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The commission belongs to a precise moment of Ferrarese urban history. Between 1926 and 1938 the Jewish podestà Renzo Ravenna led an aggressive programme of public works west of the medieval walls, christened the Addizione Novecentista in deliberate echo of the Renaissance Addizione Erculea. Carlo Savonuzzi, a Ferrarese architect trained at Bologna and tied to the local Novecento milieu, became the project’s in-house designer. The Stadio Littorio Comunale was one of its earliest pieces. Groundbreaking took place in 1927; the inauguration followed on 20 September 1928, only fifteen months later, with an athletics meeting and a football match. The brief was unusually broad for a provincial Italian city of the late 1920s: not a single-purpose football ground, but a multi-sport arena with a cinder running track, a concrete velodrome and a regulation football pitch nested inside the oval. The result placed Ferrara, well before larger Italian cities, on the short list of communes with a purpose-built modern stadium.

Savonuzzi’s scheme followed the rationalist credo of clarity over ornament. The stands were laid out as a continuous oval, with the principal grandstand on the western long side and open terraces on the curves. Reinforced concrete carried most of the structure; brick infill, exposed and laid in flat planes, provided the wall surfaces in the same warm Ferrarese register used across the Addizione Novecentista. Decorative apparatus was kept to a minimum: thin string-courses, a band of repeated openings under the grandstand cover, and lettering integrated into the masonry rather than applied as signage. The original section dedicated two-thirds of the seated capacity to the long west side, where the press box and authorities tribune were sheltered by a flat concrete canopy. The cycling track on the inner perimeter and the athletics oval outside the pitch followed international dimensions of the period, signalling the regime’s ambition to align Ferrara with the standards of the major federations.

The post-war decades reshaped the ground twice over. In 1951 the velodrome and the athletics track were removed, the terraces were pushed forward to the pitch and capacity climbed to roughly 25,000. Sectoral reconstructions followed in 1966, 1979 and 1988, each adapted to evolving federal safety codes. In February 1982 the municipality renamed the ground after Paolo Mazza, the historic SPAL president who had taken the club to Serie A and to the threshold of European football in the 1960s. The most recent campaign, between 2016 and 2018, modernised the stands to Serie A standards: every seat is now covered, the capacity stands at 16,134, and the press, hospitality and accessibility facilities have been upgraded.

Despite the layered interventions, the original 1928 perimeter and the rhythm of Savonuzzi’s grandstand remain legible from Corso Piave. Stadio Paolo Mazza is therefore a working monument: a piece of the Addizione Novecentista that has never stopped doing what it was designed for, and a rare chance in Italy to watch a Serie A or Serie B match inside the same masonry shell that opened its gates in 1928.