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: 561 articles · 145 heritage places · 687 events · 12 itineraries · 249 photographs
Published on beniculturalionline.it, the Italian archive of this publication, online since 1998. They are being brought into Cultural Heritage Online.
Founded as Littoria in 1932 on the drained Pontine Marshes, Latina still reads exactly as Oriolo Frezzotti drew it. A five-stop walk through the first new town, from the Palazzo Comunale to Palazzo M, with the curated itinerary map.
The nucleo aulico of Pomezia (1939), last of the Pontine new towns: the Casa Comunale with the Torre Civica and
Aprilia (1937), the founded town destroyed on the Anzio front line in 1944 and rebuilt over its own plan, with
The founding centre of Pontinia (1935), third of the Pontine new towns, and its civic tower with the inscribed motto
The civic centre of Sabaudia (1934): the Palazzo Comunale with its tower and the church of the Santissima Annunziata with
Five stops through the founding centre of Latina (Littoria, 1932), from Frezzotti’s Palazzo Comunale to Palazzo M and the Pontine
In the 1930s the regime built new towns, palaces and monuments across Italy and made architecture an instrument of identity and propaganda. From Terragni’s rationalism to Piacentini’s monumentalism and the myth of Rome — the facts and the historiography, from Paolo Nicoloso’s «Mussolini architetto».
In the 1930s the Italian State promoted national art through an organised system of great exhibitions: the Venice Biennale and the first Film Festival, the Rome Quadriennale, the syndicate shows and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. Artistic showcase, instrument of national identity and, in part, propaganda machine.
Between 1922 and 1944 Italian art spoke more than one language. Futurist aeropainting, the Novecento of Margherita Sarfatti, Sironi’s mural manifesto and a nationwide exhibition system — Biennale, Quadriennale, syndicate shows — mapped through documented facts and attributed interpretations.
Period photographs on display in a bar in Mogliano Veneto, near Venice, show a Veneto town between the wars: a brand-new civic square by the architect Mario Fabris, Vasco Vian’s war memorial, the years of the youth organizations, and the crowd of 10 June 1940. From the Stefano Vigolo collection.
