Lecture 2 - ‘The Third Rome’: Antiquity, Architecture & Artifice

At the beginning of the 20th century the River Tiber was dammed and banked, new suburbs such as Prati were modelled on Turin’s grid plan lay-out, and the ancient quarter round the Vatican, the Borgo, was divided by a long thoroughfare deliberately separating church from state, the Vatican from the new Rome, the ironically named Via della Conciliazioni. Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in 1922 heralded darker times for the city, the nation and Italy’s international standing. Indeed a new ‘Rubicon’ had been crossed, and the glorification of his rule, reflecting that of the emperors, was rarely far from Il Duce’s rhetoric, manifesting itself in the fervent archeological and architectural activity of the 1920s and ‘30s. Grandiose urban projects classicized established architectural settings, sweeping away irreplaceable remnants of Rome’s past. This ‘stripped-down’ language of classicism is today what is left of Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome’, silent, but ever present.