Stefano Vigolo photographs and documents Italian architecture of the interwar decades — the years known in Italy as the Ventennio — from Rationalism and Art Déco to the buildings that fall between the guidebooks. He is a researcher of the period.
Contributions: 556 articles · 134 heritage places · 7 events · 12 itineraries · 207 photographs
Published on beniculturalionline.it, the Italian archive of this publication, online since 1998. They are being brought into Cultural Heritage Online.
A Saint-George knight sells precision scales for a real Genoa engineering firm. The 1927 date and the Santambrogio attribution are the collector’s record, not facts we could independently confirm.
A prize-winning, explicitly propagandistic painting from the 1930 Venice Biennale, today recorded as dispersed or destroyed. We document it as period record, not celebration.
Trucks, a crane and the Colosseum: Cisari prints the tail end of the Via dell’Impero works that reshaped Rome around the amphitheatre in 1932-33.
A construction-site print titled after the Santa Chiara dam in Sardinia — except the dam was finished nine years before the date on the print. We publish the discrepancy along with the image.
A synthetic Art Deco profile portrait of Crown Prince Umberto, signed Fausto Giorno — the pen name of the Futurist Tiburzio Notte, reconstructed by scholarship only in 2021.
Trapani’s palace of the state financial offices, finished in 1924 as its own carved date records: late-eclectic public architecture one generation before rationalism, today disused behind the Comune’s barriers.
The provincial house of Trapani’s war-disabled veterans, designed by Giuseppe Eugenio Genovese and inaugurated during Mussolini’s August 1937 tour — the Luce photographs of him on its balcony survive, and so does the building, closed and waiting.
A rationalist school of 1938 by Marcello Diamantini, built where the 1930 earthquake felled a sixteenth-century convent; first named after Costanzo Ciano, renamed after the poet Pascoli, and still teaching.
A turreted neo-medieval house built against the walls of Treviso in the years after the First World War, known locally as the fairy-tale castle and the Russian castle.
The village hall of a fishing settlement the Fascist regime built at the mouth of the Piave in 1939 and named after Costanzo Ciano. Designed by the engineer Fausto Grisi, with a brick tower and an arcaded portico.
