Skyline

^Picciriddu's Tower, elevations

"If (as the philosophers maintain) the city is like some large house, and the house is in turn like some small city, cannot the various parts of the house - atria, xysti, dining rooms, porticoes, and so on - be considered miniature buildings?"

Leon Battista Alberti

Over time countries build themselves a city which embodies the nation’s hopes, principles and aspirations, as well as its idiosyncrasies, foibles and delusions. Newly built on virgin land flooded with bright new futures, or the careful rehabilitation of ancient sites to discover a perfect point in an heroic past, even the retroactive invention of a history that never really existed but could nonetheless be newly built, the form a capital takes illustrates both how a people would like to imagine themselves, and how the collective imagination when invested with power can fashion whole worlds.

Over time cities themselves raise buildings which on the one hand serve to contain the machinery of civic bureaucracy, and on the other encapsulate the very nature of the town, the priorities of its citizens and the tastes of its residents. An agora, a civic plaza, a public/private mall, an administrative district, a cultural quarter, a business-park style campus, whichever of these comes to be the representative heart of the metropolis reveals itself as a fragment, from which you can reconstruct the whole conurbation as its inhabitants would ideally have it be.

Over time we accumulate around ourselves objects that either mark a moment In our lives, embodying a significant memory, or which manifest in miniature form qualities we value and strive towards. Living rooms are forums for the enumeration of individual sensibilities, dreams and achievements through the arrangement of domestically significant figurines, busts, posters, books, ceramics and toys, and mantelpieces are parliamentary squares, where domestic mythologies, founding legends, and hopes for the future are constructed in the evocative deployment of familial artefacts.

The quotidian nature of life in a country or city is almost always completely at odds with how we as inhabitants would like it to be, and with how we as a city or a nation, would like to view ourselves. It is buildings, monuments, objects and spaces that symbolise those qualities absent from the everyday lives of residents, which are nonetheless valued in their absence above all else, that allow for a continuation, in fact for a continuous reinvigoration of the shared illusion in which we as citizens, and our metropolis, embody those very notions –strength, justice, liberty, faith, beauty, wisdom, excitement- whose realisation is otherwise so conspicuously absent.

Significant objects at home, weighty monuments in avenues, and civic buildings around plazas allow us to keep living through the grinding, dysfunctional banality of city life by providing us with daily, concrete, incontrovertible proof that we are, and our city, is so much more than just the sum of its parts. 

They are fragments of a dream we all wish to keep dreaming. 

^Picciriddu's Tower, animation

“’Well, do you appreciate that there are bound to be as many types of human being as there are of political systems?’ I asked. ‘Or do you imagine that political systems somehow come into being from oak or from rock, rather than from the characters of the communities’ inhabitants?”

Plato’s Republic, Chapter 11, 544d

Begun by a pope as an appropriately giant residence for his family, and designed with a vast convex façade by Bernini, the palazzo Montecitorio was a banquet of stone too big for the stomach of the Ludovisis, and was abandoned, unfinished for thirty years, with its baroque front left as lonely caretaker to a field of future rooms marked in the Roman mud by low walls of rubble and weeds.

Completed as Law Courts to amended designs sprinkled with ornamental flourishes by Fontana, its immense bulk slowly accumulated uses, found its purpose through the incorporation of offices and functions over the proceeding centuries until it housed the Papal State’s judges, the city’s administration, its governor, and the headquarters of police, eventually making it the de facto centre of all administrative, judicial and law enforcement in the city.

In the public mind however it was the central balcony in Bernini’s façade that captured the imagination, with the winning numbers of the national lottery being announced from its balustrades nine times a year, to covetous and adoring crowds, atomised by their individual hopes of a solitary, and spectacular win.

^Picciriddu's Tower, perspective view

"everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same"

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Upon the assumption of Rome as the capital of a new nation, this baroque shell of bureaucratic departments, with its endless rooms and façade of felicitous association, became a House of Parliament, its piazza-sized semi-circular courtyard filled with the Chamber of Deputies, a temporary accommodation that was soon unfit for its role as the heart of a country with imperial aspirations.

