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The Light and the Line: Florestano Di Fausto and the Politics of <em>'Mediterraneità'</em>

2010; eScholarship Publishing, University of California; Volume: 1; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5070/c311008864

2155-7926

Sean Anderson,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Architecture was born in the Mediterranean and triumphed in Rome in the eternal monuments created from the genius of our birth: it must, therefore, remain Mediterranean and Italian. 1 On March 15, 1937 along the Via Balbia, an 1800-kilometer coastal road linking Tunisia and Egypt, Benito Mussolini and Italo Balbo, then provincial governor of Italian Libya, inaugurated the Arco di Fileni, a monumental gateway commemorating two legendary Carthaginian herobrothers, while on their way to Tripoli to celebrate the first anniversary of the Italian colonial empire.Designed by the architect Florestano Di Fausto, the travertine arch, with its elongated archway and stacked pyramidal 31-meter high profile, was built atop a purported 500 BCE site that marked the division between the Greek territory of Cyrene and Carthaginian holdings to the east.Atop the arch, an inscription by the poet Horace, made popular by the Fascist party with a stamp issued in 1936, emphasized the gateway's prominence in visual terms: "O quickening sun, may naught be present to thy view more than the city of Rome." 2 The distant horizon of Rome, or more broadly, that of the newfound empire, framed by the arch, condensed an architectural, political, and spectral heroism that was akin to the civilizing mission of Italian colonialism.Here, the triumphant building of the arch, the road that passed through it, and the transformation of the Libyan landscape denoted the symbolic passage of an Italian consciousness into what formerly been indeterminate terrain.While the Janus-like apparition of the arch in the desert marked the boundary between East and West, past and future, for its architect, the site also gave way to the construction of an "eternal" monument signifying the potential of Italian colonial architecture to exist at the border between two worlds.Arguably one of the most important architects and proponents of Italian modern colonial architecture, Roman architect Florestano Di Fausto, has, until recently, been overlooked by historians of modern architecture.As a technical consultant to the Ministero degli affari Esteri, Di Fausto designed and constructed numerous Italian diplomatic offices throughout Eastern and Western Europe, South America, and the Near East. 3 But he is most recognized for his colonial urban planning schemes and government buildings from 1923 until 1940 in the Aegean Dodecanese and Libya.His works in these divergent locales conferred an eclectic sensibility to an already complex negotiation of ancient and modern forms present on the islands of Rhodes and Kos, as well as in the colony of Libya.Moreover, the range of projects Di Fausto completed in both settings attests to Italian modernism's engagement with contextual idioms in the making of colonial architecture and urbanism.Unlike many of the public structures built during the French colonial campaign in North Africa, Di Fausto's built and unbuilt projects refine the 1 Florestano Di Fausto, "Visione mediterranea della mia architettura," Libia 1:9 (December 1937) 16-18; 18.