Chapter Six - The Fascist Ideological Placemaking

Summary

The fascist period saw the realisation of the urban regeneration project of Rome that began in the post-unification period and transformed the overall image and furnishings of the city over a period of about seventy years. Questionable choices were made in the name of modernising the urban fabric: Gutting, demolitions, and open and still unhealed wounds were the protagonists of the master plans aimed at extrapolating historical identities, dissecting the authenticity of classical monuments, modernising the road network, and celebrating ideologies and propaganda. Rome was the architectural stage of such actions, and the various actors sometimes interpreted its ruins to save them, perhaps isolating them, and sometimes to remove them mercilessly by creating a stratigraphic gap in the capital of the classical Mediterranean.