Italian Rationalism reached its most theatrical scale here. The three architects who won the 1937 competition — Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto La Padula, and Mario Romano — proposed a building stripped of every classical decoration except the arch itself, repeated 216 times across the four facades. Marcello Piacentini, as architectural superintendent of the E’42 master plan, revised the proportions and clad the concrete skeleton entirely in travertine. The result is paradoxical: a cube that reads as both ancient (the Colosseum’s arched logic) and modern (no entablature, no order, no ornament beyond the inscription).

“Un popolo di poeti, di artisti, di eroi, di santi, di pensatori, di scienziati, di navigatori, di trasmigratori.”

Inscription on the facade — from Benito Mussolini’s speech of October 2, 1935.

The 1942 universal exposition was cancelled in 1941. The building was finished anyway in 1943, then sat largely unused while the surrounding EUR district was completed in the 1950s for the 1960 Rome Olympics. The Italian state owned it until 2008. Fendi has leased it as headquarters since 2015, paying 2.8 million euros a year on a fifteen-year commitment, restoring the travertine and opening the ground floor to public exhibitions.

The inscription on each facade is a 1935 Mussolini quote that Roman institutions discuss but do not remove, treating the building as documentary modernism rather than active rhetoric. The base measures 51.6 by 51.6 metres; the four corners hold the Dioscuri statues by Publio Morbiducci and Alberto Felci, added in 1942.