Ben Building: Mussolini, Monuments and Modernism

God, Allah, Yahweh.

These nightmarish psychopaths obtain immortality without having lived.

No matter what you call them,

they're wrathful, slow to bless and swift to chide.

They're mass murderers, psychotic bullies.

They exercise the right of life and death. They destroy on a whim.

And they provide a wretched example to living gods -

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, Mussolini,

such truly grotesque pieces of work,

but it's a matter of some wonder that millions were persuaded

not just to believe in them, but to worship them.

But they did.

And off they went to meet their all-too-obedient death.

There is apparently nobility in pillage and genocide.

There is apparently glory to be had in being turned to vapour,

in dying in mud.

There is glory in gangrene, in quadriplegia, in being gassed.

Hundreds of thousands of men died in the Alps around Redipuglia

in the latter half of the First World War.

Italy's battles on its north-eastern front achieved nothing

save that the ethnic bodge

called the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed,

so rendering Europe fertile for the growth of yet another bout

of tribalism, factionalism, sectarianism, nationalism

and the new cult of Fascism.

The vast sacrarium at Redipuglia is not a memorial to actual men,

to flesh and blood, somebody's lover, somebody's son.

It's an opportunistic celebration of mass sacrifice

and exhortations to further sacrifice.

It is grossly exploitative

because the men who were reduced to bonemeal and body parts

in the mountains were not Fascist.

They had never heard of Fascism.

It tells the lie that Fascists - ex post facto Fascists -

will be united in death as they are in life.

The word "fasces" signifies a bundle of branches tied together tightly.

It is strong in a way that loosely tied branches,

let alone single branches, cannot be.

The individual, then, is subservient to the whole.

Might is achieved by numbers.

No doubt some of the men who lie here might have become Fascists

had they lived.

Bu they might equally, having experienced hell on earth,

have dismissed Benito Mussolini's marshal ranting as that of a man

who had been invalided out of the Army after less than 18 months.

Nonetheless, their trashed corpses were posthumously recruited

to the Fascist cause.

The word "presente" means just that - present.

But it also means that the glorious dead are always with us,

always present.

The glorious dead fulfilling their duty to their country.

The glorious dead then are the living dead.

Presente was an omnipresent word in Fascist Italy.

The designers, the artifices, the architect Giovanni Greppi

and the sculptor Giannino Castiglioni

are virtuosi of visual illusions.

They imply a two-dimensional device in three dimensions,

thus the step, the stairs, the treads, the rises,

the terraces, get marginally narrower as they ascend.

Consequently the vanishing point appears further away than it would

if the steps were of the same width,

and the Calvary is out of scale.

Diminutive in order to make it, too,

appear more distant than it actually is.

The place is an exercise in disorientation.

What plane are we on?

Vertical and horizontal become indistinguishable.

Are we still on Earth?

Life and afterlife allied.

100 or so kilometres away from Redipuglia

stands another massive sacrarium.

Monte Grappa is a work of a few years earlier by the same designers,

Greppi and Castiglioni.

The contrast between the two could hardly be more marked.

Monte Grappa is equally magnificent in another register.

It is indebted to several disparate eras.

It blends its thefts with sombre brillo.

The very core of this structure is founded in anachronism.

The repetitive niches are blind Diocletian windows.

Atypically for a Roman emperor,

Diocletian was lucky enough to die in his bed.

Of the 20th-century's European tyrants,

only Francisco Franco emulated him.

Its concentric form is daylight robbery from a variety

of historical and prehistorical eras.

It is unambiguously architectural,

and it alludes to forms of inhumation that belong to

a variety of epoques, places, religions and cultures.

Both Redipuglia and Monte Grappa

are exhortations to patriotic death.

They sussurate the desirability of death,

which they tell you last forever...

..which is more than can be said for life.

Death is sustainable.

Despite their being by the same pair of artists,

these two remarkable structures are remarkably disparate.

On the one clenched hand,

Redipuglia, optimistically prospective,

hymning the refulgent Modernist future to come.

On the other gloved hand, Monte Grappa,

boastfully retrospective,

summoning some indefinable yet glorious past.

They are, then, exemplars of the two contrary mainstreams

of architecture and design that flowered in Italy under Fascism.

They did not displace or succeed each other,

they coexisted uncomfortably in a state of mutual mistrust.

But they were indubitably both built in Italy

in the Fascist era in the Fascist cause.

-Vincere!

-CHEERING

What is Fascism?

The response that it's a pathology of the extreme right

is idle, thoughtless.

Equally, the response that it's a cancer of the extreme left

is idle, thoughtless.

HE NEIGHS

If the extreme right is a racehorse,

and the extreme left is a carthorse,

what sort of horse is Fascism?

It's the sort of horse called a combine harvester.

Which is, of course, not a horse.

It's not even an animal.

It is a category error to invoke

right and left in an explanation of this phenomenon.

Fascism exists in a world parallel to that of democracy.

It does not belong to the same moral system,

the same thought system.

It does not exist without a hold on power.

It does not function as a form of legitimate opposition.

It is not part of a mocking, childish adversarial system.

It is not tolerant of dissent. It is not considerate.

It does not spare the rod, the noose, the axe, the firing squad.

It does not balk at genocide.

Not, not, not.

Its attributes are all too obviously not positive.

But then the same could be said of other forms of tyranny.

Absolute monarchy, theocratic dictatorship,

the police state, the communist imperium -

much older forms which have been around for millennia,

for much longer than democracy, which as the 20th century

emphatically showed us, is easily dismantled.

Sure, democracy may be elective dictatorship,

but it is at least elective.

We take it for granted at our peril,

given that all politicians yearn to be dictators.

Is Vlaams Belang fascist?

Is the BNP fascist?

Is Le Front National fascist?

Is La Lega Nord fascist?