An even bigger palace was built, really a parliament, in the most elegant style of the times by Basile, with interiors resplendent with acres of oak panelling, marble floors and floating glass ceilings, a giant new complex, but one still called the Palazzo Montecittorio, with Bernini’s façade maintained intact, now host to the proclamations of a parliament instead of the spectacles of a papacy. The explicit body-snatching of an architectural form imbued with centuries of political legitimacy by a new sovereign, from its immediate predecessor.

It has been host now for over a hundred years to the contentious ecosystem of Italian politics, its piazza and façade accommodating an endless sequence of demonstrations and counter demonstrations, television interviews and parliamentary walk-outs, its epic bulk crammed into the heart of the ancient city. Montecitorio, with its accumulation of historical significations, a figure of rootedness and burgeoning modernity, rammed up against the remnants of the city’s bustling past, is only one site of active symbolic resonance out of many competing with one another in the city.

^Picciriddu's Tower, perspective view

“Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.”

Anatole Broyard

St Peter’s, the Vittoriano, the Quirinale, the Colosseum, St John the Lateran, palazzo Madama, the Palazzacio, the Campidoglio, the Foro Mussolini, Pantheon, Corviale, there is an abundant surfeit of symbols in Rome. A collection of buildings, monuments and spaces that embody and project the jostling, and often entirely contradictory assemblage of world views, ideas of nationhood, belief, art, politics and history that somehow simultaneously coexist within the physical confines of the Grande Raccordo Anulare.

The profane performance of Rome as a functioning city could be told solely as an abysmal story of corruption and mismanagement, transport chaos and unplanned development, bureaucratic inertia and teeming decay. It is however precisely the discrepancy, the awesomely unbridgeable gulf, between the day to day failures of the city as an efficient site of normal existence, and the innumerable, vast, proclamatory symbols that anchor every other street in strident evocations of an idea of itself far greater than any actually realised in the fabric of the modern city, that generates the fuel which keeps Rome enveloped in a thousand-year long, ever-accelerating dream of itself.

The day-to-day sclerosis of its overcrowded underground, traffic-clogged motorways, and abandoned bike-shares act simply as an irritant that drives the imagination headlong into the enveloping notion of another Rome. Another, ideal city, the fragments of which can be found wherever you care to look, and which act as archaeological proof for your doubting intellect, as concrete affirmation of the reality that begins to take over through the alluring images in your mind’s eye.

^Picciriddu's Tower, perspective view

“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.” 

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Every façade is an evocation of a city as it would be imagined by one period, or one institution, or one church, or one group of people, or even one person. In their proliferation these visions of Rome are like the medieval towers which used to crowd the air in Tuscan towns, jostling with one another to form a parallel skyline of ideas, a forest of how it could be, or perhaps was, or how it actually is when looked at in a particular way.

As a visitor you will almost certainly find yourself climbing one or more of the towers, ascending step by step to the rarefied collection of domes atop Catholic Rome, or rise slowly up to the picturesque ruination of vertiginously piled brick vaults, and broken marble entablatures that crown the imperial idea of the city, or you’ll walk up and up the square Colosseum, extruded up with steps echoing in the travertine stairwell to a lofty platform filled with Mussolini’s favourite buildings, a collection of white horizontals, curved balconies, marble columns and travertine arcades.

To ascend others you will need to knock on doors, ask questions, meet those who hold the keys. Most of them are inaccessible as their owners have long passed away, but talking to a Barista, to a lady at the Post Office, to an office worker in a government ministry or a researcher in the University, you will find yourself warmly invited up to plenty of viewpoints. You’ll be walked up hidden stairs, and whisked up unexpected lifts to see how these elevated Romes each have an acropolis, which is a living room, and a city square, and a capitol, in which all that embodies the sides of the city someone loves the most, have been tenderly arranged atop their own vertiginous plinth. 

If you just can’t stay away, if your first visit to the city just isn’t enough, and you find yourself returning again and again, or as I have found myself -coming to live here for some time- you will not be able to help but begin building your own lofty version of the city. As instinctively as you would furnish an empty apartment in which you intend to spend the rest of your days, you will find yourself collecting material from around Rome, organising it, and assembling it into an edifice of individual experience, your own towering distillation of urban complexity.

