In his lengthy 1960s correspondence with architectural historian Bruno Zevi, from Bogotà architect Angiolo Mazzoni lamented that, unlike many of his colleagues who worked under Mussolini, not only he had to move to Colombia but was still unable to return to Italy. In the same correspondence, the ex-official architect of the Ministry of Communication, Mazzoni, also clarified the nature of his working relationship with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which lasted till 1935, by stating that he disapproved of Marinetti’s involvement in political affairs while approving of futurist aesthetic exploits (Billiani 2021, 96-97).[1] Mazzoni’s personal letters to Zevi bring together two often distinctive spheres: those of politics and those of aesthetics. Moreover, the story of the relationship between Mazzoni, Marinetti and Mussolini is defined by an interdisciplinary understanding of the arts’ functioning mechanisms under the overarching notion of State art. Mazzoni helped Mussolini’s project of modernising Italy by constructing new infrastructures, mainly post-offices and train stations, while he advanced Marinetti’s race for hegemony within the regime’s project of building a State art by employing futurist artists for the buildings’ decorations, such as those in La Spezia, Trento, or Alessandria. The Palazzo delle Poste was a place where the public could be proudly satisfied by an efficient, modern national service and, at the same time, enjoy an exhibition, of ‘arte totale’.
Mazzoni supervised all stages in the construction of the Palazzo delle Poste in La Spezia which was completed in just three years (1930-33) (http://dialecticsofmodernity.manchester.ac.uk/artefact/34) (Cozzi et al. 2003, 288). Part of a national plan for urban regeneration, it is located in the city centre (piazza Verdi), an area once occupied by the poor residential neighbourhood nicknamed the ‘Torretto’ (Fig 1). A stone-clad volumetric main body flanked by a lateral clock tower gives to this solid building an unusually bright appearance which is complemented by an internal explosion of colours in the decorations (Eltin 1983, 89). In 1933, almost at the end of the project, Mazzoni commissioned futurist artists Enrico Prampolini and Fillìa the internal decoration of the clock tower, which was made of a majestic mosaic representing the land-based, maritime and aerial means of transportation and communication of the time, subdivided into five main, continuous scenes and entitled Le comunicazioni. Cutting-edge vehicles and aeroplanes, telegraphs and telephones stand side by side with trains and ships in a continuous tale of modern times (Fig. 2). Despite being a collective work, Fillìa (Le comunicazioni terrestri and Le comunicazioni marittime, 1933) was more focused on a simple but poetic language, Prampolini (Le comunicazioni telegrafiche, Le comunicazioni telefoniche and Le comunicazioni aeree, 1933) based his representations on broad perspectives. Overall, the brilliant colours of the composition, placed within a stylized context dominated by lines and geometry, become images dominated by a few, representative elements, occasionally tending to geometric abstraction.
This post office is a fine example of how the arts contributed to the totalitarian project by marrying social modernization of the infrastructures with anti-representational, modern aesthetics as well as of how the arts did so in an interdisciplinary fashion by responding to rationalist architectural designs (Billiani-Pennacchietti, 2019). Rather than thinking about the arts under the regime therefore, a more apt way of the describing how politics and aesthetics worked under the dictatorship, would be that of acknowledging that the arts could function productively as an interdisciplinary system under the overarching idea of State art which aimed at gaining political consensus amongst collectivities (Billiani 2021).
[1] F. ‘Mazzoni’, letter to Zevi, Rome, 5 December 1966, MART.
References
Billiani Francesca. 2021. Fascist Modernism. Arts and Regimes. London: I.B. Tauris.
Billiani Francesca and Laura Pennacchietti. 2019. Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime. London: Palgrave.
Cozzi, Mauro, Godoli, Ezio and Paola Pettenella (eds). 2003. Angiolo Mazzoni (1894-1979). Architetto Ingegnere del Ministero delle Comunicazioni. Milan: Skira.
Etlin, Richard A. 1983. ‘Italian Rationalism.’ Progressive Architecture (July): 86-94.
Forti, Alfredo. 1978. Angiolo Mazzoni. Architetto fra fascismo e libertà. Florence: Edam.
Figures
Fig. 1 Post and Telegraph Office, La Spezia
Fig. 2 Prampolini and Filllìa, Le comunicazioni, le vide del cielo e del mare, 1933
Fig. 1. Post and Telegraph Office, La Spezia
Fig. 2. Prampolini and Filllìa, Le comunicazioni, le vie del cielo e del mare, 1933
