Abstract
Urban Space and politics intertwine in a number of ways in Aristotle Kallis’ book, in which the author reconstructs the traces of the city transformation during the fascist regime, when a Third Rome appears, which overlaps with the imperial and the baroque Rome of the Popes.
Kallis employs a rich bibliography (particularly attentive to the most recent publications) as well as a large number of primary sources. The text is supplied with beautiful images, archival or produced by the author, and a large number of useful maps were specifically produced for the volume, able to highlight the ‘spatial syntax’ through which fascism unfolds its consistent strategy of transforming the sense of space in the city of Rome.
The history of this attempt of urban transformation – accomplished only in part, but still visible through a considerable amount of massive urban works – is read by Kallis as an overall project that, in order to be understood, requires a broad analytical perspective: the historical reconstruction is developed by making three heterogeneous and fundamental elements enter into a productive dialogue in a productive way: the political dimension (and the architectural debate pertinent to it), urban space and time.
In fact, Kallis does not only describe the history of urban transformations of the city during the regime, but, thanks to the analytical approach he adopts, manages to delineate a complex and fragmented process that we could perhaps define as a manipulation of cultural memory by urban space. Rendering space into a highly readable symbolic system, fascism attempted to produce – by means of coexistence between existing monuments of imperial Rome that were brought to light alongside new and monumental buildings of fascism – what the author calls ‘visual narratives’: arbitrary reconstructions of the past that the materiality of the stone can accentuate by inscribing them in everyday life. It is the attempt to produce a ‘cosmological’ time (Uspenskij, 1988), in which the space of the old and that of the present are employed to produce the illusion of a renaissance of the past.
Through the pages of the book a compelling and dramatic story of a process of radical transformation of the sense of space develops: a semiotic process of re-signification and re-encoding, and the creation of heterotopic spaces – and through it an attempt to build a new time.
Kallis analyses the effects in a detailed manner, showing how the secular layering of the city itself has been radically transformed in this general framework, isolating the Roman monuments and destroying large parts of the urban medieval and renaissance city areas that covered them, to ‘invent’ a new level of visibility in the city, where a unifying interface connects, for the first time, the gigantic ruins of the Roman past – especially those of the empire – to the new buildings of fascism.
According to the author, this was to a new visible level of the city, properly fascist, that overlapped with the previous ones by deconstructing and reassembling their elements in new syntaxes, capable of adding further meaning to the one that they already possess. This original interpretation, and the global consideration of the city space that enable it, seem particularly valuable interpretative and methodological traits, that make the work of Kallis particularly innovative and of relevance in future research.
The first chapter of the book analyses the first steps of the fascist government to ‘conquer Rome’: the beginning of a process that the author defines as ‘appropriation’ of the city that will last throughout the decades: in parallel to the statements of Mussolini, they are considered as the first projects of demolition-reconstruction of Renaissance Rome, rightly pointing out the symbolism of the timing of the major building and construction work: the inauguration and the fulfillment coincide with the anniversaries of the March on Rome and of the establishment of ancient Rome.
The second chapter focuses on the reconstructing of the complex political-cultural debate on the relationship between urbanisation and rural development, and on the architectural style for the fascist era, showing well the initial liveliness of the debate and the ability of the hegemonic regime and Mussolini, being able to incorporate and bring together different concepts and guidelines. Capabilities that will cease gradually – and the rest of the book will provide an ample testimony – to ‘stiffen’ more and more into a style, the so-called Littorio style, – less open to personal interpretation and increasingly poor in terms of its possibility to produce new meaning.
The analysis continues by focusing on a broader analytical scale than that of the individual building: from the third to the sixth chapters it reconstructs the ‘fascist’ elements visible in the city, where the political myth of the Romanità – the symbolic essence and ideal of imperial Rome in continuity with fascism – becomes visible and livable through the excavation and the unearthing of Roman monuments on which the pre-Fascist Rome was layered. The complexity of the monuments brought to light and the path that connects them, support – this is the innovative thesis of Kallis – a new strategic spatial syntax, a new system of connections capable of changing the meaning of the Roman monuments, inserting them into unpublished sequences (chapter 3). It is through the projects of spatial transformation, that the progress of the fascist political-cultural projects becomes legible: the attempt to seize the city of the Popes, following the Lateran Treaty of 1929 (chapter 4), integrating new buildings in the city that can punctuate the landscape with fascist architecture (chapter 5) and the creation of the great centres for youth, the university campus and the city of sport (the Foro Mussolini) (chapter 6). These allow the introduction of the aim of building a new peripheral space, that of the villages which were designed for housing, out of the consolidated fabric of the city, the underclass and the working population. The chapter is further completed by an overview – both interesting and relevant – on the new fascist cities, built from scratch in the southern part of Lazio, which as Kallis considers, in an original way, as ‘long distance’ extensions of the Fascist Rome, in which the urban model of the regime could develop freely. In fact, Kallis emphasises the continuity between the spatial cleaning up of the city and the areas around it with the more general transformation project of the Italian society in its entirety: an integral bonifica that rather than just spatial, is also ‘human’ and linguistic, touching, even if only briefly, the fundamental theme (still requiring extensive research) of the role of space in the fascist biopolitics.
Another element of great interest is the consideration of exhibitions of fascism in Rome during its time (chapter 7) as attempts to create heterotopias (with reference to Foucault): miniature scenic places that want to fully represent the new space capable of making visible – and livable – the mythical time of the imperial past of Rome. The book ends with a reflection (chapter 8) on the most ambitious fascist urban project, the E42, an ‘ideal’ neighbourhood, built from scratch to host the universal exhibition of 1942, never realised, that remains a visible trace – and central to the future development of the city – of the fascist spatial model. By putting once again in parallel architecture and politics, Kallis investigates the connections with the attempt of international political hegemony of fascism, documenting the influences due to the impact of the strongly symbolic space of the Third Rome.
In conclusion the text of Kallis can be considered an excellent book. Written in a clear and elegant manner, the book can be read by all those interested in the themes of fascism, urban history and the relationship between architecture and politics, and it seems appropriate at any level of college education. At the same time, given the extreme novelty and richness that characterises it, it is a penetrating study, able to make new elements in research and new interpretations of the relationship between space, meaning and power.