Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana

The building began as one piece of a much larger scheme. In 1935 Benito Mussolini initiated the Esposizione Universale Roma, a business centre and suburban complex planned around a world exhibition and intended as a symbol of the Fascist regime. Italy asked that year to hold the fair in 1941, but the date was moved to 1942, the twentieth anniversary of the Fascist Party taking control of Italy, and the event was advertised as E'42. The law establishing the exhibition was passed in December 1936, and the first invitations and competition notices for the buildings of the new exhibition quarter followed in January 1937. Beyond the fair itself, the district was to become a centre of urbanisation extending Rome along the road axis running to the sea, equal in area to the city's Centro Storico.

The body set up to assess the E42 designs had approved its first plans by April 1937, and competitions for the most important buildings were announced between June and October of that year: the Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e dei Congressi, the exedra of Piazza Imperiale, the Museo delle Comunicazioni, the basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, and the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. The examining commission, chaired by Marcello Piacentini, promoted the design of Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Lapadula and Mario Romano. Mussolini favoured their plan for its rationalism. The building was to be the Museum of Italian Civilization at the 1942 world's fair, demonstrating the superiority of Italian architecture, and its monumentality was meant to reflect the Fascist regime's new course in Italian history. Work began in July 1938. The Fascist newsreel service Istituto Luce filmed the site's progress, including Mussolini planting a tree on the grounds in 1937; the footage served as publicity and recorded something of the working days of the labourers on the job.

The Palazzo was inaugurated on 30 November 1940 as the centrepiece of the Esposizione, although it was not finished. A thousand of the workers were laid off by the end of that year. The fair itself was cancelled on 3 June 1941 while the building was still being completed, and by 1942 the E42 was declared a dead-end project.

The final plans were revised by Piacentini, superintendent of the E42 Architecture Service, who added a travertine exterior to the facade and accentuated the classical features of the design; the engineers and their director, Gaetano Minnucci, were free to alter the drawings as they saw fit. Like much of the district, the Palazzo is a reinforced concrete frame clad in stone. Work on the cladding began in 1940 and was finished in less than a year. The choice of stone was not incidental: travertine answered the regime's appeal to romanità and its autarkic ambitions, since iron and cement were hard to come by under the sanctions the League of Nations had threatened over the war in Ethiopia. The arches of the competition design were reduced in execution to nine to a row and six rows high on each of the four identical faces, a debt to the Colosseum that Mussolini intended as a celebration of the older Roman landmark and that earned the building the everyday name Colosseo Quadrato, the Square Colosseum. Architecturally the Palazzo is seen as an example of compromise with the regime: conservative in its layout, it adheres almost entirely to the monumentalist formal scheme that ideology had imposed in Italy after fifteen years of Fascism, and it is counted among the most representative examples of Fascist architecture at the EUR.

Across the top of all four sides runs an inscription taken from a speech Mussolini delivered on 2 October 1935 in defiance of the sanctions then being weighed against Italy: “un popolo di poeti, di artisti, di eroi, di santi, di pensatori, di scienziati, di navigatori, di trasmigratori”, a nation of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of thinkers, of scientists, of navigators, of migrators. The epigraphy had first been planned as excerpts from the Res gestae, the monumental inscription of the life and achievements of Augustus, before the speech was chosen instead. The inscription refers to Mussolini's glorification of the Fascist regime, and in particular to the superior qualities he attributed to the Italian race. Fascist epigraphy of this kind was meant to press the regime's beliefs on the public, and on an educated public in particular.

Twenty-eight statues, each about 3.4 metres high, stand one to an arch around the ground floor as allegories of industries and trades and of the virtues of the Italian people: heroism, music, craftsmanship, political genius, social order, labour, agriculture, philosophy and commerce among them. They were added in 1942, carved by eight firms specialising in Carrara marble in the provinces of Lucca and Massa-Carrara. At the four corners of the stepped podium stand equestrian groups of the Dioscuri, the sons of Zeus and Leda, by Publio Morbiducci and Alberto Felci.

Work on the Palazzo stopped for good in 1943, the year the Fascist regime fell. On 9 September, immediately after the Armistice, the steps facing the Tiber were the scene of a clash between German paratroopers holding ground near the old Ponte della Magliana and Italian soldiers trying to slow their advance on the centre of Rome. An Italian artilleryman was killed in the fighting and later decorated in memory.

Along with the other EUR buildings then standing, among them the basilica, the Palazzo dei Congressi and the exedra, the Palazzo served first as a camp for German troops, then for Allied troops, and in the immediate postwar years as a shelter for displaced people. It then stood empty and abandoned for more than a decade. Postwar cinema took it up in that state, filming it as an obsolete structure symbolic of the downfall of the Fascist regime. Its architecture and its recall of the monumental forms of ancient Rome have made it a frequent setting or backdrop for cinema, television and advertising since; Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta of 1945 and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse of 1962 are among the films shot there.

The Ente EUR was revived in 1951 with Virgilio Testa installed as commissioner, and work on completing the quarter resumed, the district now seen as a new centre of gravity for the offices of the capital; the acronym stayed, but it was rechristened Europa. The Palazzo opened its doors to the public for the first time in 1953, when it housed the international agricultural exhibition held in Rome that year, and it went on to serve as the seat of the Federazione nazionale dei Cavalieri del Lavoro and for other ministerial uses. Romans gave it a second and mocking name, Palazzo groviera, for the shape of its facades.

The district around it was reclaimed from its Fascist history by being put to new use. Postwar Italians turned the EUR to suburban housing, answering the growth in the Italian population during the Fascist years, and in the 1950s it was rebranded as a modern business quarter to break the stigma attached to it. Rome's candidacy for the 1960 Olympics hastened that revival, and by the end of the decade the EUR was both a residential quarter and a flourishing administrative one.

By the middle of the 1980s the Ente EUR had taken back full management of the Palazzo, which nonetheless remained largely unused apart from occasional initiatives. It was closed to the public for restoration between 2003 and 2008. A culture ministry project of 2006 set out what the work would cover: the facades and the ground floor, the window fittings and the terraces. Directed by the architect Paolo Marconi, it began in 2008 and was completed on 15 December 2010.

The Palazzo is owned by EUR S.p.A. and is declared a building of cultural interest by the culture ministry under the 2004 heritage code, which binds it to exhibition and museum use. On 18 July 2013 an agreement between the EUR and the Fendi group let the building to the fashion house for fifteen years, to the end of 2028, and Fendi has had its headquarters there since 2015, reportedly at 2.8 million euros a year. In keeping with the museum obligation, the ground floor was to hold an exhibition area open to the public, announced as a celebration of Italian creativity and craftsmanship. In 2017 the Russian artist Pokras Lampas painted a calligraphic work in yellow on a black ground across the roof for the Fendi campaign F is For…, the most extensive work of calligraphy made in Italy.