The zealots of anti-fascism would have no hesitation

in describing these paltry parties as fascist.

But anti-fascism mirrors fascism,

equally intolerant,

equally minoritarian, equally impotent, equally anti-Semitic.

This is what they do to protect the Nazis. Shame on you, BBC!

Shame on you!

Fascism is broadly a label to be attached to whatever

anti-Fascism disproves of.

-Fascist...

-Fascist...

-Fascist...

-Fascist scum.

-Fascist...

-Crypto fascist...

-The fascist Daily Mail.

-Racist, fascist.

Fascist, racist.

-Fascistic.

-Fascists.

-Fascists.

What's so wrong with being a fascist?

Fascism ought to alarm us,

but the word's appropriation by the mob devalues it.

Atrocity is diluted, normalised.

Further, fascists, both noun and adjective,

have been shorn of meaning by their ubiquity.

Body fascist, kitchen fascist,

green fascist, mamil fascist... BELL RINGS

..fascist referee... All referees, it goes without saying, are fascist. WHISTLE BLOWS

Fascist jobsworth, fascist troll,

fascist MFH... HORN BLARES

..fascist banker, fascist pig.

PIG OINKS

And, of course, Fascist dictator.

An occupation fraught with risks,

not least from other Fascist dictators.

Live dangerously.

Engelbert Dollfuss, 39, shot,

Vienna, 25th July 1934.

Corneliu Codreanu, 39, garrotted,

Tancabesti, 29th November 1938.

Vidkun Quisling, 58, shot,

Oslo, 24th October 1945.

Jozef Tiso, 59, hanged,

Bratislava, 18th April 1947.

Adolf Hitler, 56, suicide,

Berlin, 30th April 1945.

Ferenc Szalasi, 49, hanged,

Budapest, 12th March 1946.

Ante Pavelic, 60, shot,

Madrid, 28th December 1959.

Benito Mussolini, 62, shot,

Giulino di Mezzegra, 28th April 1945.

Il Duce.

The organ grinder himself, the combine harvester's mouth -

the very embodiment of Fascism, the founder.

The man who, for those of you with archaic spelling,

put the "schism" into Fascism, who, all-knowing claimed to understand

the nuances of Fascism's vibrant diversity.

Was there any bond, save that of expediency,

between Italian Fascism and German National Socialism?

German National Socialism may not even have been Fascist at all.

Mussolini was initially contemptuous of its mythologies,

its homoeopathic pest control, its obsessive racism,

its blinding greenness, its folkish preoccupations,

its Aryan Atlantis, its clairvoyant pseudoscientists.

And yet, when after his arrest in 1943 the Nazi high command

was trying to find where he was imprisoned

so that he might be rescued,

it turned to a group of clairvoyant pseudoscientists.

Among them, Wilhelm Gutberlet.

Astonishingly, Gutberlet read in the entrails that Il Duce was being held

on the island of Ponza, which was indeed where

he had been held till just a few days previously.

When we look back to the enormities they occasioned, do the labels

that we attach to these immane regimes really matter?

Yes, they do,

for taxonomy is founded in detail,

and the devil is in the detail -

all too literally.

Il Duce is surely the one man who can tell us

what Fascism really signifies,

and what distinguishes it from national socialism,

the Arrow Cross, the Cross of Fire, the Blackshirts, the Iron Guard.

But it's too late, too late. 70 years too late to ask him.

GUNFIRE

It might all have turned out so differently for the lovers Benito

and Clara had they made it from Lake Garda to Spain,

which was the destination they had set their heart on.

They'd have whiled away their dotage in some grace and favour home

grudgingly granted them by Francisco Franco,

a sometime chum of sorts - a fair-weather ally, if truth be told.

Benito would have fulminated at the ingratitude of the Italian people,

concocted plots, dreamt of a comeback.

Escape to Spain was their last hope.

But they didn't even get as far as Switzerland.

They ended up near Lake Como in a farmyard that became an abattoir.

GUNSHOTS

PIG SQUEALS

So maybe some other time, Benito, old son.

Witnesses remarked on the petrol in puddles,

nacreous puddles, petrol that was spent,

like the lives of the beings suspended above the puddles.

Throughout the Spanish Civil War,

Franco's ultimately victorious nationalists

relied on the Nazi Condor Legion, non-Nazi airpower,

most notoriously at Guernica.

The dependence on Italian aid was even greater.

Air power again, light arms and heavy artillery,

ships, submarines and troops - armies of them.

Mussolini dispatched 70,000 men to Spain -

10,000 of them died there.

El Caudillo did not repay his debt to the axis.

There was to be no "do ut des".

His was the longest reign of all the West's 20th century tyrants.

He kept his country out of the war on "the Continent",

as Spain calls Europe beyond the Pyrenees.

He had the guile to dupe both Mussolini and Hitler.

He made entry to the war conditional upon demands

which he knew they could not meet.

He made promises which he had no intention of keeping.

That is how you stay in power for almost 40 years.

The lad was a great role model for young aspirant tyrants.

Franco was that rare creature -

a Fascist dictator who did not want to go to war.

For Mussolini, such a position was unthinkable, inconceivable,

maybe even incomprehensible.

Empathy was not one of his characteristics.

Mussolinian Fascism was a precursor of Islamofascism.

Italy went to war in the name of a dictator who believed himself

to be a God, but wasn't...

..whilst Islamofascism goes to war in the name of God who

cannot believe in himself because he is fictional.

There is, in neither instance, gain -

they share a taste for gratuitous statused violence as a norm.

National honour, national expansion.

Outbreaks of peace were, according to Mussolini,

mere undesirable anomalies that occur between wars -

lacunae of wasted time to be filled belligerently by wars.

War should be perpetual, war should be never-ending.

No justification is needed. War requires no cause.

If a cause can be found to attach to it, well, so much the better.

