A brick building of the late 1930s with the letters GIL on its wall and a rounded stair tower, built in Lucera for the Fascist youth organisation, and still known today by its old name.
At a glance
The Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, GIL, was the youth organisation of the Fascist regime, created in October 1937 and dissolved in 1943. In many Italian towns it had its own building, the casa della GIL, with a gymnasium, rooms for meetings and courses and an open space for drill. In Lucera the building shown in this postcard from the collection of Stefano Vigolo still stands, and still carries the name: it houses a nursery school listed as “La Casa della G.I.L.”.
Key facts
- Name: Casa della G.I.L., Gioventù Italiana del Littorio
- Date: between 1937 and 1943 — the organisation whose letters are on the wall existed only in those years
- Today: a nursery school, listed as Scuola Materna “La Casa della G.I.L.”
- Architect: not known to us
- GPS: 41.51142, 15.33033 · Open in Google Maps
History
The GIL was established by royal decree-law on 27 October 1937, merging the Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Fascist youth groups, and it came to an end with the fall of the regime in 1943. The letters GIL on the building therefore date the postcard, and most probably the building, to those six years. We have not found the name of the architect or the year of the inauguration. After the war the building passed to other uses and today houses a nursery school that has kept the old name.
What the postcard shows
A two-storey building of brick with a pale stone base, standing on a street corner. The entrance, on the left, is framed by a porch of thin white pillars reached by a few steps. On the corner, the letters G I L are set vertically into the brick. To the right rises a rounded stair tower with two tall windows divided into a fine grid, closed at the top by a projecting curved roof. Further left, a lower wing is marked by tall flat pillars.
Do you know more?
On this page we have published what can be seen and what we were able to verify. About the architect of this building and the year it was opened we could not find a reliable source. If you know something — a name, a date, the architect, the family who lived there, an old photograph, a document, a book that mentions it — write to Sofia, who looks after these pages.
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Please start your message with the title of this page, so it reaches the right file. Every contribution is checked against independent sources before it goes on the page, and we always say where a piece of information came from.
Sources
- Period postcard, Lucera – Casa della G.I.L., collection Stefano Vigolo: the building and its name
- Ministero della Cultura, SIUSA, Gioventù italiana del littorio – GIL, 1937-1943: the royal decree-law of 27 October 1937, no. 1839, and the merger of the Opera Nazionale Balilla and the Fascist youth groups
- OpenStreetMap and Google Maps: the school at the same site, listed as Scuola Materna “La Casa della G.I.L.”
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