M a r c o

C a p i t a n i o

3 3 5 3 3 9

THE PRODUC T I ON OF FA S C I S T SPAC E

Sabaudia and the Pontine Marshes project

Fig. 1: Inauguration of Sabaudia. View to Piazza della Rivoluzione

TAblE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE PONTINE MARSHES AND THE ITALIAN CONTEXT

ANTI-URBAN IDEOLOGIES IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

LAND RECLAMATION AND TERRITORIAL ORGANIZATION

SABAUDIA - THE COMPETITION

SABAUDIA - THE PROJECT

POLEMICS AND PROPAGANDA

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AFTERMATH

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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THE PRODUC T I ON OF FA S C I S T SPACE

Sabaudia and the Pontine Marshes project

INTRODUCTION Any social existence aspiring or claiming to be real, but failing to produce Its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the cultural realm. It would fall to the level of folklore and sooner or later disappear altogether, thereby immediately losing its identity, its denomination and its feeble degree of reality. This suggests a possible criterion for distinguishing between ideology and practice as well as between ideology and knowledge. (Lefebvre 1991:53) Fascism is generally regarded as a multi-faceted and heterogeneous ideology, in which many different currents coexist side by side: under Mussolini, artists and professionals belonging to opposed positions were equally legitimated by the regime, never explicitly choosing between the Modern style, represented by the Rationalists, and the classic school with the monumental appeal of the romanit. In this paper I will tackle the complementary terms of city and countryside under Fascism in the case of land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes, showing that, even tough the project had some very specific reasons connected to the Italian situation at the time and to the personality of Mussolini himself, the anti-urban ideologies that underlined it were a tendency to be found in many other countries in Europe and worldwide. I will also argue that the Pontine Marshes reclamation shows in a crystalline way the need for Fascism to control society hierarchically, to make its power visible, in an attempt to erase spaces for democracy through territorial reorganization. After a closer look at the new town of Sabaudia, its development after Fascism and its popularity nowadays, I will argue, borrowing an argument from Pier Paolo Pasolini, that the way in which we value Fascist architecture is a direct consequence of the regimes ideological heterogeneity and its failure in producing its own space.

THE PONTINE MARSHES AND THE ITALIAN CONTEXT The Pontine Marshes were a swampy land some 80 km south/east from Rome. Attempts to reclamate them have been taken by ancient romans and in the XVI and XVII Century by the Papacy, but the vast majority of this land was still largely uninhabited and under malaria threat when Fascism came to power in 1922. The area is divided into the Agro Pontino, which first underwent drainage and where the first three new towns and thirteen hamlets were founded, and the Agro Romano, with a total area of 800 sq. km. Even tough other land was reclamated throughout Italy by the Fascist regime, with the socalled bonifica Integrale (complete land reclamation), the Pontine Marshes remain the most well-known achievement, a sort of flagship project due to extensive international publications in architectural and planning magazines. European governments and USA in fact were following the new authoritarian Italian regime with much attention, and,
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at least until the proclamation of the Empire in 36, placed some hopes and admiration in Mussolini, who carefully developed a propaganda machine in view of national and international legitimation. With such a massive project, Mussolini was aiming at solving two problems: first, giving the promised land for cultivation to the fighters on the WWI, and second, increasing grain production in view of an Italian autarchy (Mariani 1982:16-31). In 17 the ONC Organizzazione Nazionale Combattenti (National Organization of Fighters) was founded, with the scope of compensating soldiers (mostly farmers) who fought during the WWI and were promised fertile land to cultivate when they came back home. A vast majority of rural land in Italy and particularly in the Lazio Region was owned by the church, but expropriation of high-valuable areas was a dangerous move for the regime, which counted, if not on an open collaboration with the Vatican, at least on its laissez-faire; in the Pontine Marshes on the other hand there were few owners for vast, underused, unproductive land. In 28 a law was promulgated, which allowed the expropriation of up to 2/3 of unproductive and non-fertile fields from private owners; additionally, the regime had to face an increasing unemployment throughout the country, and a general depopulation of rural areas (Mariani 1982:60-73). A second reason for embarking in the Marshes reclamation was the so-called battle for grain, launched in 24, in order to reduce imports of grain from foreign states, which can be seen as part of the Fascist ideal of self-sufficiency, a principle strengthened after the economic sanctions by the League of Nations for the invasion of Ethiopia in 35.

