A couple of years ago, when I was teaching part time at an English-speaking university here in Rome, I offered to give a guest lecture on the Fascist art and architecture in the city. The guest lecture was intended for the first year seminar cohort, which the university was attempting to revamp and make thematic. The theme, of course, was Empire, and the plan was to line up a variety of faculty and guest lecturers to address the topic through the lens of their discipline.
In my woefully misspent attempt* to demonstrate to this collective that I was a team player who would prepare and deliver something worthwhile (not so much a lecture, per se, but a guided dialogue with the 1st year class that would ostensibly also showcase what I thought would be better than talking AT a somewhat large group of people who always expect such things to be boring), I proceeded to find as much of the Fascist art and architecture that I could. The Spouse was a willing map reader and camera operator.
*(NB: the attempt was misspent because that academic collective <I'm not talking about the students> wouldn't know a team player, or for that matter, a proper leader, if they landed in their own personal helicopter on top of their building, parachuted into the middle of campus, and acted like a true professional...)
In short, this was an excuse to go exploring, and to places in and around Rome that we would have otherwise never visited.
First, we went to the EUR (Esposizione Universale Roma). This is a district known for its Brutalist architecture and art, all designed for Benito Mussolini's grand plans for Rome hosting a World's Fair in 1942. The whole complex of buildings and their decorations were intended to celebrate twenty years of Fascism. The whole project was abandoned due to the advent of WWII. The buildings remain. Some are in use. The area itself is both residential and commercial, but the immediate area of these buildings is oddly empty, just the same.
The first image above is generally referred to as the Square Colosseum.
"A nation of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of thinkers, of scientists, of navigators and transmigrators."
Obviously, the style is very hard-edged and monumental in scale. But it also is expressly intended to evoke the style of the original Colosseum.
The sculpture is also monumental in scale. Here, the rearing horse is supported by ancient Roman armor.
The emphasis is on forward movement and power.
Let's not forget that the original Colosseum once had statuary in each of its arches. This statuary echoes this idea, but it is a lot easier to absorb from a distance. Much of it fails to impress up close.
But perhaps readers will be impressed by the fact that a major Italian design name uses the building as its corporate headquarters.
Elsewhere in the EUR district, more modern, Rationalist architecture. All straight lines, hard edges, plain text inscriptions.
And heroically nude figures, conjuring ancient Rome's love affair with Greek statuary (which first put forth the heroic nude).
A giant relief, tracing the history of Rome from the ancient Romulus and Remus to the advent of Mussolini.
The twins are with the she-wolf in the upper left.
Augustus Caesar here in the center, and Marcus Aurelius on horseback below. Titus's soldiers carrying the spoils of Judea on the right.
...the building of St. Peter's Bascilica and the erection of the Egyptian obelisk in front.
I'm pretty sure that this is Constantine experiencing his vision on the Milvian Bridge, here on the left.
Not everything in the EUR is Fascist in intent, but it was all commissioned at the same time. And the style is essentially the same.
This 1930s era obelisk sits in the square named for Guglielmo Marconi, an important Italian inventor known for his work in long-distance radio transmission.
Our excursion happened on Palm Sunday, so the church was crowded. Saints Peter and Paul was designed in 1936 as part of the EUR building complex, but it was not finished until 1955. It is highly related to the rest of the architecture around it, and has a Greek cross floorplan, meant to evoke the original design for St. Peter's Basilica that Michelangelo authored.
The statue on the top of the spire.
Elsewhere, mosaics (a good reference to ancient Rome's preference for mosaics) in Italian Futurist motifs are almost the only true color to be found.
And this...THIS, I lament. It is an entire museum dedicated to the 'civilization' of Rome. And it is closed indefinitely. I don't know why. It has all kinds of interesting objects in it, but no one can get in.
This area was once popular with Italian filmmakers in the 1970s. It is still popular for fashion shoots.
We snuck inside this building while preparations were ongoing for a bridal expo.
I was fascinated by the fresco in the lobby.
But this is not the only area where you can find Fascist art in Rome. It is also situated all around the mausoleum of Augustus, which is considerably closer to where I live.
Mussolini really undertook a lot of building projects - in the style of all the best of the former Roman emperors - and excavation projects. Rome can credit him for unearthing a lot of ancient ruins and investing a great deal in the harnessing of historical pride. The buildings on two sides of the piazza that surrounds the mausoleum of Augustus are clearly Fascist in style. On another side, he had Augustus' Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace, ironically), which he had unearthed in another location, placed here.
Mosaics and sculptural reliefs highlight ancient Roman and Fascist topics.
There are depictions celebrating the virtues of labor and agriculture.
The patriotic associations of family.
Honestly, not entirely sure what this is, but can discern a little fire overtop a kind of bladder-shaped vessel.
An anchor.
Pseudo-religious motifs.
The inscription is one thing...
