The movie “Vincere” tells the story of Ida Dalser, one of Benito Mussolini’s lovers. Mussolini abandoned her, his people silenced her, and she died in an insane asylum, asserting until the bitter end that she was Mussolini’s wife and the mother of his oldest son. The film exposed two passions of mine, both unsavory: The first for the romantic figure of the young Il Duce, at least as embodied here by Italian actor Filippo Timi. The second for fascist architecture.
The most famous monument of the Mussolini era is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in the exurban Roman precinct EUR. It’s a textbook example of fascist architecture: scaleless, textureless, simplistic, and imagistic. Yet it’s forms are strongly suggestive, evoking Surrealism and antiquity. The Palazzo doesn’t feel as if it were assembled from steel and stone but as if it fell fully formed from someone’s (in this case, perhaps Mussolini’s) dreamscape. How can a brutal government produce an architecture so strangely appealing?