Abstract
This investigation highlights a new conception of design space in architecture, in the relationship between settlement and land, rooted in architectural historical studies and research on rural and agrarian economy and unlocks a potential regeneration and restoration of the rural villages of Italy’s cultural heritage. In Italy, the theme of rural architecture has gained momentum ever since the spread of the Modern Movement, reviving settlement and spatial principles as a moral lesson for the general development of new aesthetics and a new society. Innovative concepts inspired by Arrigo Serpieri such as “Integral Land Reclamation”, and long-standing institutions such as the Land Reclamation Consortia, became official law in 1933, and played a crucialrole in this process, particularly in consolidating new architectural thinking that was to endure up to post-war reconstruction and beyond, until our own times. Paradoxically, ideologically opposing phenomena, settlements related to the extensive land reclamation of the Fascist period and the rural redevelopment of the Fifties, were somehow based on comparable theoretical and operational aspects. We can recognize these ideas by looking at the most interesting experiments developed in these two periods: the city of Sabaudia designed by Piccinato, and the village of La Martella at Matera designed by Quaroni (and sponsored by Adriano Olivetti). The quest for a new “moral aesthetic” of architecture undertaken by leading representatives of Italian Rationalism was to re-emerge in the neorealism of post-war reconstruction.
Highlights
Integral Land Reclamation is carried out for purposes of public interest, through works of reclamation and land improvement [miglioramento fondiario]
Land improvement measures are those made to the benefit of one or more plots, independently of any general reclamation plan. This is the first article of the law still in force on the Bonifica integrale (Integral Land Reclamation, Royal Decree no. 215 of 13 February 1933), largely inspired by the theoretical thinking of Arrigo Serpieri, the founder of the modern discipline of Rural Economics in Italy and Undersecretary for Integral Land Reclamation at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
This decree defines the roles and functions of the Consorzi di bonifica, long-standing administrative institutes responding to the characteristics of the Italian territory, from governing the waters to the consolidation of productive agrarian fabric and civil infrastructures
Summary
The new Local Strategic Plan project for the foundation city of Sabaudia, announced through a national competition of the charitable organisation, Opera Nazionale Combattenti (ONC) in 1933 as part of a policy of new settlements within the bonifica integrale of the Pontine Marshes, was won by a group of architects consisting of Gino Cancellotti, Eugenio Montuori, Luigi Piccinato and Alfredo Scalpelli. The Casa del Fascio and the Town Hall are volumes which are isolated with respect to the surrounding urban fabric: the former, positioned at the symbolic crossing of the four main roads, arises as an ideal link between the civic centre and the adjacent religious centre (church, baptistery, convent and nursery); the latter, featuring a tower with a balcony to address the public, symbolically centred with respect to the axis towards the Appian Way. The shifting sight lines of the central nucleus are what strongly characterize the town, metaphysically suspended in an urban layout that has very little to do with the picturesque glimpses typical of medieval Italian villages – that was one of the supposed references3 – but rather a homage to the ground plans of Ancient Roman tradition with their orthogonal grid and central square featuring porticoed buildings.
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