After the Fall: The Legacy of Fascism in Rome's Architectural and Urban History

This paper willexplore the many traces of fascism that can be found in the architecture and urban form of Rome – from its buildings, monuments and piazze, to its street names and graffiti. It reveals how the legacy of this short period in history shaped - and continues to shape - Rome's contemporary cityscape in powerful ways, and examines what this can tell us about the persistence of troubling political and historical legacies in the built environment.

Italy's fascist period (1922-1943) is perhaps the least-understood episode of Rome's architectural history. Yet paradoxically those two decades have, arguably more than any other, defined our contemporary view of Rome's world-famous ancient, Renaissance, and Baroque urban landscapes. The book examines the ways in which the fascist regime sought to remake Rome according to its own vision of the past, and surveys the afterlife of Mussolini's architectural and urban projects, from the Roman Masterplan to the Foro Italico. Internationally, there is currently much debate on the controversial status of public monuments - their abandonment, defacement, re-integration or removal - and, as After the Fall demonstrates, Rome provides a rich setting in which to examine these topical, pressing questions.

Adding a new chapter to the architectural history of Rome, this fascinating history brings architecture, politics, and art together as living, contested experiences in a host of different locations around contemporary Rome.

Professor Flavia Marcello teaches the history, theory and practice of architectural design at the School of Design and Architecture, Swinburne University, Melbourne. Flavia is a world expert on the architecture and cultural production of the Italian Fascist period. She is president of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. She was the 2021-2 Balsdon Fellow of the British School in Rome and is chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Project DP240100615: Mapping Creativity in Captivity during WWII. Her first monograph Giuseppe Pagano. Design and Social Change in Fascist Italy came out in 2020 with Intellect Press. Her second monograph, After the Fall: The Legacy of Fascism in Rome's Architectural and Urban History, is published by Bloomsbury in January 2024.