ANTI-URBAN IDEOLOGIES IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT We have to think about the anti-urban ideology within the Fascist Movement as just one of the many currents that coexisted side by side: in fact, especially after the proclamation of the Empire in 36, the dictatorship concentrated more and more on the capital city of Rome, as an expression of power itself and as a way to re-link to the old glorious past of Antiquity. Mussolini decided to embark in the bonifica integrale following both ideological positions and concrete problems of the whole country. Mussolini held a famous speech in the parliament on 26th May 27, the so-called discorso dellAscensione (Ascension Day speech), in which he analyzed Italian economic and demographic situation and made clear his positions towards the city and the countryside. He argued that: [t]here is a kind of urbanism which is destructive, which sterilizes people, and it is industrial urbanism. [...] If we decrease, gentlemen, we wont have a empire, we will become a colony! [...] You will understand then why I am helping agriculture, why I call myself rural; why I do not want industries around Rome; why I want only healthy industries, which are the ones connected to agriculture and sea. (Mussolini 1927, my translation) In the same speech the dictator analyzes death- and birth-rates in many Italian cities, arguing that the metropolis has to be seen as a danger for the survival of a Nation because, simply, births in cities are not enough: in order to achieve his imperialistic goals it was clear that Mussolini had to count on demographic increase, and, statistically, one measure he thought to be successful was to slow-down the urbanization of large masses of peasants and farmers. It is anyhow necessary to note that, in comparison with other European countries, industrialization and urbanization in Italy proceeded at a much slower pace, and throughout the whole peninsula, with the partial exception of Naples, there was not a single city comparable in size and population with London, Paris or New
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York. The general decrease of birth- and death-rates was to be found Europe-wide, and, especially in Italy where industrialization was still in its beginnings, the phenomenon was not as impressive as Mussolini was showing (Mariani 1982:40-52). In fact, besides some statistics and rough analysis, the dictator was relying on a more ideological side, following tightly the theories of German philosopher Oswald Spengler, particularly his 1918 book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), in which he set up a theory of cyclical history and indicated the contemporary historical phase as one of decline, with urbanization as its major driving force (Mariani 1982:73-86). On an international level, tendencies towards an integration of urbanity and rurality during the first half of the XX Century emerged prominently in many countries, with different degrees of radicality. In the Soviet Union, within the artistic and architectural current of Constructivism in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the disurbanist group was proposing extremely radical planning solutions. In 29 a competition for a green city for 100.000 people at the periphery of Moscow was held: among the four projects presented, the one by Nikolai Ginzburg and Mikhail Barsch featured axes extending through untouched nature linking production centers, with housing and services located close to transport infrastructure. One year later Nikolai Miliutin developed his concept of the linear city (borrowing and reworking the original idea from Arturo Soria y Mata), distinguishing through zoning among transportation, production, green belt, residential area, park and agriculture. The ideology underlying the proposal affirms that most important is the tremendous problem of the elimination of the differences between the city and the country. This is why we must review the very meaning of the word city. The modern city is a product of a mercantile society and will die together with it, merging into the socialist industrialized countryside. (Miliutin 1974:57) In England, a much less radical but nonetheless influential and implemented vision was embodied in the Garden City Movement, polarized around Ebenezer Howard and his influential 1902 book Garden Cities of To-morrow, and Raymond Unwin, who materialized Howards vision in Letchworth Garden City and other projects (e.g. Hampstead): the attractivity of such a model are the combined benefits of towns and country, seen as magnets attracting people with their own peculiarities, in which the livability of urban social life is coupled with the healthiness of living close to nature, where people can work close to their home, achieving thus the peaceful path to real reform. What is interesting for us to note is the attempt of merging town and country with a third-way, as Howard wrote in the introduction to his book: Whatever may have been the causes which have operated in the past, and are operating now, to draw the people into the cities, those causes may all be summed up as attractions; and it is obvious, therefore, that no remedy can possibly be effective which will not present to the people [...] greater attractions than our cities now possess, so that the force of the old attractions shall be overcome by the force of new attractions which are to be created. [...] There are in reality not only [...] two alternatives - town life and country life - but a third alternative, in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination. (Howard 1945:44-46) Also in the USA, while suburbanization and sprawl were already taking place, city innercores grew increasingly unpopular and middle-class spread out to the outskirts with their brand-new cars, the position of Louis Wirth in the late 1930s deserves a quotation. He argues:

The failure of the urban population to reproduce itself appears to be a biological consequence of a combination of factors in the complex of urban life, and the decline in the birth-rate generally may be regarded as one of the most significant signs of the urbanization of the Western world. [...] Since cities are the consumers rather than the producers of men, the value of human life and the social estimation of the personality will not be unaffected by the balance between births and deaths. [...] [T]he physical mechanism of the city are not isolated phenomena unrelated to the city as a social entity, but are affected by and affect the urban mode of life. (Wirth 1938:20) It is worth mention that six years earlier Frank Lloyd Wright, with his book The Disappearing City, proposed the Broadacre City, whose value and meaning are still being debated today, but which represents undeniably a departure from the compact city model, owing much to Howards theories.

LAND RECLAMATION AND TERRITORIAL ORGANIZATION

Fig. 2: The Pontine Marshes. Left the Agro Romano, right the Agro Pontino. In yellow the five new towns, in green the thirteen new hamlets.

Land reclamation in the Pontine Marshes was structured through a very precise territorial hierarchy, even tough there was never a complete plan from the beginning, with Mussolini deciding on a day-by-day basis the location and the foundation date of the new towns he had in mind. The whole area would have a province, Littoria (now Latina), which was the first of five new towns, inaugurated in December 32. Sabaudia followed in April 34, generally regarded as the most interesting and successful of the Italian Fascist new towns and at which we will have a closer look in the following section. Pontinia was inaugurated in December 35, Aprilia in October 37 and Pomezia in October 39. The clash between the urbanization of the Pontine Marshes and the desire of increasing agricultural production was already clear to Mussolini and the Fascist Party, since they resolved to officially call the new towns not citt (cities), but centri rurali (rural centers). We might quote here one of the designers of Sabaudia, Luigi Piccinato, who wrote: to speak about the city is nonsense: neither Sabaudia nor Littoria are two cities in common urbanistic terms. The city presupposes something walled, enclosed, something opposed to the country. [...] They are not cities but agricultural centers;
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[...] their goal is not to live benefitting from land reclamation, but on the contrary they were founded to serve land reclamation. [...] It is impossible to speak about the city anymore but we should already see the city-region, the city-province, the city-nation. (Piccinato 1934:11, my translation) Besides them, at a lower grade, thirteen hamlets (borghi) were founded, hovering around the five rural centers: they are smaller entities, providing basic services for peasants and farmers. Each group of farms - comments Piccinato (quoted in Millon 1978:335) - has a borgo as their head, in which there was to be an office of the Agricultural Concern (Azienda agraria) of the Opera Nazionale per i Combattenti, chapel, first aid station, school, post office, and grocery store. The office of the Agricultural Concern was to oversee the direction, administration and assistance of their group of farms. The Azienda agraria was the way in which Fascism established control over the territory (while throughout Italy local election were banned in favor of an appointed mayor - podest from the regime). The smallest unit in this hierarchy was the farm (podere) itself: around 4.000 of them were scattered throughout the Agro Pontino and Agro Romano, with an average of 150/200 belonging to each hamlet and, as Piccinato (ibid.) puts it, [t]o each farm will be given a plot of land varying from fifteen to thirty hectares. The size will be different in accord with the crop to be grown and the economic potential of the colonist. If the plan was sound on paper, its real development was definitively harder. In fact, on the one hand drainage works and construction had to proceed at full speed to keep up with the propaganda machine that Mussolini put up, and on the other, the majority of peasants for the new farm were forced to move from northern Italian regions; since municipalities had all interests in extradite the most unwanted and the less-skilled of their citizens, the new labor force turned out to be very different from the Fascistic ideal of an efficient and robust worker (Mariani 1982:148-161).