At various times,

he considered attacking newly Nazi Germany in order to protect

Dollfuss' regime in Austria and to demonstrate Italy's superiority.

France was a possible target,

because it would not cede Corsica and Nice to him.

And an attack would demonstrate Italy's superiority.

War with Britain was briefly considered because it opposed

his colonial ambitions and his desire to rule the Mediterranean -

"our sea".

And because an attack on Britain

would demonstrate Italy's superiority.

# Run, rabbit, run, rabbit

# Run, run, run... #

This was a demagogue who could pick a fight with his own shadow.

He fulfilled those colonial ambitions

in Libya, Greece and Ethiopia,

but at a huge economic and strategic cost.

He prosecuted war, it might be said he frivolously prosecuted war,

in order to show off that capacity - the ability to prosecute war.

For Mussolini, war was nothing more or less than

the expression of ostentatious bellicosity

and martial can-do - it was an end in itself.

That was the nearest thing he had to an ideology.

In Mussolini's worldview, power and stability

could be maintained only by brute force.

This coarse, dog-eat-dog perception was founded early on

in the playground, where from the age of six years old -

six! - he routinely attacked his fellow pupils, stabbing them

with compasses and dividers, stealing from them

and threatening them should they grass him up.

-NEWSREEL:

-Fascism has been Mussolini's dream for seven years.

Now the march on Rome.

His movement numbers a million members,

including uniformed Blackshirts and Mussolini successfully forces

his leadership on the Italian King and people.

He boasted of having seized power by force at the end

of the much-vaunted march on Rome in 1922.

In fact, power was yielded to him without a struggle

and he had joined the march only intermittently for what were

not yet called photo opportunities -

exercises in self aggrandisement and myth-making.

How is a man to become a God

if he does not proclaim himself to be a God?

Other required qualities - an utter absence of irony is of course

essential to the apprentice God.

So too is the conviction, held without any corroboration

save that of crawling yes-men, that one is always right.

Polyglot vanity is also obligatory.

Overconfident visibility to speak French and German -

Mussolini refused to have interpreters in attendance

at his meetings with Hitler, Laval, Goring and so on.

Consequently, he failed to understand much of the small print.

Then there is the laughably pompous practice of referring to

oneself in the third person.

That anyway is what Jonathan Mears has concluded.

Above all, the tyro God must cultivate the willingness to treat

humans, who are of course non-Gods, with contempt...

..as assets, disposable as disposable tissues,

to be used as cannon fodder and guinea pigs, to sate vanity,

as expendable entities of negative value, who deserve only extinction.

Or treat them as reproductive machines.

It was Il Duce's conviction that a high birth rate was an essential

condition of a vigorous, healthy, morally sound society.

Accordingly, women were exhorted to bear as many as 20 children.

The fastest breeders, biped broodmares,

were rewarded with cash prizes.

Most of all, a high birth rate provides minds to be indoctrinated.

The child has no choice, it can be brainwashed.

The child can look forward to the prospect of dying for Fascist Italy,

a destiny exclusive to children made in Fascist Italy.

Inanimate objects might be made in Fascist Italy,

but they can't be brainwashed.

Unless we're fool enough to believe in amulets, charms,

religious relics, Veronica's handkerchief and so on,

inanimate objects do not contain the spirit of the doctrines or

gods or saints they are associated with.

There is no such thing as spirit, save in the mind of the deluded.

And the attribution to inanimate objects

of humours or moral qualities is half-witted,

yet it is apparently an irresistible human urge.

It's an urge I don't share,

but that's no doubt due to my finely-honed insensitivity.

If all the pieces of wood from the cross on which the probably

fictional character called Jesus is said to have died

were collected together,

they would form a structure higher than any in the world today.

Made in Fascist Italy.

Epochal considerations apart, what does that mean?

What are the implications of the label?

Many sorts of intimate objects were manufactured

during the Fascist era -

frying pans, chairs, coffee kit,

inventive fishing equipment and white telephones.

Such potent symbols of modernity and the fast life, that they

gave their name to frothy comedies of mores.

Dishes such as sartu and sformato and frico

were made in Fascist Italy.

Can rice be Fascist?

Can bechamel?

Mussolini himself gives us little indication that these dishes

did not form part of his diet. He had worrying tastes.

This was a man who necked up to four litres of milk per day.

Was there ever a greater sign of anti-gastronomic depravity?

We surely all know that milk is poison

unless it's turned into cheese.

Fiats were manufactured throughout the Fascist era,

so were Olivettis.

Can a car represent Fascism?

Can a car BE Fascist?

Fiats were manufactured according to processes devised

in the United States by Henry Ford,

an anti-Semite and the author of The International Jew.

It's worth noting that Mussolini's Fascism was not anti-Semitic

until he came under the influence of Hitler in the late 1930s.

It was a form of hatred that had, astonishingly, evaded him.

Here are two cars from the beginning of that decade.

It's obvious which the Fascist car is.

Can a typewriter be Fascist?

Can it be - and this is different - emblematic of Fascism?

A typewriter can of course produce letters which add up to the words

that form the slogans which were Fascist diktats.

RADIO CHANNELS CHANGE

'With usura hath no man a house of good stone

'each block cut smooth and well fitting

'that design might cover their face.

'With usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall...'

A radio can receive a station broadcasting

Ezra Pound's rants against the Gombeen men of the usurocracy -

but does that make it a Fascist radio?

Or simply a boringly tuned one?

Is it just that these disparate objects were manufactured

during Mussolini's dictatorship and are associable with Fascism

simply by calendrical chance?

I'm asking the question - I don't know the answer.

The two predominant schools or idioms of architecture

that infected Italy during Mussolini's long tenure,

exemplified by Redipuglia and Montegrappa,

the cautiously futuristic and the revivalist,

might both claim to be truly Fascist.

