Early 20th Century & the Modern Movement (1900–1945)

Rome EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma)

1937– · Italy · Southern Europe · National modernization and capital-city building · Planned by Mussolini-era institutions; later completions
General master plan (planimetria generale) of the EUR / E42 district laid out for the planned 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma, showing the monumental axial street grid and principal buildings unde
General master plan (planimetria generale) of the EUR / E42 district laid out for the planned 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma, showing the monumental axial street grid and principal buildings unde · cc-by-sa

Core idea

Axial modernist district southwest of center

Why it matters

Historical planned district with postwar reuse

Description

A planned district on the southwestern edge of Rome, initiated in 1937 under Mussolini as the site of a universal exposition planned for 1942, with Marcello Piacentini coordinating its design. The plan established a monumental axial layout of wide streets, travertine-clad rationalist and stripped-classical buildings such as the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, and grand public spaces intended to celebrate the fascist regime. The exposition was cancelled by the war, and the incomplete district was finished in the 1950s and 1960s as a business and residential quarter, aided by the 1960 Olympics.

Significance

EUR is the most complete built ensemble of Italian fascist urbanism and a rare case of a propaganda landscape successfully converted to ordinary metropolitan use as a modern office district. It remains central to debates on the aesthetics and afterlife of totalitarian planning, and its architecture has exerted a lasting influence on classicising strands of modernism.

What shaped it

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.