Introduction

The present-day visitor to Rome is surrounded by architectural reminders of past centuries and dead regimes: most notably, those of Republican and Imperial Rome and of the medieval and Renaissance papacy. Here and there may also be observed traces of another bygone regime, one that can seem somehow more distant and elusive than any of these. One of the approaches to Italy’s Olympic stadium, for example, is along an avenue decorated with defaced stone columns and crumbling mosaics, obviously inspired yet not produced by classical Rome, commemorating epoch-making military victories, and praising a now-dead leader or Duce. The Duce was Benito Mussolini and the regime responsible for thus inscribing his achievements in stone was the Fascist regime he headed. Another face of Fascism awaits the visitor who ventures out to the south-western suburb of EUR, where an array of architecturally innovative, modernistic buildings reminds Romans of a ‘Universal Exhibition’, planned for 1942 but never actually held.