ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on the reconstruction of the Piazzale Augusto Imperatore zone next to the Tiber, linking this development to the Mostra Augustea della Romanitá (1937) and the visit of Hitler (1938). My concern will be to compare the ways that these fascist developments negotiate existing
imperial meanings (Classical and Papal) in Rome to the ways in which the previous Liberal government had negotiated the same imperial heritage. I think that the negotiation between existing imperialist/urbanistic discourses on the one hand, and changing contemporary cultural discourses (Beaux Arts in the case of Liberal Italy, Futurism/Modernism in the case of the Fascists) on the other – all in the nationalism/imperialism context – might represent a useful perspective in order to look behind the familiar iconography of fascist architecture. My argument is that by choosing in the end the rhetoric of classical monumentality over futurist radicalism in pursuit of what should have been a truly ‘fascist style’ (or stile littorio), Fascism resorted to a strategy of self-representation which, to borrow literary terminology, I will call ‘masquerade’, this in order to cover up its always shifting and oxymoronic ideological core.1 As we shall see, Rome was the victim but, paradoxically, also the accomplice in such a strategy, which would indelibly alter not only her urban landscape but also her symbolic perception in the nation’s collective imagery.
