ABSTRACT
Postwar political ideology and architectural innovation come together in the mountainside retreat of Villaggio ENI, constructed as a company vacation colony for the Italian state–controlled oil conglomerate and economic powerhouse ENI (formerly AGIP) under the direction of administrator Enrico Mattei. Designed by Austrian-born architect Edoardo Gellner, Villaggio ENI is at once futuristic and site-specific – a product of post-fascist optimism about Northern Italy’s methane resources and their potential to make Italy a global power. Sited in Corte di Cadore just south of Cortina d’Ampezzo, Villaggio ENI consists of 263 villas, a staff dormitory, a hotel, two camps, a church designed in collaboration with Carlo Scarpa (La Chiesa di Nostra Signora di Cadore), and plans for 300 additional villas and a town center.
Villaggio ENI mediates cultural, societal, and ideological strata in postwar Italy: hybrid Austrian-Italian identities of the Northern Dolomites; fascist social agendas and new Italian societal structures; and modernist and local material motifs such as the baita. Together, as client and architect, Mattei and Gellner shaped and defined a post-fascist town, salvaging assets of the Fascist regime – the paternalistic colonia typology and the stylistic interest in marrying old and new – while also reclaiming not the classical Roman but the regional vernacular.
