Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (1938-1943), or the "Colosseo Quadrato" - flanked by equestrian statues (Publio Morbiducci and Alberto de Felci) representing the Greek heros Dioscuri in Carrara marble - and features six arched bays across (Benito) and nine levels (Mussolini) in possible reference to the name of the fascist Italian leader who commissioned it

…or EUR, originally known as E42, the vast development south of Rome initiated by Benito Mussolini in 1935 designed by a collaborative of Italian architects is where we went today in search of some adventures in fascist Roman architecture – which first fascinated me (to the horror of my Italian classmates and teaching assistants) while working on my thesis project for Aldo Rossi at the IUAV from 1990-91 – and today I was struck by how much the buildings reminded me of Aldo Rossi‘s greatest & earliest works such as the Cataldo Cemetery in Modena (1971) and the more relentlessly austere designs of Giorgio Grassi – but today I was left feeling uncomfortable with our ability to have a purely aesthetic experience with architecture generated to promote brutal inhuman activity – but hey, we really love that Colosseum built by slaves where hundreds of thousands died torturous deaths to the cheering of an entertained public.