Fig. 3: Territorial hierarchy. B = borghi, P = poderi, A = azienda agraria 7

SABAUDIA - THE COMPETITION Let us now examine closer the most renown and appreciated of the five Fascistic new towns, Sabaudia, and analyze at the urban planning and architectural level some of the characteristics of the Italian regime. The announcement of Sabaudias foundation was given by Mussolini at the inaugurations speech of Littoria, on 18th December 32: the town (or as we said before, the rural center) was to be inaugurated on 15th April 34. Even tough time was scarce, the Fascist Party opted for a competition: the brief was published on 21st April 33 and we report it here in full length: The Opera Nazionale per i Combattenti (ONC), with headquarters in Via Ulpiano 11, Rome, proclaims a nationwide competition open to all registered architects and engineers for the design of a development plan for a new communal centre of Sabaudia to be built in the reclaimed Pontine Marshes. Plans of the location for the communal centre and its surrounding area will be provided by the ONC. The designers are given a free hand as long as the development plan responds to the functional needs of a fundamentally agricultural centre and to the requirements of hygiene, the market economy, traffic circulation, land allocation, building layout and of aesthetics - for a municipality of 20,000 people with 5,000 inhabitants in the centre itself. The development plan must provide all the necessary public services for the efficient functioning of the new agricultural centre, and must include all the typical institutions of the Fascist Regime (which must be constructed before other buildings) such as; the town hall with its tower, the Fascist Party headquarters, a workers club, barracks for the Fascist Militia, the Carabinieri (military police), and the Pubblica Sicurezza (police); the headquarters for the Balilla (Fascist youth league); a church with bell-tower and rectory; a nursery; a primary school; a hospital; a maternity and infancy centre; veterans clubs; the local ONC offices; a post office; a sports field; a covered market; a hotel; a cinema; an abattoir; public housing with sixty apartments and thirty shops; and, a cemetery. (Storm Ofteland 2002:50) What was important for the regime was to show its efficiency and speed: the plan was to build first only the representative buildings for the official inauguration, and only then provide housing and essential facilities for the new citizens. One can also note that it was crucial to integrate Fascist organizations and offices in order to make the regimes power and presence visible, and to keep the population under control. On 25th May 33 was submission date, meaning that participants had only less than one month to work on their proposals; out of thirteen submissions (all offices were from central Italy), three were selected for the second round: Angelo Vicario, Oriolo Frezzotti (the planner of Littoria) and the team of urbanists and architects Cancellotti-MontuoriPiccinato-Scalpelli. Even tough the jury (whose president was professor and urbanist Gustavo Giovannoni) selected the latter team as the winner, also the second and third architect were given some building design for Sabaudia: to Vicario the hospital, cemetery and ONC offices; to Frezzotti the schools and sports field. Construction began on 5th August 33 and the town was inaugurated on 15th April 34, only after 253 days, with some 6.000 workers operating day- and night-time to keep up with the Duces promises. That day, apart from Mussolini himself, the Savoia royal family of Italy was present, to whom the very name of Sabaudia was dedicated.

