History

Latina was founded in 1932 under the name Littoria as the administrative capital of the newly reclaimed Agro Pontino marshes. Frezzotti, working with engineer Caio Savoia, drew the master plan around two civic squares — piazza del Popolo and piazza della Libertà — and signed most of its founding public buildings, from the cathedral of San Marco to the town hall. Palazzo M was a later addition: by 1938 the regime wanted a dedicated party building, and the project was launched as the centrepiece of a wider scheme called Foro Littorio, a porticoed square with a central tower that was to connect the new Casa del Fascio to the nearby barracks of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio. The Foro Littorio was never built.

Work on the block continued through the early years of the war, slowed by the scarcity of iron diverted to the front. The building was finished at the end of 1943. In January and February 1944 it was hit repeatedly by Allied bombing — Latina sat on the German defensive line south of Rome — and only its left wing remained standing. That surviving wing was used in the immediate postwar to shelter displaced families. Frezzotti himself directed the reconstruction, completed in 1954, after which the building reopened as a school. It was only later assigned to its current police and Guardia di Finanza use.

The popular reading of the plan as an M for Mussolini is not asserted by the surviving project documents held by the Casa dell’Architettura di Latina, which describe the building neutrally as a four-level block on a complex plan. The shape is unmistakable from the air, and the political climate of 1938 leaves little doubt about the intended reading; but the often-repeated certainty that the M was a literal monogram should be read as informed tradition rather than documented authorial statement.