Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (review)

Baxa argues that fascist urban planning in Rome—the sventramenti (gutting) of whole quarters of the old city and the building of new roads—was determined by the experience of World War I and, in particular, the horrors of fighting on the Carso, the eastern front line against Austria-Hungary that now is the border with Slovenia. The fascist veterans of that terrible front allegedly refashioned Rome to reproduce the shattered, ruined landscape of the battlefield and the open spaces of the zone between the Carso and the river Piave, behind which Italian forces regrouped following the catastrophic rout of Caporetto in October 1917. In this way, they could both punish Rome, center of “legal Italy,” for its equivocal attitude to the war and reshape the capital according to the experiences of Italy’s most recent and important history.

This is not entirely implausible—historians of Italian fascism over the last twenty years have sought to understand its actions by closer reference to its ideologies, passions, and prejudices, and fantasies. But Baxa takes his argument too far. Another part of the explanation might be that the fascist conquerors of the “March on Rome” of October 1922 that enabled Benito Mussolini’s rise to power, were overwhelmingly ‘northerners’ by virtue of their provinces of birth—such as Mussolini (Forlì), Dino Grandi (Bologna), Italo Balbo (Ferrara), Giovanni Giuriati (Brescia), and Cesare Maria De Vecchi (Turin). Like the Piedmontese who seized Rome from the pope in September 1870, the fascists despised Rome and sought to bring it under their control, in both cases by radical town planning.

In their reshaping of Rome, the fascists were inevitably influenced by notions of modernism. The result was the disappearance of many of the “picturesque” smaller streets and squares, and the opening up of the remains of the various forums and the creation of wide, often ceremonial, roads worthy of a twentieth-century capital city. For Baxa, these roads represented the culmination of futuristic modernity, the triumph of speed through the motorcar, and he may be right.

He examines Pope Pius XI’s response to the great fascist urban project and argues that apart from the demolition of some important churches and religious houses, the pontiff was concerned abut the “paganizing” agenda that he perceived to lie behind it. His worst fears were realized by Hitler’s visit to Rome in May 1938. Ironically, Pius himself indulged in some sventra-meni after the establishment of the State of the Vatican City in 1929. Many of the old Vatican streets were swept away; and when the triumphal Via della Conciliazone was built from the Tiber to St. Peter’s, most of a whole quarter, the Borgo, was demolished.

Sometimes the reader is left confused by Baxa’s use of street names, because he does not always explain what they were called before and after fascism. Thus he repeatedly talks about the “Corso Umberto I.” One surmises that he means what Romans now call il Corso or the Via del Corso—that is, the street between the Piazza Venezia and the Piazza del Popolo. Oddly, on page 97 he actually quotes a contemporary fascist writer who calls it by its proper name, Via del Corso. A book on topography and town planning must, for obvious reasons, contain maps. This one does not. It is consequently very difficult to understand some of the issues that Baxa seeks to explore—in particular, the project to build the Palazzo del Littorio (headquarters of the Fascist Party) on what is now the Via dei Fori Imperiali, between Via Cavour and the Colosseum, and why the site was eventually abandoned for the Forum Mussolini up the Tiber. It is unclear if this omission is an oversight on the part of the author or is one that can be attributed to the University of Toronto Press.

Despite its defects, this is a thought-provoking and fascinating read...