SABAUDIA - THE PROJECT

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19 15 14 7 13 2 12 9 1 6 4 20 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Town hall Church complex Fascist headquarter Cinema Hotel Police station Post office Military station House of Fighters Schools ONC headquarters Hospital Maternity center Restaurant Employee club Abbatoir Cemetery Water reservoir Sports field Covered market Sport club Horse racing Fair ground 10 11 23

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Fig. 4: Plan of Sabaudia. In black the representative buildings, in grey housing.

The site in which Sabaudia was founded was chosen in April 33 by the ONC officer Valentino Orsolini-Cancelli: it is located on a lakeshore (lago di Paola), divided from the Tyrrhenian sea by a strip of sand, close to the Circeo mount, which, together with part of the wood around Sabaudia, was declared a National Park in January 34 due to its naturalistic beauty. The urbanistic layout by Cancellotti-Montuori-Piccinato-Scalpelli is determined by two major axes crossing at ninety degrees, a sort of cardus (Corso Vittorio Emanuele II) and decumanus (Corso Vittorio Emanuele III), the first going in the direction of Rome and the second in the direction of Terracina. At their crossing a series of three different squares defines the center of the town and hosts the main public facilities: around Piazza della Rivoluzione we find an apartment-house, a hotel, the town-hall, the party headquarters,

the theater/cinema and a restaurant. This core was designed according to relatively traditional urban design principles, made up of views, axes and alignments: for instance, the town-hall tower is exactly placed so that it is on the axis of Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and on the axis of the church belfry, while using the Circeo mount as a borrowed landscape. Other public facilities were laid outside of the center, like the sports club on the lake-shore, the hospital close to the maternity center, water reservoir and abattoir at the entrance of the town and sports field close to the fair ground.

Fig. 5: Sketches left to right, top to bottom: town-hall tower with Circeo mount; town-hall tower and church belfry; church complex; view from church to town-hall tower.

While the urban design is rather traditional, the architecture in Sabaudia belongs to the Modernist or Rationalist Movement: resources were limited since the regime was already preparing for an economy of war, so glass, steel and concrete had to be reduced to a minimum. Even though the majority of Sabaudias buildings were built with brick and plastered with stucco of warm tones, ranging from yellow to red, still the most representative buildings were cladded with travertine stone. The designers produced three main typologies for housing: detached-houses, the most expansive and enjoying the best views, six variations of semi-detached houses and six variations of row houses, some of which have shops at ground floor, especially at the corners. Despite variations, row houses show some fixed characteristics (Pasquali 1985:3133): two apartments share always one staircase, floor area ranges between 80 and 90 sq.
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m., all apartments have a loggia or balcony, a double prospect allowing cross-ventilation and the buildings are always 12 m. deep, never longer than 65 m. This typological variety, commerce at ground floor and a prospect on the street confirm the traditional planning layout. The town was thought to have a density of around 70 pph and all buildings except towers are two-floors high, also due to the sandy soil.

POLEMICS AND PROPAGANDA In Sabaudia the heterogenous soul of Fascism shows up with the polemics about the height of the town-hall tower (Mariani 1982:96-101): during construction works in January 34 an officer of the ONC discovers that Sabaudias town-hall tower is supposed to be higher than the one in Littoria, officially the province capital. When Mussolini is informed he decides for the shortening of the tower, but a month later, visiting the construction site together with the architects, and being explained about the precise calculations done by the designers, changes his mind and assures that the project will not be changed. Moreover, in June 34, after polemics inside the Parliament between the two opposed currents of classicists and modernists, originated after the modernist winning projects of Sabaudia and the Station of Florence by Giovanni Michelucci, Mussolini invites to his roman residence in Palazzo Venezia both the designers of the new town and Michelucci, in order to stop polemics, in one of the very few moments in which he had to explicitly choose for a style in architecture and art. This is also typical of dictatorships, when the dictator himself is bound to give his personal opinion and to intervene directly and openly in the decision-making. As we already mentioned, other European countries were looking at Italian Fascism with very much interest: since the welfare state in democratic regimes was facing a crisis, Mussolinis achievements were seen, at least until the invasion of Ethiopia, with more admiration than suspect. On the one hand he was able to gain collaboration with artists and intellectual who promoted Fascistic ideology, and on the other international governments and press were not able to see the real face of Mussolinis totalitarian regime under the propaganda: in the case of Sabaudia, which we might truly consider as a sort of flagship project, this can be seen in the enthusiastic and naive reviews in European architectural magazines (some of them in the bibliography), which based their articles and data on official Fascistic bulletins instead of critical thinking and independent research.

