Itineraries

Five stops across Forlì and Predappio, the two Romagna towns the regime rebuilt as its showcase: Bazzani’s post office on

Padua’s rationalism is scattered rather than monumental, and it does not stop in 1943. Five stops over twelve kilometres. Quirino De Giorgio designed the Cinema Altino on Via Altinate between 1946 and 1952, in the years when his futurist signature settled into something calmer. Gio Ponti’s Palazzo Liviano, won in a 1934 competition and built between 1937 and 1943, is the humanities seat of the university on Piazza Capitaniato. The former Kofler works, which made perfume, powder and soap, left a streamline-moderne corner that gave its quarter a nickname. The church of the Holy Family, built in brick and Istrian stone between 1936 and 1940, serves the San Giuseppe district around it. The last stop leaves the city for Rubano, and one of the rural party houses De Giorgio built across the countryside in 1937–39. Stefano Vigolo tells the full story in a separate article.

EUR was built for a universal exposition that never opened. Rome began the quarter for 1942; the war cancelled the event and left the buildings, and three of them stand within a two-kilometre walk. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana is Italian Rationalism at its most theatrical: a travertine cube of 216 arches, finished in 1943 for an exhibition nobody attended. Gaetano Minnucci’s Palazzo degli Uffici was the first permanent building on the site, raised in under two years as the working headquarters of the exposition itself — the office that built the quarter, inside the quarter. Adalberto Libera’s Palazzo dei Congressi, the winning entry in the 1937 competition, is a forty-five-metre cube wrapped around a single luminous void. Three buildings, three scales of ambition, and a quarter that became a Roman district by accident. Stefano Vigolo tells the full story in a separate article.

Nine seaside colonies along forty kilometres of the Romagna coast, from Busiri Vici’s Le Navi at Cattolica to the Colonia

Of the five towns raised on the drained Pontine Marshes, Pomezia came last: founded in 1939, it is the youngest of them, and its founding core is small enough to cross in a few hundred metres. Two buildings carry it. The Casa Comunale, with the Torre Civica over the square, was designed by the 2PST group as the centrepiece of the civic ensemble and inaugurated in October. A short walk away stands the Palazzo delle Poste e Telegrafi, built in 1938 as part of the same coordinated plan — state architecture in modernist dress, put on the ground before the town around it existed. Two stops, then, and a walk of minutes rather than hours. What it shows is not distance but compression: an entire civic programme, government and tower and post, fitted into one square. Stefano Vigolo tells the full story in a separate article.

Aprilia was the fourth of the new towns built on the reclaimed Pontine plain south of Rome, founded in 1937 to a design by the 2PST team — Petrucci, Tufaroli, Paolini, Silenzi. Seven years later the Anzio front line ran straight through it and the town was destroyed; it was rebuilt afterwards over its own plan. Two stops hold that story. The first is the town itself, as a piece of design that outlived its own buildings. The second is the church of San Michele Arcangelo: inaugurated with the town in 1937, ruined with it in 1944, raised again on the same ground. Three kilometres on foot, and really one question — what survives of a plan when the stones that carried it are gone. Stefano Vigolo tells the full story in a separate article.

Pontinia was the third of the five towns founded on the drained Pontine Marshes between 1932 and 1939, inaugurated on 18 December 1935, and it is also the plainest of them. The walk is two stops in the founding centre, and the second explains the first. The Palazzo Comunale is rural rationalism in brick and travertine, under a civic tower that carries the inscribed motto of the reclamation: the works that made the land are written on the building that governs it. Nothing here was built to impress a visitor, and that is what makes the place legible. Where Latina got travertine and a radial plan, Pontinia got the same programme at the scale of a market square. Stefano Vigolo tells the full story in a separate article.

The civic centre of Sabaudia (1934): the Palazzo Comunale with its tower and the church of the Santissima Annunziata with

Latina was founded in 1932 as Littoria, the first of the new towns on the drained Pontine Marshes, and almost everything in its centre was drawn by one architect. Five stops, two kilometres. Oriolo Frezzotti’s Palazzo Comunale stands at the centre of his own radial plan, its travertine clock tower visible from across the town. The Palazzo del Governo of 1932 anchors Piazza della Libertà with a sober monumentality. The cathedral of San Marco went up in 1932–33, at the same time as the town around it. Palazzo M, built from 1938, is a four-storey block laid out in the shape of an M. The walk ends at the Museo della Terra Pontina, in the monumental former palace of the Opera Nazionale Combattenti. One hand, one decade, and a whole town centre to read it on. Stefano Vigolo tells the full story in a separate article.

Two and a half kilometres in the centre of Turin cross two thousand years without ever leaving walking distance. The route starts at the Palazzo Reale, seat of the House of Savoy and briefly of the Kingdom of Italy, where the royal apartments sit beside Guarini’s daring dome for the Holy Shroud and a major armoury. It continues to the Museo Egizio, the world’s oldest museum devoted entirely to ancient Egypt and the second-largest Egyptological collection anywhere. Then two Baroque interiors: the Real Chiesa di San Lorenzo, one of the masterpieces of European Baroque, and the seventeenth-century Palazzo Falletti di Barolo. It ends at the Porta Palatina, the Roman gate of the first century BC and one of the best-preserved city gates in the world. Court, collection, church and gate: four ways the same city has kept hold of what it was.