EUR - Reception and Congress Building

The Reception and Congress Building, more informally known as Palazzo dei Congressi, is a building in the EUR of Rome which is located in the EUR district; designed by Adalberto Libera and started in 1938, it was completed in 1954.

Among the projects presented in the competition there was - in addition to the winning one by Adalberto Libera - that of the Como-born Giuseppe Terragni, Cesare Cattaneo and Pietro Lingeri, who finished in second place.

The exclusion of the latter led Giuseppe Pagano to speak in 1941 of a "lost opportunity" and to criticize the work of the commission ("... the opinion of the majority on the projects most conspicuously entrusted to compromise was so agreed that every struggle to save the best could border on the absurdity of a paranoid fixation ")

Originally one of the most important projects of the planned universal exhibition in Rome in 1942, never realized due to the war, it was almost completed when the post-war emergencies overshadowed the architectural and representative needs of the capital, and only in the fifties did it see the definitive completion of the works and its opening to the public.

In May 1936 Rome had become the capital of an empire: in that same year the organization of the Universal Exhibition of 1942 was assigned to the city and the Italian government intended to take the opportunity to celebrate on that date both the glories of the newborn empire and , above all, the fascist twentieth anniversary as well as to develop the urbanization of the city along the road axis that led to the sea.

In December 1936 the law was passed that established the institution for the Universal Exposition of Rome and just a month later the first competitions were announced and invitations were issued for the design of the buildings of the instituting exhibition district, which took the name of EUR 42 from the acronym of the Exhibition and the year in which it should have been held.

Due to its capacity and its large free volumes, it was also intended to host fencing competitions at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.

Map: EUR - Reception and Congress Building