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.
Born in Milan in 1922 as a painters’ movement around Margherita Sarfatti, the Novecento sought a bridge between classical tradition and modernity. In architecture its voice was Giovanni Muzio — from Ca’ Brutta to the Triennale — a language distinct from both rationalism and State monumentalism.
Pure geometric volumes, symmetry, minimal ornament and an explicit appeal to classical Rome reinterpreted in modern key: the monumental style of Italian public architecture in the 1930s, its defining features, its verified buildings — and how it differs from rationalism.
Newsreels, documentaries, stock footage and photographs: the documentary core of the Archivio Storico Luce records the Italian twentieth century in images. Since 2013 it is the only Italian audiovisual archive in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.
Founded in 1924, the world’s first State cinema institution produced newsreels and documentaries for two decades. Today, as Archivio Luce Cinecitta, it holds more than 77,000 films and some 5 million photographs — in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register since 2013.
Ten years before the Bolzano courthouse collapse, Corriere della Sera had already settled the question: rationalist buildings of the Ventennio are historical sources to conserve and study, not monuments to erase. A rereading of Paolo Conti 2015 piece, from Moretti Casa della GIL to the Foro Italico obelisk – and why documenting is not celebrating.
The archive now has a masthead, a corrections policy and an ownership disclosure. The editor on why a quiet catalogue chose to put names on the door — and an invitation to the writers and photographers who should join it.
A ballroom fitted with furnishings salvaged from the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair sits inside a 10,000-square-foot house built to look like an ocean liner…
A creamery owner in northern Minnesota built himself a poured-concrete house shaped like a piano when viewed from above — one of the state’s few genuine…
After two decades designing Washington’s grandest apartment houses and hotels for other clients, architect Mihran Mesrobian finally built something for…
Listed on the National Register in 1989 and bulldozed anyway in 1995, the Coral Court was Route 66’s most notorious motor court — glazed yellow brick…