It reads: 'This is the place where the soul of Augustus flies through the breezes, after the mausoleum of the emperor was extracted from the darkness of the ages and the scattered pieces of the altar of peace were restored, Mussolini
the leader ordered the old narrow places to be destroyed and the location to be adorned with streets, buildings, and shrines fitting for the ways of humanity in the year 1940, in the eighteenth year of the Fascist Era.' 
The floating figures carrying the fascia (a bundle of rods with an axe head bound together with a strip of leather) are another thing, altogether.
I think that the full mosaic connects Hercules' connection (at the top, depicted enacting the one of the 12 labors - a journey to the end of the world to collect the cattle belonging to the monster Geryon - he performs just before arriving in Rome) with the foundation of Rome to the story of Rome's founders Romulus and Remus.
A collection of small mosaics decorate the buildings in this square, too.
Diana? Crescent moon on her diadem...
Ceres, with her sheaf of wheat?
*shoulder shrugging* A noble figure of agricultural labor?
More Rationalist architectural style, here: big, blocky. Visually HEAVY.
Reliefs of instruments of industry and war.
Surprised?
Since I've gone back to the hospital for appendix surgery follow-ups SIX TIMES (want the details, ask me personally...I'm so sick of going there!), I've seen this obelisk every...single...time. Here's a sunnier day shot:
What I love about this photo is it could just as easily be an image from the 1960s...one of those artificially enhanced color images...or from 2020. Ah, Italy.
Pillars with reliefs for a big bridge right across from the sports complex...highlighting Italy's contributions to WWI, I pretty sure.
And in the spirit of ancient Roman mosaics found in both Pompeii and Ostia (as well as other places, let's not forget the expanse of the height of the empire), black and white mosaics. These are all in front of the sports complex, embedded in the now deteriorating concrete sidewalks.
They are HUGE.
Common themes: Mussolini's title or cognome initial...the fasces (over and over again).
If you like your title, repeat it. You know, the way your followers and supplicants chant in crowds gathered to celebrate you....
I started to put all of this together when summertime American news was consumed with the removal of Confederate statuary...or any other statuary associated with highly questionable figures in American history. For awhile now, I have struggled with the visible editing of monument history because I worry that a lack of visibility of even the most challenging entities leaves an opening for the, shall we say, growth of another starfish arm. Another bad actor can fill the void if we don't remember the original bad actors.
I also understand the highly problematic nature of having statuary of those same bad actors in heraldic or other sorts of honorific locations. And so I am mollified by the relocation of at least some of these monuments into museums (even though one could easily argue that museum placement is an honorific measure as well...this is a TOUGH subject).
But I remain struck, as I live here in Rome, by the omnipresence of one bad actor's public works. I didn't have to pay to access any of the things I photographed. They are freely visible and available.
Every year I've been here - except for the pandemic year of 2020 - I have taught an on-ground course on Roman Art and Architecture that spans from the ancient to the Baroque eras. There are parts of this course that are hard to help students literally see, because they are gone. The fora (take your pick: the original Roman forum, the fora of Julius Caesar, August Caesar, Trajan and so on) became a kind of quarry for the city's marble needs of the middle ages and beyond. You have to point to a pile of rocks, a broken column or two, and say, "imagine the Temple of Saturn, folks." And it's pretty hard to imagine.
Additionally, I have to stand with students at the Arch of Constantine and ask them to imagine the statue of one of ancient Rome's many bad actors, the bronze Colossus of Nero (for which, of course the Colosseum got its nickname)...because that statue is long, long gone. And let's consider that the Arch of Constantine, with its spoil (meaning, appropriated from elsewhere) fragments re-carved to suit the programmatic purpose of Constantine's vision, also edits history too. At least in that case the borrowings came from other imperial monuments for equally well-respected emperors.
We call some of these purposeful disruptions of material history - the intentional destruction of said bad actors' memories, such as Nero's colossal bronze statue - damnatio memoriae. The damnation of memory.
America's - as well as some other countries' - summer of 2020 has been an episode of damnatio memoriae. And the creation of other monuments to lesser recognized, formerly marginalized figures has been enacted. New memories are being created. Even Rome has dipped its old, layered toe into this pool.
Yet, Mussolini's memory, even the prominence of his name, remains here. I don't know if it's the shred of nobility embedded in his efforts to revive Rome's pride in its own history...or if the sheer monumentality of these Brutalist buildings and artistic efforts is too much (i.e., too costly?) to remove...or that some people look upon that era of Italian unity - before their grandparents or great-grandparents were either starved or otherwise economically impacted by radical nationalism or hauled away on trains for concentration camps (or brutally murdered right here) - fondly. There IS a group that collectively advocates for the removal of Italy's visible fascist history. It just doesn't seem to gain much ground. Ironically, when a museum dedicated to Italian Fascism was recently proposed here (!), the current mayor rejected it, saying that the city was anti-Fascist, and that 'no one should be mistaken about it.'
But if we as civilized human beings - regardless of nationality - are re-framing our understandings about monuments and their placement, it seems that it would be easy to be mistaken about that issue in Rome.
I don't know where I stand, exactly, on this. I just know that it is a fascinating situation, particularly right now.
