ABSTRACT
Throughout Italy’s twenty years of Fascism (1922–1943), the National Fascist Party (PNF) constructed numerous architectural and urban projects across Rome. These projects, many of which remain extant, serve as perpetual reminders of the PNF’s ideological practices. However, since the fall of the regime, various entities have appropriated these spaces and, in the process, complicated their meaning. Taking the Foro Mussolini—the Fascist-era sports complex now known as the Foro Italico—as its case study, this chapter engages the legacy of Fascist-era built heritage with the complexities of its reuse.
Tracing the life of the Foro through its reuse as a rest center by the U.S. Army following the Allied liberation of Rome during World War II to its return to Italian control in 1948, this chapter negotiates the implications of the site’s continual use via the lens of media. First, the chapter analyzes the U.S. Army’s photographs of the Allied occupation of the sports complex. In mediating this potent example of reuse, these images offer a means to reinterpret the significance of the Foro and its architectural agency. Expanding the insights offered by these photographs, the chapter then examines Allied soldier guidebooks, American newspapers, and Italian documentary films to demonstrate the Foro’s role in national and international politics during and beyond its Allied appropriation. Finally, the chapter places the more contemporary lived experience of the Foro in conversation with the legacy of its historical reuse. Using media to access the shifting socio-political contexts of the sports complex, this chapter aims to expand the history and meaning of the Foro by revealing how its reuse is as significant and as politically resonant as its original intention. In the process, the chapter shows how a transnational consideration of one nation’s built heritage expands our understanding of the afterlives of contentious modern monuments.
