The unfinished. Architects, engineers and the shaping of public space from fascist to republican Rome

In September 1951, the newspaper La Stampa published an article entitled ‘Modern Ruins’. In this piece, Mario Praz led readers on an imaginary tour of Rome, reflecting on several urban planning projects from the Ventennio. In these spaces, Praz observed a persistent ‘fabrication of the past’, the production of styles endowed with ‘a strong evocative power’. Despite its proximity, the Fascist legacy appeared as a set of distant ‘fictitious ruins’. Perhaps, he concluded, ‘tomorrow the construction will be completed . . . but in the meantime I seem to feel the bite of the past more closely here than among the ruins of the Via Sacra’. During the 1950s, intellectuals advocated for a break with the past not only in sociopolitical but also in architectural and urban planning discourse. However, Rome still faced a difficult issue: the unfinished buildings and urban spaces left by the Fascist regime. Drawing on Praz’s reflections, this paper examines the perceived caesura between Fascist and Republican Rome, the marginal role of iconoclasm, the choice of preservation, and the persistence of architects and engineers who survived the collapse of the regime.