But that is a handle that can be unthinkingly attached to any object.

Buildings occupy a singular niche in this conundrum of ascription,

classification and significance.

Unlike cars, typewriters, cups and so on,

they are potentially multipurpose.

They're capable of possessing a flexibility which their

architect can hardly have foreseen.

They can be made to serve an endeavour unknown

when they were constructed.

A building can have serial lives, so to speak.

A fire station can be converted into yet another exciting boutique hotel.

A hospital can be made over into apartments,

luxury apartments, of course.

A site of ritual can be deconsecrated

as a site of recreation.

When the Reconquista brought civilisation back to Spain,

the Cordoba mosque became a cathedral.

The original purpose is obliterated.

In time, it'll be forgotten.

In time, the buildings made in Fascist Italy will be

purged of their Fascist links.

The awkward truth, habitually ignored or denied by those

who associate progressive architecture with democratic

governance, is that much that was built in totalitarian Italy

between 1922 and 1943 was at the very forefront of modernism.

Modernism is more closely linked with totalitarianism

than it is with democracy.

Modernism in Italy was "Fascist", in quotes.

Modernism in France was "republican", in quotes.

Move a building across the border from Menton to Ventimiglia

and it ceases to be a republican building

and becomes a Fascist building...

obviously(!)

There was little in Italy that could not have been found in France,

or in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Holland, or in Russia,

during the constructivist period which ended in 1932.

Mussolini enthusiastically censored film-makers, writers,

academics, journalists.

The only journalists he approved of were in what might be called

the Alastair Campbell tradition of toadying and bullying

and spouting propaganda.

However, unlike Stalin and Hitler, he did not, up to the late '30s,

exercise aesthetic control over building.

To adapt a Marxist term, there was no attempted architectural hegemony,

until he cravenly bowed to pressure from Hitler,

who declared that the Roman state had been resurrected.

Architecturally, there was little accord between Italian Fascism

and German national socialism.

Nor, for that matter, between those two and Soviet communism.

The position held by, among others,

the exiled Italian writer Bruno Rizzi, that whatever ideologies

they claimed to profess, they were near identical in their bureaucratic

collectivism, is given the lie by their very different buildings -

the buildings are the regime.

Till that late Hitlerian intervention,

Mussolini had been indifferent to architectural style.

Maybe he considered it too trivial a matter to concern himself with.

It's more probable that he was crippled by procrastination.

He could discern virtues in both modernism and revivalism.

What is indisputable is

that throughout his first decade in power,

he neglected to exploit architecture's potential

to affect his subjects,

through expressive gestures, through particular forms.

He failed to harness its capacity to suppress and control them,

to exhilarate them, to bend them to his will.

Mussolini's architectural priorities had been different.

It was to direct what types of building were made,

irrespective of style.

Prospective types, to signal a novel society without precedent,

that would create the future - forge the future, in tyrant-speak.

Retrospective types, for a traditional society with roots

that stretch deep down into Italian soil.

A dictator can have his cake and eat it.

Let's build. Let's build lots.

Volume, quantity, bulk.

Let's build - think of the jobs created.

Think of the infrastructure that you can eat your lunch off.

Think of the impression on foreign visitors.

Wow.

Think of the showcase of indigenous talent.

Think of the boost to the collective amour propre,

think most of all of the relieving massage

that heightens the leader's self-esteem.

No, no, not him!

Think New Labour.

Think of the great harbinger of peace, our former Duce Tonio Blair.

And the blistering intensity of the reflected glory which has

turned him orange.

So long as it was productive, Mussolini was happy to preside over

an architectural and constructional establishment

that was stylistically riven.

He no more knew what the architecture of Fascism should be

than he knew what Fascism was.

Every time he was asked to define it, he gave a different reply.

His inconsistency was a pathology. Or maybe it was a strategy.

Fascism is a super relativist movement.

In the years immediately before the First World War,

when the poisonous stew of nationalist exclusivity

and authoritarian dogmas, which would eventually fuse as Fascism,

were becoming current among the revolutionary unwashed,

Italy's high bourgeoisie,

the unwashed's avowed enemy and prime target,

was indulging its taste for flashy opulence by commissioning villas

in a variant of the idiom known as Stile Liberty.

Wealthy northern Italians embraced the fashion that had captured

the rest of Europe,

and they had as their designer of choice the marvellous artificer

Gino Coppede - Florentine by birth, Genoese by adoption,

riotously eclectic by temperament and, for once it can be safely said,

quite unlike any other architect of his or any other time.

He was the undisputed master of "more is more".

# Ma quella faccia un po' cosi quell'espressione un po' cosi

# Che abbiamo noi prima di andare a Genova

# E ogni volta ci chediamo si quel posto dove andiamo

# Non c'inghiotte e non torniamo piu. #

Genoa was at that point the most thriving of Italian cities.

It was here and along the Ligurian littoral that he made his name

with an astounding series of picturesque villas,

whose appropriateness to their surrounds is total.

# Genova per noi

# Che stiamo in fondo alla campagna... #

Genoa is an exceptionally hilly city,

of buildings recklessly piled on top of each other.

The Castello Mackenzie, the first of several such buildings

that Coppede was to design in the city,

exploits the precipitous topography.

The immensely tall perforated tower looks frighteningly precarious.

It may teeter and fall.

It pretends to include fragments of other buildings.

It gives the impression of having been built in different stages,

in different eras, in different styles.

Like all great artists, Coppede stole and transformed,

and he seldom bothered to cover his tracks.

He looted the past with rampant abandon.

He certainly drew on the northern Italian fortified tradition.

The Palazzo Vecchio in Florence is just one starting point.

He uses it like an armature on which to hang further thefts,

from such wildly disparate sources as Byzantium, Liberty, sure enough,

Venetian Gothic, fairgrounds,

Mughal and Moorish buildings that had never existed,

an invented Orient, a skewed Renaissance.

