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The commission belonged to a specific moment in Italian inter-war policy. Through the 1930s the regime expanded its network of colonie marine, large coastal facilities where children of the affiliated provinces spent supervised summer weeks on the beach. The Federazione dei Fasci of Varese, an inland province with no sea, chose the new resort of Milano Marittima — planted in the Cervia pinewood after 1912 — to anchor its own colony. Mario Loreti delivered the design in 1937 and the building rose in roughly two seasons, opening in 1939 just months before the war. With a footprint of about 4,530 square metres, a volume above 62,000 cubic metres and a fenced plot of more than six hectares running toward the shore, the Varese colony entered service as one of the largest single buildings on the Adriatic coast.

Loreti organised the complex around an uncompromising central axis. A monumental reinforced-concrete frame holds a vertical core of ramps and stairs at the heart of the building, flanked by two-storey service wings and, beyond them, two five-storey blocks containing the dormitories. The plan reads almost as a diagram: rigorous symmetry, repeated bays of identical windows, flat roofs, no historicist ornament. Every architectural choice is in line with Italian Rationalism as it had been codified by the MIAR generation and applied by figures such as Terragni and Libera — clarity of structure, sincerity of materials, hierarchy of function expressed in volume. The colony’s monumentality, however, is closer to the late-1930s state-commissioned scale than to the radical early Rationalist projects: the dormitory wings line up like ocean liners alongside the pinewood, designed to be read at a distance from both the sea and the Statale Adriatica.

After 1945 the building lost its original purpose. Used only briefly in the immediate post-war years, the colony has stood essentially empty since the 1950s, owned today by the Regione Emilia-Romagna. The reinforced-concrete frame remains structurally sound, but the wings show extensive vandalism and weathering, and access is restricted.

The Colonia Varese nevertheless appears in every serious survey of Rationalist seaside architecture and is regularly included in studies and exhibitions on the colonie marine. Occasional contemporary-art installations, photo shoots and heritage open days have used the empty halls, and successive recovery proposals have circulated; none has yet produced a permanent reuse. The building remains a contested but unmissable piece of the Adriatic’s twentieth-century landscape.