^Picciriddu's Tower, animation

When you eventually leave, what you have erected will remain. It will take its place among countless others in the crowded daydream which constitutes the skyline of this city, this capital of dreams that is suspended within the imagination of the world.

Pasquale

^Pasquale

His family tree goes as far back as the devotional statuary of domestic atriums in Babylon and Thebes, made of wood with flecks of azurite and gold leaf, figures that would take excursions across the Mediterranean on unsteady boats, to Carthage and Tripoli where they were sold or swapped for clay vessels, full of fermented fish or the colour purple.

At some point a notion coalesced around these forebears. A conceit in which each one of them was an ultimately doomed, but nonetheless worthy attempt in miniature to reflect one aspect of an impossibly pure ideal. It was 'Beauty' that his forebears never managed to encapsulate, but regardless of this failure they were all so very, very beautiful.

The first marble members of his family cast midsummer shadows in the great colonnades at Palmyra, Apamea and Leptis magna, before they were reproduced, like for like, multiplied endlessly, and spread across identical marble forums from Saguntum to Artaxata. They stood like mirrors reflecting the sun off their blinding whiteness, endless duplications of themselves in an ultimate homage to the skill of the stonemason’s hand, so much harder to achieve than the caprices of novelty.

After the fall, one of this innumerable number eventually found themselves a lone survivor, unearthed from a pile of rubble somewhere and propped up in a Vatican garden to be lauded, worshipped, studied and adored as if he himself were the direct personification of all that beauty could ever be, and had ever been. The sculptor’s duplicate was so perfect in its fate that it usurped all its predecessors from which it had once been reproduced.

Slowly at first, one souvenir at a time, he began to multiply. Smaller versions, bronze versions, porcelain versions, eventually plastic versions of him in all sizes and varying levels of verisimilitude started to appear, initially all around the city he had found himself in, and then later elsewhere, in other cities, in other countries, all over the world, in living rooms, mantelpieces, on coffee tables, desks, windowsills and display cabinets.

At some point a notion coalesced around this particular forebear. A conceit in which his burgeoning progeny were all ultimately futile, and fundamentally worthless attempts in miniature to capture the qualities embodied in his original, authentic form. But nobody explained this to him, nor to his children, and while they may not have been exactly him, they were still so very, very beautiful to all those people who bought them, to their children and their parents, and to him.

^Pasquale

In photographs, black and white and colour and polaroid, Kodak and Fuji, and then digital bits and bytes the family grew into a nation. In colour, in photo albums, animated, through memes, on blogs, spread not only around the world’s living rooms but into every single person’s pocket, backlit, bright, photoshopped, zoomable, editable. In 3d. Poly-mesh surfaces which you could cut and stretch, and that were just like real marble. Apps in which you could make the nose bigger, bulk up the abs, rotate the head and then shoot it off to Amazon to print, for a package to arrive in three days with your very own idea of beauty in a little ball of bubble wrap. 

A notion soon formed that every single member of the family was worth as much as any other, as much as the ones who came before, and as much as the ones who would come after, and as much as those others who were printed, cast, carved, painted, rendered, and drawn at the same time. There was no such thing as an Ideal, and there never had been an Original. Beauty was simply the sum total of the pleasure experienced from all these innumerable items, and so the more of them there were, the more Beauty there was.

And so out they popped, fluorescent modified babies, in plastic and stone and metal and ceramic, each one slightly different, printed everywhere from Busan to Bilbao, and no longer trying to look as much as possible like that lonely statue in a Vatican garden. Each new object in fact trying to look as different as possible whilst still nonetheless containing the instantly recognisable trace of its origins.

Beauty increased exponentially, an unprecedented escalation of gorgeousness, and with every stage of explosive growth the prestige of their ancestors surged proportionately. The larger the family, the more collectively revered the progenitors. Gods don’t exist without believers, and the more believers there are, the greater the god, and so it is in the realm of objects.

It was at this point he woke up, proud heir to a lineage as august as any of the great aristocratic families. Pasquale. A bright, deep, luscious red. Electrically so. He is cold to the touch, and as someone comes over and flicks his side with a finger, he rings like a wine glass.