This is architecture as entertainment - art without angst.

With happiness and geniality. Such a thing does exist.

It must be a matter of wonder to those not familiar with

the caprices of architectural history that this great

and singular artist is not widely celebrated.

But then architectural history

is no different from any other history.

It is written by the victors,

and the eventual victors in the 20th century were the modernists.

The history they wrote was retrospective propaganda.

MUSIC: Geno by Dexys Midnight Runners

You never know when it'll happen, and it happens rarely,

once or twice in a lifetime.

A coup de foudre - love at first sight.

Fright at first sight, too.

I was in a street market in Genoa in 1982.

Every store was blasting out that summer's hit, Geno by Dexys,

their tribute to Signor Coppede.

# That man took the stage, his towel was swinging high... #

My eye was drawn to some plates, cheap, plastic.

Representations of animals. So far, so banal.

But with in-built crackalure - they had been aged.

The corniness was epic and hilarious.

I brought half a dozen,

then turned round to a sight that first astonished me,

then sent some freezing pulse to the base of my spine.

The building I was facing was fantastical. A hothouse.

Victor Hugo wrote of the Renaissance's magnificent decadence.

This went further.

It was as voluptuous as a flesh-eating orchid,

and frightening, sinister.

Classical symmetry, high relief rustication,

stones seething like a Gorgon's hair,

facades entrusted with distended motifs, with frozen menageries

of malevolent animals which belong to no known bestiary.

There is corruption in the air.

The aggression of these buildings is quite at odds with the picturesque

felicities of the Castello and its offspring,

save that, as ever, more is more.

In his last work, unfinished at the time of his death

five years after Mussolini came to power,

Coppede combined these two, apparently irreconcilable, styles.

They don't fuse, they collide.

The Quartiere Coppede, as it came to be known,

is the wholly astonishing aftermath

of an apparently beneficent accident.

What on earth is that?

How in heaven's name did that get up there?

What's that doing? What's it for?

Why? And so on.

This near-psychotropic confection to the north of central Rome

was his only work in a city which was rapidly expanding.

The country was being rebalanced, demographically, topographically.

Mussolini, the master builder,

was creating not merely a national capital, but an imperial one.

His megalomania was limitless but then, well, that's pleonastic -

megalomania always is limitless.

The city was no longer a backwater of clerical superstition.

It was no longer a museum of itself.

It was thriving, it was an economic magnet.

It was an opportunity opportunity, it was dynamically dynamic.

That, anyway, was Mussolini's take on it.

And he had the power to make that delusion a reality,

through building.

Come on, let's send out for some infrastructure!

That's what autocrats do.

So for that matter do the presidents, chancellors

and prime ministers of elective dictatorships.

How they'd love to be real dictators.

Look busy!

Coppede is as close as you can get to inimitable,

but that never deterred anyone.

Garbatella was the development

about five kilometres south of the Quartiere Coppede.

It was described as a garden city,

but then there were few urbanistic projects

of the 20th century which weren't so described.

Garbatella's architects did not attempt to match Coppede,

but they took their cue from him, they doffed their caps,

and the area owes everything to him,

or it owes nothing,

for it's watered wine - dilute, pared down.

Though it was mostly associated with subsidised social housing projects,

the frugality of ornament was not economically determined.

It was the stylistic choice of architects trying to create

a form of 20th century architecture which dissociated itself

from both 19th-century revivalism

and rectilinear modernism's radical abstraction.

Unified Italy had only a short past.

This was an attempt to define a national architecture,

a romantic peasant-unifying glue.

It had much in common with what was going on in Scotland

and northern Germany, Finland, Belgium, Holland -

countries where an effort was made to challenge

the blancoed uniformity of the international style,

whose proponents thought of it as the one true way.

A moral necessity, which of course is how it has been represented.

The Whig interpretation of architectural history.

The silly architectural historian Siegfried Giedion,

said of the 1920s, "One had to start from scratch."

Had to? Really?

The architect of this building, Paolo Mezzanotte,

evidently thought otherwise.

Mussolini talked of a second Renaissance.

He talked of a new Augustan age.

Paolo Mezzanotte's Milan stock exchange

is as bloated a lump of baroque as San Giovanni in Laterano,

a Roman basilica which was probably its inspiration.

The Paris exhibition of modern, decorative and industrial art

in 1925 gives us the term Art Deco -

a sort of mass-market modernism.

The architect of the Italian pavilion was chosen after

the usual petulant squabbling and tribal spats.

The commission was won by Armando Brasini,

who had form as a pathological fulminator

against all strains of modernism.

He was among the most striking of all baroque,

rather than barochetto architects.

His evocation of Imperial Rome was not a copy of a particular building,

but something which might have come from the imagination

of an imagined designer of the baroque, evoking Imperial Rome.

The more he built, the more ambitious Brasini became.

Mussolini was no fan of the baroque.

He believed that it belonged to the atomised

and decadent Italy of pre-unification -

the Italy of the two Sicilies, the kingdom of Sardinia,

the Papal States, etc.

He was tolerant of it as he was of any form of architecture -

the tyrant who neglected to tyrannise.

And style notwithstanding, he must have perceived in Brasini

an artist whose megalomania matched his own.

This mind-boggling group of buildings was initially intended

as an orphanage for small girls -

a use which Robert Venturi, with admirable understatement,

described as "questionable". Today it houses various schools.

The place's startling grandeur remains undiminished,

even though its numerous spires were reckoned unsafe

and taken down in the early 1970s.

Its being slightly ruinous increases its appeal,

at least it does to my eye.

It takes quite a feat of temporal concentration to accept

that those spires were only 30 years old

and that the building wasn't finished till 1943,

the year of Mussolini's downfall. Not quite credible.

