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The stadium was conceived as the centrepiece of a regime sports campaign that twinned Turin with Rome and Bologna as showcase cities for fascist youth. The site, on the southern edge of the city in the still-developing Santa Rita district, was chosen because it offered a large, flat parcel within tram distance of the centre, and because it could double as a parade ground for political rallies. Construction began on 21 September 1932 and was completed in just over seven months: the building was handed over on 29 April 1933 and inaugurated on 14 May for the second edition of the World Student Games. The brief required a 65,000-seat oval, an adjoining covered pool, tennis courts, and the marble-clad Torre Maratona, a campanile-like tower designed to carry the Olympic flame and a public-address system across the entire complex.

Fagnoni’s design translated the Rationalist programme into a sporting building rather than a civic one. The grandstand is a continuous reinforced-concrete shell, with the upper ring cantilevered over the lower bowl on a regular rhythm of slender piers; the exterior is stripped of ornament and reduced to a sequence of horizontal slabs, vertical ribs and recessed entrances marked by simple incised lettering. Bianchini and Ortensi engineered the cantilevers and the long-span pool roof in poured concrete, exploiting the material’s structural plasticity to deliver clear sight-lines without the steel trusses that British and German stadia of the period still relied on. The Torre Maratona, a tall, plain shaft faced in white marble, supplied the vertical accent that the low oval would otherwise have lacked, and tied the complex to the strain of Rationalism — visible at the Foro Mussolini in Rome and at Florence’s Stadio Berta — that combined austere modern volumes with classical monumental scale.

The Mussolini name fell away in 1945 and the venue became simply the Stadio Comunale, shared by Torino and Juventus until the construction of the Stadio delle Alpi for the 1990 World Cup left it largely disused. In 1986 it was rededicated to Vittorio Pozzo, the coach who had led Italy to two World Cup titles. For the 2006 Winter Olympic Games the city commissioned a deep refurbishment from Studio Cenna and Arteco of Verona, which preserved the original grandstand structure and the Torre Maratona while replacing the seating bowl, lowering the pitch and adding a continuous roof, one third of it in translucent membrane to limit shading of the turf. The works, completed in November 2005 at a cost of around thirty million euros, brought capacity to 28,177 covered seats and a UEFA Category 4 rating.

Since 2013 the complex has been under formal architectural protection by the Italian Ministry of Culture, and since 2016 has carried the name Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino in memory of the 1949 Superga air disaster that wiped out the legendary Torino side of the late 1940s. The building remains the largest Rationalist sports venue still in continuous use in Italy, a rare case in which the original interwar volumes have survived two cycles of post-war reconstruction without losing their architectural identity.