{{refimprove, date=December 2020 Palazzo_degli_Uffici_Eur_Roma

Stile Littorio denotes an architectural language developed in

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

in the

1930s File:1930s decade montage.png, From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Owens Thompson, Florence Thompson shows the effects of the Great Depression; due to extreme drought conditions, farms across the south-central Uni ...

and featured in a large number of public buildings commissioned by the

Fascist regime Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...

until its fall. The emergence of Stile Littorio is closely linked to the development of a fascist architectural policy in which, through the direct and indirect influence of the fascist institutions up to

Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his overthrow in 194 ...

himself, a formally exemplary, emphasized and dogmatic architectural language, ultimately monumental, had to be promoted, to express the greatness and historical dimension claimed by the regime. FOROITALICO13220808

In the history of Italian architecture, the term Stile Littorio refers to those buildings and urban spaces from the fascist period which were built in "mostly rhetorical and monumental forms". It denotes a simplified architecture, decidedly classicistic in its perpetual use of the ancient Roman building heritage. This way of designing architecture, characterized by the combination of abstraction and a concrete historical vocabulary of forms, took its name, which refers to the

fasces A fasces ( ; ; a , from the Latin word , meaning 'bundle'; ) is a bound bundle of wooden rods, often but not always including an axe (occasionally two axes) with its blade emerging. The fasces is an Italian symbol that had its origin in the Etrus ...

symbols of fascism, already in the 1930s, so as to distinguish a design trend in progress and favored by the fascist regime especially for public works. The Stile Littorio therefore denotes an expression of state architecture that aimed to homogenize the various currents of architectural language in Italy in the twenties, merging

monumentalism {{unreferenced, date=March 2020 Monumentalism defines the architectural tendencies that during the first half of the twentieth century had as their essential canon the inspiration and connection to classicism and Neoclassical architecture, neoclas ...

and

classicism Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aesthe ...

with

rationalism In philosophy, rationalism is the Epistemology, epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "the position that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge", often in contrast to ot ...

in search of a unitary, connotative and recognizable national style, at the service of an image of the fascist state that was connoted as progressive and at the same time as the continuer of a great past, above all to demonstrate its power through the measure and volumetric simplicity emphasized in a state monumentalism. The term Stile Littorio was used for the first time when Saverio Palozzi presented the results of the first competition held in 1934 for the national headquarters of the

Partito Nazionale Fascista The National Fascist Party (, PNF) was a political party in Italy, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of Italian fascism and as a reorganisation of the previous Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, Italian Fasces of Combat. Th ...

.vedi F. Saverio Palozzi: Il nuovo stile littorio: I progetti per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in via dell'Impero. Milano 1936, p. 189.

References

Bibliography

* Joshua Arthurs: Excavating Modernity: The Roman Past in Fascist Italy. Ithaca 2012. * Carmen M. Enss und Luigi Monzo: ‘Terms and Conditions’ of Interwar Architecture and Urbanism in Italy: A Tentative Glossary. In: Enss, Carmen M. und Luigi Monzo (eds.): Townscapes in Transition. Transformation and Reorganization of Italian Cities and their Architecture in the Interwar Period. Bielefeld 2019, p. 270. * Patrick, Goode (ed.): The Oxford Companion to Architecture. 2 volumi. New York 2009, vol. 2, pp. 872f. * Andrew J. Manson: Rationalism and Ruins in Roma Mussoliniana: The 1934 Palazzo del Littorio Competition. New York 2015 (Dissertation, Columbia University, 2015). * Luigi Monzo
''Croci e fasci – Der italienische Kirchenbau in der Zeit des Faschismus, 1919–1945.''
Karlsruhe 2017 (Tesi di dottorato, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 2017), pp. 146–154. * F. Saverio Palozzi: Il nuovo stile littorio: I progetti per il Palazzo del Littorio e della Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in via dell’Impero. Milano 1936. *Paolo Nicoloso, ''Architetture per un'identità italiana'', Udine, Gaspari, 2012, ISBN 9788875412586.

References

Bibliography

See also