The Colosseum pulses with life, a great melting pot of holidaymakers seeking the remnants of a long-dead civilisation. For a long time, this place stood mostly empty: a reminder of Rome’s one time status as the centre of empire repurposed for contemporary use. Stone was stripped from walls for use as quicklime, underground chambers where gladiators once prepared for bloodsport became shelters for animals used by the poor agrarian populace who lived just outside the walls. Now its purpose has turned inwards: it is a reminder and exhibit of its own existence, millenia removed from its original function. People love it for that - they travel to Rome from around the world just to look at it. They stand in queues and endure blistering heat just to be able to run their hands over the stone and feel some fleeting connection to the past.
Modern Rome venerates its ancient life. That’s a key part of its success, why it remains one of the most visited cities in the world. There is a part of the city, however, where most tourists do not go.
A short trip on the metro from the Colosseum brings one to its modern descendant: the Colosseo Quadrato (‘Square Colosseum’). It stands nearly 60 metres tall, a stark white cube with 6 rows of 9 arches on each exterior facade. Atop a small hill it looms over the area, flanked by statues of the Dioscuri and their enormous steeds. Unlike its namesake, you cannot go inside, or even get particularly close. Well-dressed business executives dwell within, and on the plaza (as is too often the case in Italy) security officers prowl in packs, muscles rippling beneath immaculate uniforms, black rifles gleaming in the sun. This is what remains of the Fascist dream of Italy. This is Mussolini’s EUR.
The Esposizione Universale di Roma was intended as a coup de grace in Benito Mussolini’s reconstruction of Rome during the Fascist Era. The existing centre has already undergone a radical transformation, with whole swathes of the city bulldozed to make room for the large boulevards that had characterised the modern city since Haussman’s Paris. Now, the city centre was to be expanded west towards the port of Ostia, and a new centre created in the EUR. Mussolini gave Marcello Piancentini the role of developing the architecture of the EUR, attracted as he was to the architect’s neoclassical flourishes that would become the de jure style of Fascist Rome. This centre was to be an embodiment of Italian Fascist ideals, a celebration of Italian culture and supremacy from the Roman Empire to the Papal States finding their ultimate expression in the monumental modernity of Fascism. Not a pastiche or a homage, but a new era for an old civilisation.
The 1942 World’s Fair was to inaugurate this new vision, but it was cancelled due to the outbreak of war in Europe. Mussolini was overthrown in 1943, and his party collapsed days later. Roman citizens defaced fascist monuments across the city, but the partially completed EUR, damaged by war, remained largely untouched. Later, the project was revised as a business district away from the centre of Rome, the remaining buildings were finished, and this is the state in which it exists today.
While the Square Colosseum still manages to conjure some degree of imposing grandeur, reminding those who enter the EUR of their relative smallness in the face of history, elsewhere in the area we find the desolation of Mussolini’s dream. This is most apparent on the approach to the Museum of Roman Civilisation, on the opposite side of the EUR.
While it may be of a piece with the Square Colosseum, its massive colonnade vainly evoking the power of Ancient Rome, the museum’s distance from the metro and the fact that it has been inexplicably closed ‘for renovation’ for the past decade has taken its toll on the surrounding area. We are alone as we approach the building, and the only other soul we encounter during the time we are there is an old local man who lets his dog hitch its leg against one of the bushes. The cicada symphony that soundtracks Italy in summer falls silent abruptly, as if to emphasise how truly empty the place is. Sure, an abandoned museum is hardly going to pull the same crowd as the Colosseum or Forum, but I imagined there would be at least somebody there with the same morbid curiosity as me. Nothing.
The legacy of the area as a Fascist brainchild seems complicated, only half-buried. Outside of the obvious points of interest, the EUR is a non-place - an administrative organ of Rome where bureaucrats and executives can come and go without tarnishing the tourist image of the city. No one wants to claim it as anything more significant, not even the current government with its origins in Italy’s post-fascist MSI movement. There’s an eeriness to the sight of these monuments to ideology sharing space with the inoffensively pleasant glass-and-steel structures of government offices.
On the train back into town, an oppressive feeling lifts, the sense of awaking from some dull nightmare. Far to the North, in the small town of Predappio, a statuette holds aloft a flame above the Mussolini Family Crypt. The same flame adorns the ruling Brothers of Italy party logo. Beneath the flame, tourists pass on their way down the stairs, down to the small room where Il Duce’s bones rest. A bust of his face gazes sternly down from the wall at all who visit as if inviting them to worship. There’s a shrine of Fascist memorabilia, hastily drawn swastikas in the guestbook. Every year, on the anniversary of the March on Rome, Neo-Nazis and other fascist strains converge on the town to venerate their leader. Despite laws ostensibly prohibiting any display of fascist sympathy, plenty of them perform Nazi salutes without incident. Some of them even hold up pictures of Georgia Meloni, the current premier, in approval.
The EUR might be bleached bones in a graveyard, but elsewhere the heart still beats.