^Pasquale

He is unique, this Pasquale, and new, so shiny, shiny new, and yet he is enriched by the depths of a past he has inherited and of the breadth of a present his kind have conquered, of features he sports which speak not only of a Renaissance Garden and its star attraction, but of a hundred thousand display cabinets, a million Instagram accounts, the marble remains of a hundred Roman cities, the precise hands of a Greek sculptor, the pages of five hundred years of artist’s sketchbooks, the molten metal of the bronze caster, the click of a Canon’s shutter, and the mechanical whining of a 3d-printer.

Pasquale knows all of this. It is why he looks so serene.

..................................

This story refers to the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museums, his predecessors, and his many replicas.

Rome Wasn't Built From Arrested Decay

^Quintus, Thaksin, Gaius and Alhasan

If you walk down any street in the centre of Rome you will hear any number of languages from all over the world. You will hear them at any time of day, all months of the year, in 2015 just as you would have heard them walking down the same street (or one underneath) in AD100, 1690 the 1880s or the 1950s. Us visitors course in and out of the city each and every day, week after week, in and out, surging down its streets, reaching into the tiniest of alleyways and the smallest, most reclusive of its church interiors, and back out again, pulling out of the side streets and back up the boulevards, and out to the railway station and the airports, draining the city of our presence just as a new surge replaces us almost before we have left, keeping the shops and the cafes and the museums ceaselessly flush with the bloom of our foreign pockets.

The world can’t get enough of Rome, and like the imported seeds of an exotic plant, bits of it, ideas about it, images of it are taken every day, away to innumerable other cities from Kampala to Kuala Lumpur, Paramaribo to Port-au-Prince, Bengaluru and Beirut, where they are spliced with local species and lovingly nurtured in tropical locales, until they blossom and breed and grow into their own unique varieties and subspecies that take root and proliferate and rapidly become as much a part of their new homes as anything that had been there before

But Rome loves the rest of the world as much as the rest of the world loves Rome.

In 1986 the first McDonalds opened next to the Spanish Steps, ostensibly to serve and be served by the rich alluvial flood of tourists which keep that part of town permanently submerged. However, instead of being inundated with Americans visiting from Atlanta Georgia, and Georgians visiting from Tblisi, the outlet was stormed, not figuratively but in a very real sense, by ecstatic city dwelling youths, frenzied by the prospect of consuming on their doorstep some of that outside world which itself had been so expertly consuming their city for the past two millennia.

^Shreebaldone Uno

“The opening was huge, so big that teenagers nearly stormed the restaurant, stopping traffic and causing havoc in the streets. To stop the mania, officials decreed that McDonald's would have to be closed at certain times until further notice” *1

The bright red background of the company’s corporate identity was a vivid, twinkling, shiny new red, a plastic television-red for a city of faded, eczematic, itching reds on buildings whose facades were uncomfortably peeling and crumbling, and fading into a flaky brown decay. The entrance was declared by triumphal arches which looked like two pairs of bananas, California reinventing a Roman tradition in its own healthy way, letters that were sunny like Los Angeles in a city of letters set in cold stone. Inside there were banquettes that were reflective yellow extrusions as curvy and bulbous as a Bernini, in which you could see yourself all yellow and radiant like your face was the inside of a gilded dome in the Vatican, only happier.

There is a conspiracy against this city to arrest its passage through time, to guard it from the intrusion of novelty. No new districts are currently built. No new buildings are allowed in the old districts. Botox is injected in various places by UNESCO and the heritage bodies to insure a static and reliable complexion to its historic rictus. But behind the preserved plaster facades and travertine walls the young of the city, while inescapably steeped in the baroque bed in which they were born, are nonetheless hungry, were hungry, and have always been hungry for more. Heritage becomes a burden, is sterile unless constantly revived, generation after generation, through its coupling with new and energising sources of foreign, alien influence. It has to be constantly, rigorously reinvented. This is instinctively understood by those who have been sustained by its immemorial age, and with a confidence obtainable only by those of impeccable origins, Romans unfailingly set out to acquire youthful brides for their aging metropolis.