AFTERMATH Sabaudia never reached its goal of a productive rural center, as the battle for grain did not produce the expected outcomes. Especially in the beginning, shops in town faced many difficulties, and, unlike Littoria, industrial production never took place. In 1951 there were in Sabaudia 7.700 inhabitants and only in 2010 they reached 19.300, which was the estimation in the competition brief. In spite of its rural failure, the town is nowadays a rather popular maritime spot for romans and its economy relies on tourism: its beach, where the majority of development took place, is always crowded, its lake is perfect for sport and outdoor activities. A major achievement, in contrast to the general Italian trend in the 1960s and 1970s, is that in Sabaudia no sprawl has happened: this is due to the Circeo National Park, that preserved the original shape and character of the town, together with its naturalistic attractiveness. The popularity of Sabaudia today raises a question to us: how are we supposed to judge
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such a project, originated under a dictatorship? In which terms and with which tools do we value it? How are ideology and buildings linked? I will argue that in the Italian context, Fascism, because of its heterogeneity and lack of unique ideology in art and architecture, was not able to produce its own space, the Fascist space, speaking in Lefebvrian terms. It borrowed partly from tradition and history, partly from avant-garde movements like Futurism and Rationalism. This is why Italians are now completely at ease with architecture in the period of Fascism: it was built during the dictatorship but it is impossible to define it as Fascist. Mussolini wanted to change Italy deep into his soul: I will only tell you that, in ten years, Italy, our Italy will be unrecognizable to herself and to foreigners, because we will radically transform her in her appearance, but most of all in her soul. (Mussolini 1927, my translation) Never could have he imagined that Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the most influential leftist intellectuals in Italy in the second half of the XX Centry, could express in this way his admiration for Sabaudia: How we intellectuals have laughed [...] of Sabaudia. Yet [...] theres nothing unreal or ridiculous about its architecture. [...] Its imperial character has become metaphysical, reminding of De Chiricos paintings, and realistic, because one feels this city was built to be lived in, there are [...] human beings [...]. Suddenly it seems enchanting to us. Sabaudia was built by Fascism, but there is nothing fascistic about it, beyond its [...] appearance. So I think: the fascist regime was nothing more than a group of criminals in power, [...] unable [...] even to scratch the surface of Italian reality. [...] Sabaudia, though created according to the regime [...], doesnt find its roots in it [...]. Its the reality of the provincial, rustic, pre-industrial Italy which gave birth to Sabaudia, not Fascism. (Pasolini e... la forma della citt, 1974, my translation)

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bIblIOGRAPHY AND lIST OF IllUSTRATIONS

