ABSTRACT
For centuries Rome had been a space that stimulated, hosted and enacted utopias. From the planners of ancient Rome to the prosperous popes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the post-1870 rulers of the modern Italian state, utopian thinking about the capital was exhilarating and farreaching, if often incongruous and incomplete.1 Numerous interventions, particularly in the historic centre, had left indelible traces on quarters, buildings and spaces, partly obscuring or effacing previous elements and altering or disrupting the anthropological and topographical parameters of the city. By the time Mussolini came to power in late October 1922 the capital had accumulated elements that echoed the sum of discordant, only partly enacted, previous utopias. It was a city of multiple zones and layers, styles and rhythms, inheritances and opportunities, desires and frustrations. The Fascist regime inherited an array of ideas, plans and processes in motion that pointed in all possible directions. The big debates of the post1870 period about the future forms and functions of ‘Rome the Capital’ had charted a plethora of possible scenarios for the city, from a modern, functional capital to a city of national or universal heritage. During the two decades of Fascist rule (1922-43) such rival utopias continued to dominate political and cultural debate about the future of the ‘third (Fascist) Rome’, fighting for the support of Il Duce as its new indisputable patron.2 That such a pluralism was indeed allowed to flourish in a totalitarian regime3 reflected Fascism’s own ambiguous relation with Rome’s past. For the Fascist revolution preached a new radical order but also celebrated a narrative of historical continuity that stretched back to ancient and medieval Rome to legitimize its own role as the undisputed heir of the most glorious moments of the past and as the force of regeneration for the future.4 The new Fascist Rome was to be the cradle of the new uomo fascista, the model capital of the Italian state, the symbolic space of the Italian nation, the sanctuary of a novel political religion with totalitarian,
universalist aspirations.5 To achieve this totalizing goal the Fascist regime had as much need for new space to enact its own revolutionary utopias as for auratization6 derived from the deliberate appropriation of the symbolic past. Therefore, conquest – of place and of time, of physical space and of memory, of institutions and symbolism – became the hallmark of the Fascist chapter in the history of Rome.7
