The Urban Node of Piazzale delle Belle Arti in Rome. From Ettore Rossi's Project to the Realization of two “monumental palaces”

Abstract

Preparing the capital of Italy to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Unification of Italy was one of the goals of Ernesto Nathan (1845-1921), the cosmopolitan mayor who entrusted the new urban development plan to Edmondo Sanjust di Teulada (1858-1936). Sanjust’s plan (1909) outlined the face of modern Rome through new neighbourhoods with different size, location and social composition and three building types: villas, villini and buildings, which were transformed in the following years to increase the plan’s building capacity, giving rise to the palazzine (small apartment buildings) and intensivi, (high density dwellings) that were an ideal tool for exploiting the new building areas and helped to shape some of the urban sections and nodes, including the Piazzale delle Belle Arti. Already strategic for the 1911 Expo, it only found a definition in the 1930s, thanks to the two “palazzi monumentali” (monumental palaces), conceived by architect Ettore Rossi as a unified gateway towards the new Risorgimento bridge, but realised with different volumes and stylistic features, by Rossi himself and the engineer Giulio Gra.

The unpublished reconstruction of Rossi's project and of the historical-constructive events connected with this urban and building activity intends to show how it fits in with the search underway in Rome in the early 20th century for a “city effect”, which was partially completed through complexes in which the physical relationship between building and urban scale was re-established and a figuratively varied, articulated historical environment recalled.