Roads and Ruins

Download or read book Roads and Ruins written by Paul Baxa and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1930s, the Italian Fascist regime profoundly changed the landscape of Rome's historic centre, demolishing buildings and displacing thousands of Romans in order to display the ruins of the pre-Christian Roman Empire. This transformation is commonly interpreted as a failed attempt to harmonize urban planning with Fascism's ideological exaltation of the Roman Empire. Roads and Ruins argues that the chaotic Fascist cityscape, filled with traffic and crumbling ruins, was in fact a reflection of the landscape of the First World War. In the radical interwar transformation of Roman space, Paul Baxa finds the embodiment of the Fascist exaltation of speed and destruction, with both roads and ruins defining the cultural impulses at the heart of the movement. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including war diaries, memoirs, paintings, films, and government archives, Roads and Ruins is a richly textured study that offers an original perspective on a well known story.