Founded in 1938 and inaugurated on the eve of the war, Pomezia closed the Pontine series with the most compact civic centre of the five – the nucleo aulico of the 2PST group, with the curated itinerary map.
Inaugurated in 1937 and shelled to rubble on the Anzio front line in 1944, Aprilia is the Pontine new town that tells two stories. The church of San Michele Arcangelo carries both dates – with the curated itinerary map.
Between celebrated Latina and celebrated Sabaudia sits the new town nobody writes about. Pontinia, third of the five, is rural rationalism at its most distilled – a founded town still readable street by street, with the curated itinerary map.
Planned in 1933 by Cancellotti, Montuori, Piccinato and Scalpelli and built in barely a year, Sabaudia is the masterwork of Italian rationalist urbanism. Two buildings, one civic idea, and the Ferrazzi mosaic – with the curated itinerary map.
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.
From Di Fausto’s Mediterranean eclecticism on Rhodes — the Grande Albergo delle Rose, the Foro Italico, Lombardi’s Kallithea spa — to the complete rationalist town of Portolago (Lakki) on Leros and the post-earthquake rebuilding of Kos: the built record of Italy’s Aegean possession, 1912-1947. Third in the overseas territories series.
Italy’s first colony holds its most recognised built record: Asmara, UNESCO-listed in 2017 as “A Modernist African City”, with the Fiat Tagliero and Cinema Impero — and the engineering that tied a 2,400-metre capital to the sea: the 1911 mountain railway and the 75-km Massawa cableway, the world’s longest. Second in the overseas territories series.
Tripoli’s colonial architecture and Florestano Di Fausto, the 1927 International Fair, the Mellaha Grand Prix, the 1,822-km Litoranea with its 65 roadhouses, the demolished Arch of the Philaeni and the 1938 settlement villages — the documented record of Italian Libya, including how colonial rule was imposed. First in a series on Italy’s overseas territories.
“Fascist architecture” is a convenient but imprecise label: beneath it coexist different and partly opposed currents — rationalism, the Novecento movement, monumentalism — each with its masters and its buildings. A verified map for telling them apart, from the Casa del Fascio to the Square Colosseum.
