ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the symbolic meaning of Italian fascist and modern monumental architecture. The effort to better comprehend the iconic potency and endurance of politically charged structures in culturally rich contexts has a renewed importance. Indeed, the enormous legacy of buildings and infrastructure that define Italy during the ventennio of Mussolini’s regime have come under new scrutiny both in Italy and abroad. Restoration laws, aging infrastructure, limited resources, and questions of political expression have raised new questions about architecture’s symbolic role. Among the qualities that characterize this prolific period of design, important features of abstract form, and scale invite comparisons across building functions, audiences, and decades.
Notable fascist structures that have evoked current controversy in Bolzano and Predappio are introduced as subjects to frame the difficult problem of politically affiliated monuments. Through comparisons of modern period monuments, challenges are presented to the certainty of meaning based on static cultural commodities and conditions. Unlikely bedfellows include the competition entry for the EUR’s Palazzo dell’Acqua e delle Luce, The Fosse Ardeatine, and the later Resistance Monument of Udine, which illustrate morphological types with symbol-to-form discord.
