“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.
Ten years before the Bolzano courthouse collapse, Corriere della Sera had already settled the question: rationalist buildings of the Ventennio are historical sources to conserve and study, not monuments to erase. A rereading of Paolo Conti 2015 piece, from Moretti Casa della GIL to the Foro Italico obelisk – and why documenting is not celebrating.
Shortly before 6:00 on 16 July 2026 the central section of the Bolzano courthouse collapsed during renovation works: a quarter of the rationalist palace by Rossi de Paoli and Busiri Vici (1939-1956) is gone, one cleaner lightly injured. What happened, and why repair – not demolition – is the only answer worthy of the city that taught Europe to live critically with this heritage.
Eleven original Mario Sironi posters surfaced from an antiques market — L’Ambrosiano’s editions of the day, the 1924 lottery for disfigured veterans, the 1926 Novecento debut, and the regime’s monumental X of 1932. A journey through the visual code of interwar Italy, from the Stefano Vigolo collection.
A 1937 watercolour by Italian painter Giuseppe Carosi depicting construction sites surrounding the Augusteum in Rome. The work captures urban transformation during Rome’s interwar period.
A still life painting by Italian artist Archimede Santi from 1925, featuring a simple domestic arrangement of everyday objects.
A portrait by Italian painter Alberto Salietti, executed in 1923. Salietti was a Ravenna-born artist whose career spanned the twentieth century, exhibiting regularly at the Venice Biennale from 1920 onwards.
Roberto Iras Baldessari’s Ballerina spagnola, painted in 1922, reflects the artist’s experimental phase during his European sojourns in the early interwar years.
An illustration of Castello di Vezzo in Stresa, rendered by Italian painter and illustrator Achille Beltrame in 1935. The work documents the lakeside castle during the interwar period.
