After 1870 Rome grew rapidly as the capital of the new Italian state, and the Trieste-Salario area north-east of Villa Borghese was opened up to speculative residential building. In 1915 the Società Anonima Edilizia Moderna of the Cerruti brothers commissioned the Florentine architect Gino Coppedè (1866–1927) — already known in Genoa for Castello Mackenzie and his own Villa Coppedè — to design an entirely new residential enclave on the triangle of streets around what would become Piazza Mincio, between Via Tagliamento and Via Po. Coppedè conceived it as a single unitary stage-set: a small autonomous quarter entered from Via Tagliamento through a monumental arch joining two palazzine, with a large wrought-iron chandelier hung over the street as the threshold sign.

Piazza Mincio is the heart of the ensemble. At its centre stands the Fontana delle Rane, completed in 1924, a circular travertine basin with twelve frogs arranged around an upper bowl — a deliberate twentieth-century echo of Renaissance Roman fountains rephrased in Liberty language. Around the piazza Coppedè laid out the most striking buildings of the district: the Palazzo del Ragno, marked by a large spider on its facade and a Latin inscription, and the Villino delle Fate, whose asymmetrical volumes carry frescoes, mosaics and sculpted figures drawn from Italian medieval imagery, Dante, Petrarch and Florentine civic memory. Across the seventeen-or-so palazzine and twenty-six villini Coppedè layered Italian Liberty and Art Nouveau over a base of Medieval revival, with quotations from Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian-Babylonian and Etruscan ornament — an eclectic vocabulary held together by his workshop’s consistent craftsmanship in iron, stucco and glass.

Coppedè died in September 1927, before the quarter was complete; the remaining buildings were finished by his collaborators and workshop, with Paolo Emilio André taking over direction of the works. The ensemble has since been recognised as a protected piece of early twentieth-century Roman heritage and remains in active residential use. Its theatrical character has made it a recurring location for Italian and international cinema — among others Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo and Inferno, Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976) and, more recently, House of Gucci (2021). The district is freely accessible on foot and is normally visited from Via Tagliamento, walking under the arch and into Piazza Mincio.