The sheer size is difficult to take in.

And combined with the labyrinthine plan, all 45 degree angles

and repetitive diagonals, it's all but incomprehensible, illegible.

Even though it's symmetrical, its unpredictability is total.

It might have been improvised.

You are setting out to change the course of human existence,

to remake man as a fearless, obedient,

rock-hard knot of musculature, so rock-hard

he can shatter rock-hard rocks with a flick of a rock-hard pectoral.

You are creating a society unlike any society that has ever been.

You have within your steel heart the satanic absence of mercy

that is the sine qua non of an omnipotent, omniscient leader.

You will dispense with everything that stands in your way.

You're ruthless.

You gaze purposefully into a future that you alone can see.

It is your lathe, your chisel, that will shape the nation

then shape the world.

But what of the shavings, the sawdust, the shards?

Ooh! You have such a lovely uniform!

From the Scala wardrobe, is it? So dinky! So Offenbach!

So modern, so dernier cri. Ooh, those tassels!

JONATHAN SPEAKS ITALIAN:

Why, then, do you and your fellow dictators cling in varying degrees

to myths and emblems of the past,

when tearing up the past is a very condition of founding the future?

This is an instance of pragmatism suppressing ideology.

All this spirituality - whatever spirituality is -

all this revitalisation and renewal,

seem to demand some sort of grounding in the archaic.

A violent break with the past

is liable to shock your slower subjects,

so you have to take them with you, franchise or no franchise.

Easy does it.

Technological means are neutral, inanimate.

They do not determine the uses they are put to - man does.

Even artificial intelligences have to be prepped by man.

And artificial intelligences are not necessarily high IQ.

They can't answer back when commanded to perform morally dubious

or even unquestionably wicked tasks.

These abuses are secret, hidden.

The perpetrator does not advertise his enormities.

The populace is kept in the dark.

The mendacious banality of propaganda sees to that.

Ernst Schertel, the author of a study of flagellation -

a mere 12 volumes -

an occultist and an early enthusiast for Hitler wrote,

"He who does not carry demonic seeds within him

"will never give birth to a new world."

Again, the much-needed demonic seeds are secret, hidden.

It is the overt, supposedly progressive, perhaps genuinely

progressive results of technology, which are made ostentatiously public

and which the public is invited to believe it has a share in -

the circuses, the airfields,

the gravity-defying feats of infrastructure.

the kilometre upon kilometre of autostrada,

in a nation in which only 2%

of the population owned a car in the mid-'30s.

They're not secret, not hidden,

but broadcast as evidence of the remade world's emergence.

They are new.

Mussolini's Italy occasioned consumer Fascism.

It was the most technophiliac of the major dictatorships.

It was the most materially advanced,

the most artistically sophisticated, because the least proscribed

and the least preoccupied with religious matters.

On the one hand, Mussolini talked endless waffle

about spiritual renewal,

on the other, he called priests "black germs".

He knew very well that the presence of the greedy Vatican had

long promoted a healthy anticlericism in a large section

of the sceptical, mocking Roman populace,

whose voice was the gleefully blasphemous dialect poet,

Giuseppe Gioachino Belli.

Mary, eating soup for lunch, was still a virgin, just.

Gabriel, an angel, hurled by God like a bolt,

broke through a window. These are the words he spoke to her.

"You are up the duff, you're in the club.

"You really must believe me. I'm here on God's say-so.

"He's the dad."

# Ave Maria! #

It's the first time she'd heard that song.

"Get on! I'm not some scrubber!

"I never touched a dong!"

"Love, you're chosen. This is just the start.

"The launchpad to planetary acclaim.

"It was at Pentecost. The old sod was disguised as a dove.

"Recall the bird that nestled in your lap.

"He's crafty. He knew the way to your womb door."

"The swine!

"You'll see. My choice is to abort the son of God!"

Mussolini had the desire but not the aptitude,

the thankfully rare aptitude, for turning himself into a living God

to the extent that Hitler and Stalin did in nations

whose people were more credulous and more pathetically susceptible

to the idea of the great man, the strong leader.

It was a question of degree rather than of kind.

As a living God, he was stalled on the lower slopes of Olympus.

He never was best in show.

Not that this lack of aptitude prevented him trying.

The extraordinary Lady Houston,

a tireless horizontal who became one of the richest women in Britain,

and an avid funder of anti-Communist causes, owned a Belgian griffon,

which she called Benito, in honour of her hero.

Within less than three years of his attaining power,

his childhood home in Predappio

had been turned into a place of pilgrimage.

The two big dates in the calendar commemorated the day of his birth,

on July 29th, 1883, and his so-called "March on Rome",

which brought him to power in October 1922.

Despite the adulation, Mussolini couldn't scramble up Olympus.

He remained resolutely human, ridiculously human.

A thuggish, strutting cockerel, a blustering Ruritanian

with a taste for the most preposterous opera bouffe uniforms,

posing as a dictator.

It prompts the question, were his demonic seeds insufficiently demonic

for a real dictator? Was there a crucial lack?

Was he a demonic seed short of the full satanic sac?

Is that why he was a dictator who failed to dictate?

One of the unintended consequences of his torpid laissez faire

was an architecture of exceptional plurality, of many materials,

of many forms.

The result is that Italy lacks the standardised oddities

of mid-century Soviet Union.

There is nothing as boorishly eye-catching as the despot's baroque

of Stalin's blingscapes, nor is there anything as creepy

as Nazism's folkish siedlungs,

built expressions of the doctrine of blood and soil.

Under those regimes, modernism was largely suppressed.

Insufficiently populist in the USSR,

condemned as Jewish and/or international in Germany.

The situation in Italy could not have been less kindred.

Italian Fascism and Italian modernism,

in the sometimes conflicting, sometimes congruent forms

of futurism and rationalism, were bound together from the very start.

