches. He was awarded commissions by competition, but to work on such a massive project, Fascist Party membership was required. “Architects from all the modernist strands clamored to make theirs the language of Fascism,” Kirk said. “At EUR, we see them striking a balance between modernity and classicism.

“Look at the travertine arches of the Square Colosseum, a commentary on the timeless classical tradition, backed by huge plates of glass that could have come from downtown New York City,” Kirk said.

To the east we saw the Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi, a Fascist convention center designed by Adalberto Libera in the late 1930s. It is a standout example of Italian modernist architecture, with a dome that echoes the Pantheon, Kirk pointed out.

Many empty spaces left on the EUR plan at the end of World War II were eventually filled with office complexes in the then-prevalent International Style, partly to counterbalance the implied Fascism of earlier buildings. When Rome hosted the 1960 Olympics, EUR was further transformed by a Pier Luigi Nervi stadium where Romans still watch basketball.

More changes are underway. A gaping hole at the district’s center attests to construction of a futuristic new convention center, and renovation drags on at the Square Colosseum where a museum of Italian design is planned.

I still think of Il Duce clutching the railing of a balcony at Piazza Venezia, boasting of his big new building projects. But now when I walk past Termini station or the Square Colosseum, I see monuments of Italian modernism, not monsters.

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susan.spano@latimes.com