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The commission landed on a charged site. Piazza Aurelio Saffi had been the political heart of Forlì since the Middle Ages, ringed by the Palazzo del Podestà, the Romanesque abbey of San Mercuriale and the nineteenth-century Palazzo del Comune. After 1922, the regime read the square as a stage for the new state and approved a sequence of monumental insertions that culminated with Bazzani’s post office on the south side. The architect, born in Rome in 1873 and already responsible for the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione in viale Trastevere and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, was the regime’s preferred designer for institutional buildings that needed to read as modern without breaking the silhouette of older fabric. The brief asked for a complete postal and telegraph headquarters: counters, sorting halls, telephone exchange and offices, all behind a façade that could hold its own against the medieval brick of San Mercuriale across the piazza.

Bazzani answered with a six-bay travertine front organised around a tall rusticated base, a long mid-register of plain ashlar pilasters and a recessed attic. The volume is rationalist in its insistence on the wall as a continuous surface and on the suppression of cornices and decorative apparatus, but the rhythm of the openings, the symmetry of the entrance portal and the cladding belong to the parallel current of stripped classicism that ran through Italian official architecture between 1928 and 1936.

Window frames sit flush, without surrounds; the lettering “POSTE E TELEGRAFI” is incised directly into the stone above the entrance. Inside, the public hall opens behind a low colonnade, paved in coloured marbles and lit from a single high band of glazing — the type of restrained, geometric civic interior that Marcello Piacentini was promoting in the same years for the EUR competitions in Rome.

The palace took heavy damage on 25 August 1944, when Allied air raids on Forlì struck the centre and gutted the upper floors; repairs continued until 1950 and were carried out within the original drawings, so the façade today reads as Bazzani designed it. The building is protected ipso jure as a monument of the state and sits inside the Zona A — Centro Storico of the municipal master plan, with operational postal use that has continued without interruption since 1932. For visitors mapping the densest concentration of interwar rationalism in any provincial Italian city — Forlì had Mussolini’s home province behind it and absorbed an unusually high share of state-funded buildings between 1925 and 1940 — the Palazzo delle Poste is the canonical first stop, paired with the nearby Palazzo delle Esposizioni, the Collegio Aeronautico and the former Casa del Fascio.