From before the very start, they were intertwined in utero.

The Futurists were a belligerent crew.

They comprised one of those things called a "movement".

An art movement,

which happens at the far end of the intestinal tract.

And like the proto-Fascists they were,

they understood that there was strength in numbers.

Numbers disguise mediocrity.

Numbers cover up the underachievers.

They had rules. They had manifestoes.

Of course they had manifestoes.

Manifestoes and more manifestoes.

The manifesto compensates for the paucity of the visual art.

It gradually becomes the art itself.

The longer the manifesto, the more dismal the work.

The artless drivel called conceptualism

ultimately derives from the manifesto.

Manifesto turns out to be an anagram of

"I am a no-hoper dork who knows a curator or two

"and prays not to get found out, but can't write and can't paint".

The Futurists had credos. They had a cookbook full of silly ideas.

Food sculpture, originality -

which of course has no place in the kitchen - trout wrapped in liver.

Lamb with lion sauce.

Such silly ideas that they have of course all been adopted.

The Futurists swiftly became formulaic.

Futurism was a fashion item, which ought to have

been as ephemeral as the Dartford Two were predicted to be.

But ephemera has a habit of outliving

what was confidently intended to be permanent.

But which just vanished.

The poet agitator and author of the cookbook, Filippo Marinetti,

was a 34-year-old adolescent

when he described Rome as a pustulating sore.

He led his troops in clamorously demanding the city's modernisation.

The renewal he sought - ordered, rational, technocratic -

could not have been more at odds with that of Coppede and barochetto.

Futurism attempted with varying degrees of success

to represent movement -

the arrogant assumption being that no previous painting had done so.

Just look at The Murder by Cezanne. Before he was Cezanne.

But a painting, unlike prose or film or music, is a static medium,

no matter how frantically restless its subject.

Movement in a work in two dimensions is bound to be figurative,

illusory, a frozen moment - the same goes for movement in buildings.

Marinetti was pathologically nationalist,

yet his exultational rants were those of Walt Whitman -

a barely sane Walt Whitman.

And not all that Italian.

"We will sing of great mobs eager for work, eager for joy,

"eager for riots.

"We will sing of the nightly clamour of arsenals,

"of teeming shipyards ablaze with the electric moon's blinding light.

"We will sing of bridges that bestride rivers like giant athletes,

"knives glistening in the sun.

"We, the Futurists, are scorned by the crippled and paralysed.

"We, the Futurists, glory in danger and revel in violence.

"We revere patriotism. We exult war.

"War is the hygiene of the world.

"The sole hygiene."

The world was to be cleansed.

We have heard that one before and since.

The First World War made an actuality

of Marinetti's teenage dream of glorious mass death

and nationalistic sacrifice.

Over half a million Italian combatants

and over half a million Italian civilians died.

Umberto Boccione,

the most inventive of the Futurist painters, was killed.

So too was Antonia Sant'Elia.

There are a number of paper architects,

dreamers of the never-to-be-built, whose influence was boundless

because their works never got off the page.

It remained an immaculate ideal.

Piranesi, Bouille, Le Coeur,

Ludwig Hilberseimer, Hugh Ferriss, Frank Hampson

and the Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia,

the holy Sant'Elia,

whose Citta Nuova was predictive of

so many of the 20th century's utopias and dystopias.

Hardly surprising, for it was so gleefully copied.

We can admire the drawings of Sant'Elia and these other artists,

but we have to acknowledge that what they do is not architecture.

This stuff is the mere germ of architecture.

It is unconcerned with stresses, services and soil pipes.

Sant'Elia's collaborator and peer, Mario Chiatonne,

is today forgotten.

He made the terrible career move of not dying young.

Throughout the early years of Mussolini's two decades,

there occurred something akin to the

Battle of Styles in Victorian England.

There were several factions,

each of them special pleading that it was their architecture

which best represented nationalism, sacrifice, belligerence,

Fascism's moral fervour and a true devotion to Il Duce.

They vied for an imprimatur he was unwilling to bestow.

The architecture that the Futurists foresaw

and promoted was based on Chiatonne's drawings and Sant'Elia's

plans for La Citta Nuova.

It had no sort of architectural precedent.

It would have been a disavowal of faith not to have

started from scratch.

This was not architecture, it was a vision of architecture which

had no existence other than on the page.

It might be socially deleterious, but it was the future,

because the Futurists, with their exclusive claim on the future,

said it to be so.

It stood for, or was at least intellectually linked,

to the machine, to man as a machine cog,

to the suppression of the individual, to collectivity,

discipline,

submission to the state and the doctrines of Taylorism

and Fordism, which had started in the United States

but which flourished in anti-democratic countries

whose workers had only frail rights.

This was a fact that was picked up by Giovanni Agnelli,

the founder of Fiat,

whose Futurism was hardly ideological and aesthetic,

rather technophiliac and utilitarian.

The factory he built at Lingotto in Turin was Futurism made concrete,

500 metres long, emphatically horizontal

and functional to the point of frugality.

Manufacturer proceeded from street level and spiralled upwards.

The final stages of assembly were carried out on the fifth floor.

The banked test track on its roof was, then, practical

as well as unique.

It was internationally famous within months of its opening.

It showed how far ahead of the game Italy was.

This was the most advanced factory in Europe.

Advanced?

Its owner founded a dynasty - ill-starred, as they so often are.

His grandson deservedly became world famous for wearing his watch

over his shirt cuff.

Agnelli also gained control of La Stampa, the formerly liberal

Torinese newspaper which had been closed down for suggesting

Mussolini had been complicit in the murder of the Socialist deputy

and writer Giacomo Matteotti.

Such acts of sycophancy were commonplace.

Commercial destinies and careers depended on patronage

and favouritism and also on a certain flexibility.