^Shreebaldone Due

“Three dancers in red - Valentino red - floated like puppets on a string in front of the Colosseum. As their shadows flickered over the ancient stones, a giant balloon, celebrating Valentino's 45 fashion years, drifted by and a golden shower of fireworks exploded.” *2

A few shop fronts away from the McDonald’s is Valentino’s atelier, that great purveyor of Roman Red and Imperial White. In the 50s he had been drawn to the sequined salons of Paris, where he had assimilated into himself the glamorous lipstick of its couturiers and the imperial iciness of its high society. Upon his return to Italy he had fused the foremost in French fashion, with an abundantly italic ripeness, a hybrid of imported ideas and parochial flair that clothed a whole decade of Rome’s Dolce Vita, gave body to the cinematic worlds of an entire generation of Rome-obsessed directors, and came to be known as purely, essentially Roman, as much part of its platitudinal history as the senatorial toga, or the robes of a cardinal.

Valentino came to Rome from a Paris plundered by his hungry Italian eye, returning with his spoils to transform the bodies of his city, and in the same manner, perhaps even more so, there are thousands upon thousands of Romans now spread around the world, scouring and assimilating and consuming elsewhere with at least as much vigour and intensity as those who have always come to their city. From Cairo to Camden they are observing and absorbing, learning and acquiring the precious materials with which they will eventually return home and begin the perpetually necessary process of renewal which Rome must always undergo, being reimagined from within, using the excitement of things encountered without. 

There has been no building for some time, activity in general has been somewhat subdued and there is a glazed sheen of ennui to the pretty skyline here. But Romans keep returning, from all over, and each time any one of them arrives he brings with him strange seeds of potential newness that he unwittingly sows in her abundantly fertile soil. Super malls from Chongqing, skyscrapers from Astana, themed communities from Dubai, music from Accra and fashion from Lima, all curled up and desiccated, ready at the first glimmer of rain to sprout up all giddy and excited amongst the arches and the columns and the frozen facades.

^Quintus, Thaksin, Gaius and Alhasan, detail

Just as the city has always unexpectedly exploded in bouts of delirious creativity when global winds blow opportune showers its way, so it will again soon, and this time around its stockpile of imaginative reserves is an immense magma chamber, an infinitely dense mass of pressurised newness churning beneath the city, which is as vast as the wanderings of its inhabitants, and as colourful as the sum of all the pent up, frustrated desires of a city’s million excitable minds.

These past thirty years Heritage has acted as the plug to Rome’s volcano, which is bloated and burning, and it is about to burst.

.........................................................

*1 “The Unique Story of McDonald's Restaurants Entering the Italian Market”

*2 “Valentino at 45: Painting the town in red” By Suzy Menkes

This post is dedicated to Renzo Campisi, a very great Roman

Memory Palace

^Memory Palace rear facade

His parents had mandated at least one palace or villa and three churches a day. From the time he normally got up for school until the time he would usually be having dinner they marched from stone building to building, corridor of marble statues to other corridors of marble statues. Everything was old, dirty, stained and big, and nowhere was properly heated so he would hide as deeply as possible in his oversized puffer jacket, peering out from the duvet-like hood at cliffs of stone so big, and from streets so small, that he couldn’t see to the tops without pivoting from his waist to stare upwards.

The subway was all bright orange, but covered in layers of brownish gunk so that it was like he was worming his way through some sort of huge, rotting citrus fruit. There were old ladies hiding behind things in the street, abandoned phone booths and bus stops, who leered suddenly out at him as he passed by, looking for all the world like extras from Pirates of the Caribbean, almost comic with their bedraggled rags, bent backs, and theatrically shaking hands outstretched with wobbling canes. Whenever they were in a square and his mother was reading for them from the guide-book, young men would approach, offering him selfie-sticks, and as they crossed streets to get a better view of the front of one church or another they would have to squeeze between groups of other young men with lots of colourful things in rows on wet, grimy tarpaulins spread out over the pavements.

^Memory Palace Front Facade

Discomfort was what he noticed most at the time. Interiors so big that they disappeared into darkness and which were even colder than outside, cafes in which he wasn’t allowed to sit down, streets that were more like obstacle courses or bomb sites strewn with cars and broken chunks of pavement, scooters scattered here and there, a total lack of his favourite fast food, and he couldn’t understand why they weren’t driving at all, in a car with heating, and why his phone didn’t work, and why nothing was clean, and why they couldn’t just go to a mall, for a bit, for a break.

