The official architecture

Carbonia, Teatro Centrale. Photo by Massimiliano Frau, 2016, from Catalogo BBCC RAS

At the debut of fascism, the backwardness of Sardinia was well emphasized by the fragility of the urban structure, reduced according to the 1921 census to an extremely small population of cities and a very high percentage of residents in very small towns scattered in a sparsely populated, large and poorly served territory by inadequate roads.
The events of the capital of Barbaria, which in 1927 became a “Province of the Littorio”, are illustrative of the evolution of a small town into a city in need of representative public buildings, but also of housing for the new bureaucrats, who completely renewed its still village face.
In the same way, Cagliari and Sassari were also included in the group of the many regulatory plans drafted, but often not implemented, in Italy in the Twenty Years. In fact, the first urban planning law of the Italian state was approved only in 1942 in a country now torn by war, calling into question the many plans already approved, including the Sardinian ones.
In the same way, fascism inherits some of the unresolved problems of the “bourgeois” city, ranging from the growing contrast between center and periphery to the prevailing attention to individual architecture with little interest in the context.
The regime's response is an intervention policy based essentially on two points: competitions for regulatory plans, almost always destined to remain without implementation and in any case far from the demiurgical action assigned to them; gutting and thinning interventions for the hygienic rehabilitation of the city center.
The results are often repetitive, as can be obtained from the rapid examination of the plans produced in those years, and are essentially based on a road network that cuts through the existing one, gutting or thinning out the buildings, with a consequent overlapping of the new, without much care for the old nuclei.

Update

1/12/2025 - 13:08