But how fascist is Fascist Rome?

How mass society and modern culture asserted themselves and blended into the contradictory reality of the Mussolini regime 

Rome was the place where the twentieth-century atmosphere dressed in Fascist garb had its greatest public manifestations, where the regime imbued works and dreams, streets and squares, sports grounds and film studios, suburbs and cultural institutes, newspapers and universities with itself. 

Put firmly back at the centre of national life, the capital’s urban scene was par excellence the scene of Fascism. 

Now that the Ventennio (the twenty years of Fascism) is ideologically and politically over, even the Rome of the Duce can finally be seen not only as a panorama of archaeological and urban crimes, but in its relationship with the great cultural and artistic currents of the 20th century. 

And as the birthplace of a new bourgeois society destined to establish a kind of ‘Roman hegemony’ over the future democratic Italy.

The author, born and raised in Rome, retraces the most important stages of the process recalling his own memories from the post-war years and asks: what remains of this huge transformation? Has it been replaced by a new architecture or has enjoyed a longue durée that reaches to the present day?

This double architectural identity in which the fascist capital coexists with the democratic one poses a fundamental question: why is it that this chapter of history, despite its inglorious ending and the political transformation that followed, manages to make its presence felt so powerfully almost 80 years later?