The Colossus of Mussolini

In 1933, Renato Ricci, President of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, proposed to move the place of Benito Mussolini’s gatherings from Piazza Venezia to the slopes of Monte Mario, into the Foro Mussolini, a complex mainly dedicated to sport activities. Ricci entrusted Luigi Moretti with the design of the vast esplanade of the Arengo delle Nazioni and a huge bronze statue of the Genius of Fascism upon the hill of Monte Mario, which was to incarnate the physiognomy of Mussolini himself. For the first time, the projects produced by a group of engineers, architects—Mansutti and Miozzo, Paniconi and Pediconi, Del Debbio, and Moretti himself—and Aroldo Bellini, the sculptor chosen to create the new Colossus of Rome, are here systematically reordered, analyzed, and discussed in the historical, political, and artistic scenarios of 1930s Italy to reconstruct a forgotten chapter of the megalomaniacal plans promoted by the fascist regime to turn Rome into the capital of a new empire.