At a glance

Sabaudia sits in the province of Latina, in southern Lazio, on land reclaimed from the Pontine Marshes. It was conceived as a complete new town rather than a settlement that grew over generations, and the speed of its construction was central to the project: the official record gives 253 days from groundbreaking to completion. The result is a town read most easily from above, as a diagram of straight axes and right angles, with a white civic tower marking its centre.

Key facts

• Region: Lazio, province of Latina
• Founded: 12 April 1934 (construction begun 5 August 1933)
• Construction time: 253 days
• Style: Italian Rationalist architecture and urban planning
• Site: reclaimed Pontine Marshes, near the Circeo forest and Monte Circeo
• Name: after the House of Savoy

History

Sabaudia is one of the towns founded during the draining of the Pontine Marshes, the large reclamation campaign that converted standing water and malarial wetland south of Rome into farmland and new settlements. The town’s design came out of a competition won by four architects: Gino Cancellotti, Eugenio Montuori, Luigi Piccinato and Alfredo Scalpelli. The brief was unusually total, since they were planning a town that did not yet exist on a site that had only recently become dry land.

The name honours the Savoy dynasty, then Italy’s ruling house. Sabaudia belongs to the architecture and planning history of the 1930s, and its interest today is as a built record of how Rationalist ideas about order, geometry and the modern town were put into practice at full scale, fast.

What you see

• Torre Civica (civic tower). The tower of the town hall is the vertical landmark of the centre, a pale Rationalist marker visible across the low surrounding land.
• The rectangular grid. The town is laid out on a rectangular grid of roads, so the plan itself is the main monument: long straight axes meeting at right angles, with public buildings placed as deliberate accents.
• Rationalist civic buildings. The public architecture is stripped and geometric, with flat surfaces and clear volumes rather than ornament, in keeping with the Rationalist competition design of the early 1930s.
• The reclaimed plain and the Circeo forest. Sabaudia stands on land drained from the Pontine Marshes, edged by the Circeo forest, with Monte Circeo rising as a prominent landmark to the south.
• The coast. The municipality includes a long stretch of beach, around fifteen kilometres, carrying Blue Flag status.

Practical information

Sabaudia is a working town of roughly twenty thousand residents, not a museum site, so its Rationalist core is best understood by walking the central axes around the town hall and reading how the grid organises everything else. The patron saint is the SS. Annunziata, celebrated on 25 March. The coast and the Circeo area draw visitors in summer; outside the high season the town is quieter and the planned layout is easier to take in.

Getting there

Sabaudia lies in southern Lazio, in the province of Latina, between Rome and the Circeo promontory. Approximate coordinates are 41.3014° N, 13.0261° E. The town is reached by road across the reclaimed Pontine plain; Latina is the nearest provincial centre.

Nearby

The setting is as much a draw as the town. Monte Circeo and the Circeo forest sit immediately to the south, and the surrounding plain is itself the product of the 1930s reclamation. Within the municipality there are Roman remains, including the excavated Villa of Domitian, and a later neoclassical building, Villa Volpi, built in 1952.

Sources

• Sabaudia — Wikipedia
• Sabaudia — Wikimedia Commons