Angiolo Mazzoni joined the Fascist Party early on, which

eased his way to becoming the main architect of the state railways,

which, in turn, earned him many further commissions.

He also had connections to the second wave of Futurism,

but was willing to work in whatever style his patrons demanded.

Such a catholic approach to design is habitually scorned.

Architecture is the only creative endeavour where commitment

to a single style is reckoned to be a demonstration of moral probity.

The second wave of Futurism produced a sort of painting

and photography preoccupied with flight.

Now and again, it possesses vertiginous potency.

Tullio Crali's Diving Over The City

and Before The Parachute Opens are among the rare instances.

At its more typical, it is all patternmaking and poster art.

Nonetheless, the idea of the all-seeing pilot,

with the world beneath him as a target at his mercy,

overcomes the hackneyed depiction.

Indeed, it feeds off it.

This literal vision of the city from above, revealing its shape,

symmetries, intricacies and secrets, belongs to Mussolini.

He is the pilot. He is the leader.

Again, it was a spur to architectural creation,

an encouragement to architectural impersonality and grandiosity.

Seeing the Earth from thousands of metres above

is a lesson in its puniness.

There is so much space to fill with buildings of the new age,

with grand boulevards and square squares and half-moon crescents.

What ought those squares to look like at ground level?

That, after all, is where the little people will get to see them.

The Enigma of Arrival is VS Naipaul's meditation

on his discovery of the valley north of Salisbury

which would become his home.

The title was stolen from a painting by the peripatetic

Giorgio de Chiricho.

There are congruences of mood between book and painting.

Isolation, ambiguity.

Above all, the presentiment that once you have arrived,

all that awaits you is death.

It was to Turin that de Chiricho ascribed his architectural lexicon.

He visited that city for two or three days in 1911. That was enough.

Turin implanted itself in his memory.

We don't choose places, they choose us. Turin chose de Chiricho.

-TRANSLATION:

-Turin, as nature saw it and described it, revealed to me

a spiritual power I haven't been aware of before.

I understood what he saw in it, especially in the piazzas,

those Turin piazzas, surrounded by porticos.

It was something very poetic, very profound.

His lexicon is severely straightened - blank walls,

mute apertures, round-arched arcades, classical motifs,

ruined statuary, obelisks. It is all elemental, pared down, primitive.

Interior and exterior allied.

Indeed, the very notion of separate spaces dissolves.

Nothing seems complete. Scale is mocked.

Shadows tell different times in a realm where there is no time,

where the source of light is a mystery,

where the sun appears to shine from opposing directions.

De Chiricho's desolate urban fragments are places

from which there is no escape.

The rare figures are frozen or mutilated or faceless.

They were shrouds from the sepulchre.

What he paints is a dream of death, a dream of the city of the dead.

The classicism, the modern classicism, that derived

from de Chiricho was a compromise,

a grudgingly conciliatory handshake

between the two main antagonists in the Battle of the Styles.

The notion that the architects were consciously

searching for an architecture of death assumes that architects

understand the meaning of their buildings. They don't.

And they shouldn't. Interpretation is not the maker's task.

But Thanatopolis is what they created, over and again.

EUR is the set piece of Mussolini's reign -

the site of an international exhibition that was never to be.

It was scheduled for 1942,

the 20th anniversary of Italian Fascist Government.

Events intervened.

Within a year of its completion, Fascism was defeated

and Mussolini was a near-powerless Nazi puppet.

What does this place tell us about Fascism?

That Fascism builds monuments to its great leader,

that sport is essentially a Fascist activity.

That Fascism is conditional upon xenophobia.

That Fascism builds infrastructure in the national interest,

or as a diversion.

Fascism, in common with all totalitarian faiths,

demands scapegoats. The kulaks, the bourgeoisie, the myopic, the Jews.

Always the Jews.

Fascism employs technology brutally to affect mass deaths.

Fascism is oxymoron, a secular theology.

Fascism is greedy for sacrifice. Fascism just loves dressing up.

There's something about a corpse in uniform.

That Fascism is a death wish. Kill and be killed.

That Fascism is a belief system whose paramount creed

is that the most important event in your life is your death.

So it's apt that the most striking building of the era,

intended as an exhibition space,

should appear to be a mausoleum or an ossuary, the house of the dead.

De Chirico suffered precognition.

Post-1945, both parts of Germany abandoned the architecture

associated with Nazism.

Post-1953, the USSR abandoned the architecture

associated with Stalinism.

Italy's reaction to the architecture

made during the two decades of Fascism was different.

There was no reaction.

Italy had turned against Mussolini and his alliance with Nazi Germany.

It thus had judged itself to have enjoyed an expiation.

So it had few qualms about proceeding

architecturally as it had before that alliance was struck.

Every school and style was equally blessed, equally damned

by the dead dictators' eclectic pluralism.

Architects who served the Fascist state were not regarded as pariahs.

Had they been, there would have been no architects to rebuild

Italy - for the entire trade, with less than a dozen exceptions,

had sworn a vow of loyalty to Mussolini.

As a result, there was a continuum.

The fallen of all wars were commemorated in 1951 at Medea,

in an idiom which, whilst it may be associable with Fascism,

is even more associable with the unknowable state

that is at the very core of Fascism...

..death.

Things come around.

Aldo Rossi, Fernand Pouillon,

Ricardo Bofill, David Chipperfield.

They are not Fascists, but each has had an inkling of mortality.

Rossi's actual ossuary at Modena was built 35 years after

the defeat of Fascism.

But Fascism never dies. Nor does death.

Both are perpetual. Fascism and death fuse.

Here is the temple of the rapture cult.

The myriad raiments of Thanatos, whose truth and reconciliation,

ethically-sourced spa rub and enforcement-grade nuclear butter,

pamper the sure, calm ride to the other side.

Good night.

No, best night...of your life.