BOOkS

Carli, Carlo Fabrizio (ed.) (1980) Architettura e fascismo, Roma: G. Volpe Ciucci, Giorgio (1989) Gli architetti e il fascismo: architettura e citta, 1922-1944, Torino: G. Einaudi Cresti, Carlo (1986) Architettura e fascismo, Firenze: Vallecchi Howard, E. (1946) Garden Cities of To-Morrow [originally published in 1902], London: Faber and Faber Lefebvre Henri (1991) The Production of Space, 1st ed., New York et al.: John Wiley & Sons Mariani, Riccardo (1982) Fascismo e Citt nuove, Milano: Feltrinelli Mattioli, Aram, and Gerald Steinacher (2009) Fr den Faschismus bauen. Architektur und Stdtebau im Italien Mussolinis, Zrich: Orell Fssli Verlag Miliutin, Nikolai (1974, originally published in 1930) Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities, Cambridge: MIT Press Mussolini, Benito (1927 May 26) Discorso dellAscensione, Libreria del Littorio: Roma Pagano, Giuseppe and de Seta, Giuseppe (ed.) (1976) Architettura e citt durante il Fascismo, Bari: Laterza Pasquali, Giuseppe (1985) Sabaudia, 1933-1934, Milano: Electa Stave Tvinnereim, Helga (2007) Agro Pontino: Urbanism and Regional Development in Lazio Under Benito Mussolini, Oslo: Solum Forlag Wright, Frank Lloyd (1932) The Disappearing City, 1st ed, New York: William Farquhar Payson

ARTICLES & THESES

Cancellotti, Montuori, Piccinato, Scalpelli (1935) La citt di Sabaudia, Casabella, 8 (95)

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Caprotti, Federico (2007) Destructive Creation: Fascist Urban Planning, Architecture and New Towns, Journal of Historical Geography, 33 (3), 651-679, available: eprints.ucl. ac.uk/13654/1/13654.pdf [accessed 7 Mar. 2011] Construction moderne (1936) Sabaudia: architects, G. Cancellotti, E. Montuori, L. Piccinato et A. Scalpelli, 51, 428-436 Dougill, Wesley (1936) Two New Towns in Italy. Littoria and Sabaudia in Town Planning Review, 17 (1), 43-50 Millon, Henri A. (1978) Some New Towns in Italy in the 1930s in: Millon, H A. & Nochlin, L. (eds.) Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, Boston: The MIT Press Mussolini, Benito (1927) Discorso dellAscensione, Atti Parlamentari, Sessione 19241928, XXVII Legislatura, Vol. VIII - Biblioteca della Camera dei Deputati, available: http:// cronologia.leonardo.it/storia/a1927v.htm [accessed 7 Mar. 2011] Mussolini, Benito (1928) Cifre e deduzioni: sfollare le citt, Il Popolo dItalia, 22 Nov. Piccinato, Luigi (1934) Il significato urbanistico di Sabaudia, in Urbanistica, 3 (1) Rimbach, karl Ernst (1936) Die vier neuen Stdte Italiens : Aprilia, Littoria, Pontinia, Sabaudia in Deutsche Bauzeitung, 70, 476-480 Storm Ofteland, Hanne (2002) Sabaudia 1934, materializing the fascist, corporate town, [online] unpublished thesis (Cand. Philol.), University of Oslo Institute for Art History, available: www.handtomouth.net/HSO/SabaudiaVolume1.pdf [accessed 7 Mar. 2011] Vago, Pierre (1934) Sabaudia: Cancelloti, Montuori, Piccinato et Scalpelli, architectes in Architecture daujourdhui, 7, 17-30 Wirth, Louis (1938) Urbanism as a way of life in American Journal of Sociology, 44 (1), 1-24

VIDEOS Pasolini e... la forma della citt (1974) Rai, 7 Feb., available: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=e6ki-p1eW2o [accessed 7 Mar. 2011]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS p. 1: Inauguration of Sabaudia. 15 Apr. 1934 (Storm Ofteland 2007: plate 16) p. 6: Le paludi pontine (Mariani 1982: 33) p. 7: Hierarchical structure of the area. Model (Storm Ofteland 2007: plate 5) p. 9: Regulation plan (Storm Ofteland 2007: plate 14) p. 10: La torre del comune con in fondo il monte Circeo. Il viale verso la Casa del Fascio e il Palazzo del comune. La piazza della chiesa con il battistero. Il Comune e la Casa del Fascio (Pasquali 1985: 40)
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