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The commission belongs to the wave of Case del Balilla that the Opera Nazionale Balilla rolled out across Italian provincial capitals at the turn of the 1930s. Treviso, expanding south of its Venetian walls into a new garden-suburb plan known as Citta Giardino, set aside a parcel along what is today Via Luigi Giacomelli for a youth centre that would combine indoor sport, performance and reading rooms under a single civic roof. The brief was awarded in 1930 to Pietro Motta, an architect from nearby Mogliano Veneto, whose project organised the programme into a tripartite plan: a tall central block flanked by two symmetrical wings. Work proceeded over three years and the building was inaugurated in 1933 as Casa del Balilla, before being rebranded GIL in 1937 when the Balilla organisation was absorbed into the Gioventu Italiana del Littorio.

Motta’s design sits squarely inside the rationalist current that swept Italian public architecture in those years, yet it also negotiates with the regime’s pull towards Roman monumentality. The lateral wings read as the rationalist half of the bargain: flat wall planes, regular fenestration arranged in long horizontal bands, plain stuccoed surfaces, no historicist mouldings, a stripped geometry that lets the structural grid carry the composition.

The central block answers a different demand. A wide pronaos with squared piers carries the entablature like the porch of a small Roman temple, signalling civic gravitas to anyone arriving from the avenue. Inside, the plan was equally disciplined: a gymnasium on one side, a theatre on the other, a library room above, corridors and offices ordered around the longitudinal spine. The result is one of the few Treviso buildings of the period that can be read as a textbook of the compromise between Razionalismo and the Novecento monumentalism preferred by the regime.

The building survived the war but lost its political function with the fall of the regime in 1943 and the dissolution of the GIL. For decades it served the city in piecemeal ways, with sections used as schools, offices and storage while the fabric slowly deteriorated. A first restoration campaign was carried out in 1990, followed by a more thorough intervention in 2005 that prepared the building for its current civic role. In 2016 the municipality concentrated the Biblioteca Citta Giardino “Andrea Zanzotto” here, naming it after the great Veneto poet who lived nearby. Further enlargement works began in 2024 to roughly double the available space and consolidate Treviso’s plan for a “university city” district around the ex GIL. The building is today fully accessible to the public during library hours and remains the most legible piece of 1930s rationalist civic architecture in the city.