It was only later that images of the various buildings he saw began to surface in his memory. What had riled him during his visit, that everything was so different to, so at odds with the comfortably shiny, quotidian newness of his surroundings back home, had in retrospect become an object of fascination. As he grew older, he began looking for qualities other than those offered by the acres and acres of air-conditioned, polished-stone floor and white plaster wall interiors that had provided the backdrop to his youth. That particular, miserable trip in which he had felt helplessly trapped for an impossibly long week, cold, shrunken and exhausted at the mercy of gargantuan, crumbling, multiplying old buildings, in the end proved to be a mental reserve of inspiration to which he found himself returning constantly.

^Memory Palace Rotation

He didn’t have specific recollections of individual places, he hadn’t been paying enough attention at the time to know what exactly he had seen and where, instead everything he had visited merged into one, becoming in his head a kind of super extended piece of indistinct architecture that incorporated into itself an almost limitless index of stone moments from all over the city and from all periods, haphazardly united only by the fact he had visited them, and that they had somehow managed to impress their forms deeply into his little shivering head.

The visit had been like being pinned to the sides of a giant centrifuge full of columns, porticoes, colonnades and entablatures, and upon returning to his experiences he set about introducing a sense of order to the thrown about jumble. He would allow himself to linger a while with each impression, with the memory of each niche, exedra, antechamber or clerestory, and he would allocate a grading to the strength of impact its form obtained from him, to the allure of its particular kind of strangeness. From his daydreaming contemplation and categorical meanderings through the full depth of what he had seen, the blurry, massive and disorderly edifice that had encompassed the time spent in the city began to obtain solidity, form, a sense of hierarchy.

^Memory Palace from above

At relatively regular intervals he would return to sets of discrete moments and reevaluate them, judging each from his new standpoint of having grown a bit older, having slightly different notions about things, and he would find that some would rise in his estimation, and others retreat, so that the edifice in his head would be reconfigured, with previously humble features expanding to become central conceits in the space of his mental composition. It was by this stage a recognisable place, a properly prodigious palace, an immense palazzo, a complex through which he could wander at will, whenever and wherever he wanted. It was constituted of every single detail he had managed to extract from his memories of those tiring days, as well as embellishments which he himself had added, refinements to shapes that were in retrospect perhaps a touch too severe or banal.

^Memory Palace Front

In some ways the palace had started out as a souvenir of his visit, one made of pure recollection, but in the intervening years it had grown into something far larger. Its corridors and the endless bays on its façade and its courtyards had taken on a life of their own far beyond the city itself, or the trip that had originally inspired them. It incorporated into itself, into its forever reshuffling turrets and pediments and arches, something of all his experiences since that first trip. It was an architectural Chinese Whispers that had begun in the actual buildings visited, and had been passed progressively through all the various versions of himself as he transitioned from childhood to youth to adulthood, transforming each time as it was passed on, but also accumulating aspects of him, collecting the residue of his passage through time in the same way that the real buildings in the city he had travelled to long ago had accumulated grime, and dirt and stains from the passing of life around them.

He never revisited the city again. He was well aware of the yawning discrepancy between the fertile world he had cultivated in his imagination over the years, and the no doubt disappointing reality of the widely dispersed set of individually perhaps not stellar buildings out of which his world had initially evolved. Instead he endeavoured to create moments from his palace in whatever small way his career in a medium-sized commercial practice allowed him. Upon completion, prior to their being open to the public or clients, he would walk alone around his building, and for a few brief moments the private life of his daydreaming would become entirely coextensive with that of the world around him, and he would feel an enormous sense of calm.

