Luigi De Marchi, architect, is the editor and publisher of Cultural Heritage Online. He founded the archive in 1998 as beniculturalionline.it and has published it without interruption since.
Contributions: 44 articles · 1,238 heritage places · 26 itineraries · 2 road-books
Published on beniculturalionline.it, the Italian archive of this publication, online since 1998. They are being brought into Cultural Heritage Online.
Five years of empire (1936-1941): master plans for Addis Ababa, Gondar and Jimma by Gherardo Bosio, 4,400 km of imperial roads, the origin of the Merkato — and the documented atrocities, from Yekatit 12 to Debre Libanos, without which none of it can be read. Fourth in the overseas territories series.
From Di Fausto’s Mediterranean eclecticism on Rhodes — the Grande Albergo delle Rose, the Foro Italico, Lombardi’s Kallithea spa — to the complete rationalist town of Portolago (Lakki) on Leros and the post-earthquake rebuilding of Kos: the built record of Italy’s Aegean possession, 1912-1947. Third in the overseas territories series.
The model town Italian rule built on the bay of Leros: a complete rationalist city by Rodolfo Petracco and Armando Bernabiti (1934-1938), with cinema, round market and clock tower — still inhabited today under its Greek name, Lakki.
The flagship hotel of Italian Rhodes, opened in 1927 to the design of Florestano Di Fausto and Michele Platania: a seafront palace of Venetian, Byzantine and Arab motifs. Since 1999 the building houses the Casino Rodos.
Italy’s first colony holds its most recognised built record: Asmara, UNESCO-listed in 2017 as “A Modernist African City”, with the Fiat Tagliero and Cinema Impero — and the engineering that tied a 2,400-metre capital to the sea: the 1911 mountain railway and the 75-km Massawa cableway, the world’s longest. Second in the overseas territories series.
Tripoli’s colonial architecture and Florestano Di Fausto, the 1927 International Fair, the Mellaha Grand Prix, the 1,822-km Litoranea with its 65 roadhouses, the demolished Arch of the Philaeni and the 1938 settlement villages — the documented record of Italian Libya, including how colonial rule was imposed. First in a series on Italy’s overseas territories.
The Romanesque Revival cathedral of Italian Tripoli, designed by Saffo Panteri and consecrated in November 1928, with its 46-metre dome over Algeria Square. Converted in 1970 into the Jamal Abdel Nasser Mosque, the building still stands.
The monumental arch by Florestano Di Fausto on the Libyan coastal road, inaugurated in March 1937 at the Tripolitania-Cyrenaica border and known to WWII troops as the Marble Arch. Demolished with dynamite in 1973: it no longer exists.
“Fascist architecture” is a convenient but imprecise label: beneath it coexist different and partly opposed currents — rationalism, the Novecento movement, monumentalism — each with its masters and its buildings. A verified map for telling them apart, from the Casa del Fascio to the Square Colosseum.
Functional, logical, free of superfluous ornament: the Italian current of the Modern Movement, from the Gruppo 7 manifestos of 1926-27 and the MIAR to Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como and the seaside colonies of the Adriatic — with the necessary distinctions from Novecento and monumentalism.