^Memory Palace Rear Facade

Most of the office’s projects were redevelopments of the kind of malls and commercial complexes whose interior banality had led him to retreat back into his memories in the first place. Their era was up, and so they were being repurposed to any number of new uses. If you head to the outskirts of his hometown now, as many architecture students have found themselves doing in recent years, to the places where the malls used to be, you can find a quite remarkable collection of buildings, interiors, facades, and bits of buildings whose architectural form have absolutely no precedent in the area around them, and frankly seem to have no precedent whatsoever. His palace exists, in pieces, scattered around, not coherent and cohesive as it had existed in his head, but dispersed, piecemeal, like the way he had experienced those places back on the visit with his family in the first place.

The people of the town are rather proud of them, especially as they've become reason for a small degree of international attention, and some tourism. And so even after he has passed away, the memories he had used to build his own world have in turn become material for others to come and feed upon, take away, remember, reimagine and rebuild in their own fashion elsewhere, and so on, forever, everything transforming everything else endlessly through the vehicle of the human imagination, city to city, town to town, imagination to imagination.

^Memory Palace Rotation Zoom

Palanti's Pride

This text is based on the story of Mario Palanti and the Mole Littoria, uncovered in Dietrich C Neumann’s essay “A Skyscraper for Mussolini,” in issue 68 of the AA Files. [1]

Dictators attract conceited architects. It is an affinity as basic as that between a baby and its mother’s teat.

The architects must however engage in elaborate mating rituals, and overcome numerous rivals, before they may couple with their man. A dictator must be expertly serenaded. One’s genius must be skilfully strutted. Visionary designs, grand ideas, glorious urban transformations must be paraded in competitions, pamphlets, publications, exhibitions.

Sycophantic descriptions are appended to utopian renderings. Unsolicited projects are designed and presented as votive offerings to the greatness of the tyrant’s might and ideology.

“When the fatherland called its children, I came to serve – From Argentina.”

Mario Palanti, a successful architect practicing in Buenos Aires, author of the two tallest buildings in the Southern Americas, an Italian expatriate, a dreamer and prolific producer of impossibly megalomaniacal schemes, a superhumanly confident character, spotted in Benito Mussonlini someone who could lift his phantasms off the page and onto the skyline.

In Rome. In the Eternal City. Not Buenos Aires, not Montevideo. No more would he slave over masterpieces in places no one would appreciate them but philistine farming magnates, vulgar copper mine owners, and the uncultured, teeming masses heaving off the boats into the empty new continent. He would take his rightful place beside Hadrian, Bramante and Bernini.

Arriving in Italy before him, with an Argentinian Greyhound as a gift to the dictator, was his proposed design for L’Eternale, a 330metre high, 70,000sqm skyscraper of epic proportions mooted for the centre of Rome, a tower which was to “Eternalise for the centuries the work of the fascist government in the Eternal City.”

The tallest building in the world, but one not at the service of commerce but of the citizen and the state, housing Italy’s new Parliament, lecture halls, meeting rooms, a hotel, library, enormous sports facilities, lighthouse, clock, astronomical observatory, telegraph and telephone stations. The blinding penumbra of the reflected sunlight off its acres and acres of white Carrara marble would be visible for miles out into the Lazian countryside.

A form of cancerous, stage-set eclecticism congealed around the mighty armature of the American skyscraper typology. Or as a Palanti fan put it more generously, his works “surpass futurism, assimilate Indian art, Europeanise the east, aestheticize the American and regulate the Grotesque.”

As Neumann has explained, Palanti did not know Rome well. He liked the idea of Rome, not the actual city itself with its tiny, congested streets. He wasn’t too concerned with practical issues. He suggested the building be built somewhere between Palazzo Chigi, the seat of government, and the Tiber: one of the most densely populated urban areas in Europe. His tower would take up roughly half the district.

Mussolini loved the puppy gifted him by the architect. He went, puppy in tow, to an exhibition of the designs in the Salone della Vittoria at the Palazzo Chigi. Mussolini was impressed, it caught his imagination. It looked American, but bigger, much bigger. It was much taller than St Peter’s. It had more marble than the Vittoriano.

He signed the guestbook, “Per la Mole Littoria, Alala!”. The great man had christened the baby.

The Dictator and the conceited architect had coupled and the father had chosen the baby’s name.

“The President stayed for a long time in order to familiarise himself with all the details of the building and he discussed their technical, artistic and financial aspects, finally expressing his full approval.”

The New York Times ran the “Mole Littoria” as their front page story soon after the exhibition. It was an international sensation. Palanti became a talking point from London to Los Angeles. He rode the wave of fascination with Mussolini’s Italy, with its projection of can-do dynamism. He became a lightning rod for criticism of the regime’s hubris. Adolf Platz in the Deutsche Bauzeitung called it a “deadly sin, against which the world’s Christianity should revolt.” Stadtebau Magazine decried Rome’s “Rape”, the LA Time that it would be “chafing Rome”.

Italians were less theatrical, but according to Neumann the disdain beneath their careful and systematic criticisms was palpable. Death by a thousand reasonable objections. Where could it in actual fact realistically be built? Would it not strain the city’s infrastructure too much? How could something like it be financed? Is its mishmash of styles not out of keeping with the spirit of the era?

Marcello Piacentini, soon to become the regime’s preferred architect and planner, declared “The same sky into which Milan Cathedral reaches or Michelangelo’s dome at St Peter’s, cannot be shared with a skyscraper.” The conclusion: “no skyscrapers anywhere in Italy”.

The international headlines continued, but in Italy the debate had moved on. Palanti’s skyscraper looked like the answer to a question nobody was asking. Cremonesi told Mussolini -who was still keen on the idea- that the proposal would create “very harmful … aesthetic problems for the city,” suggesting the architect might try to achieve his goals with a different building.

The Dictator’s gaze drifted. It wasn’t important enough to push for. The experts were telling him otherwise anyway. He had other difficulties to attend to.

After the endorsement, after his international fame, the last thing Palanti had expected was a deathly wall of silence.

He returned to Italy. He redesigned the tower in several versions of descending height, 300m, 145m, 130m & 80m. Spreading his bets. Better a stump than nothing. He had another exhibition at the Salone Vittoria. Mussolini attended and politely complimented the new project. Like any delusional who will not read implicit signs of rejection, Palanti took this luke-warm nod as full re-endorsement. He published another glossy, expensive book for the new designs.

He returned to Buenos Aires to be greeted by Le Corbusier calling his recently completed Uruguayan tower an “unbearable hodgepodge … a monstrous copulation of American and Italian pastry … with delicatessen as ornament and fat dripping from its edges … a ‘public calamity’,” that was at the same time “very funny.”

Things were slipping through his fingers. Becoming desperate for his Italian dream he returned once again, this time entering the competition for a Palazzo Littorio opposite the Bailica of Maxentius.

He stole two prize racehorses that belonged to his wife and gifted them to Mussolini. They were returned.

He did not win. According to Neumann his designs were ridiculed. “Carnivalesque Cake.” “Shark-like South American snobbery.”

Palanti had missed his moment but his delusions only grew, precluding his acknowledgement of failure. He had a special relationship with the Dictator, Mussolini understood his genius even if no one else did. He gave up his lucrative but glory-less Argentine career, he moved permanently to Italy to chase prestige. He left his rich wife. He published more books, designed more grandiose projects. He proposed amongst other things a Torre Littorio in Milan based on the letter M.

Despite his increasingly pathetic efforts Palanti only ever completed one project in Italy, a symbolically appropriate tomb in the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano. Palanti and his tomb.

No newspaper, international or Italian, would ever publish him again. He never again received so much as a word from the Dictator. He never built again. The coupling of the architect and the tyrant had in the end been sterile, mostly unrequited, and had driven the lover mad.

The architect half-lived for another thirty years in a small flat in Milan, broke, alone, silently surveying the rise of and burgeoning fame of other men in his generation, men he once looked down upon from the height of his Mole Littoria.

Surrounded by piles of his various visionary towers, and ancient articles on his once “recklessly extravagant and ingeniously eccentric” imaginary projects that had been discussed from Tokyo to Montreal, Palanti eventually died, another forgotten victim of the maddening allure that Rome exerts on men, dictators and architects alike, with the irresistible challenge it poses to each successive generation: to make your mark if you dare, to equal or surpass the impossible greatness of its past, if you can.

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References:[1] Dietrich C Neumann, “A Skyscraper for Mussolini”, AA Files 68 p.141

This post was amended on November 16th to more thoroughly attribute its source.