1 The peculiarity of the Rome problem

Rome is among those cities that by dint of their history, buildings, role and culture
are quite ‘unique’ indeed. Moreover, Rome seems (for reasons that we will consider
below) more unique, as it were, than the others.1 Quite apart from its aesthetic and
architectural heritage, Rome’s peculiarity is derived from its historical development
and its consequent urban structure; and it is this urban structure that is the source of its
peculiar problems.
From a certain point of view, to be fair, I cannot deny that Rome’s most important
problems are all too common among great cities across the world: congestion, pollution,
intractable traffic problems, lack of green spaces, degradation of the urban landscape,
and the disintegration of social and human relations.
Though the problems are ubiquitous, their Roman context is, indeed, unusual. It
is important to observe that these typical factors of crisis and degradation, which are
common to any great conurbation, are applied, in Rome’s case, to an unusual historical
and environmental situation. I begin with a few insights into this situation.
Rome’s historic centre: size and survival
Rome is a city that has an old (or rather very old) and also very extensive historic
centre. The centre has been built in layers that continue to show the marks of classical,
medieval and Renaissance town planning. Realignment of the pattern of city streets
stopped, however, in the seventeenth century. There is, of course, a great deal of
Baroque architecture (churches, palaces, monuments) in Rome; however, their facades
peer down into narrow streets designed in an earlier era, a characteristic very unlike
Baroque areas in other large European cities. The survival of historic centres with a
medieval or Renaissance plan is certainly characteristic of other smaller European and
Italian cities. Unlike Rome, however, none of these has the characteristics of a major
metropolitan city (for example, having a population of more than one million people).
In contrast, the largest metropolitan European cities – those with more than a million
inhabitants have not retained their medieval and Renaissance historic centres in the
same way and to the same degree that Rome has.
Baroque architecture in other great European capitals in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries went hand in hand with analogous urbanistic reorganization that was
carried out at the expense of the old medieval and Renaissance quarters. One only has
to think of the work of Louis XIV that so impressed both Christopher Wren and Gian-
lorenzo Bernini when they met in Paris in 1665. After his return to London, Wren, in
1
This should not seem a strange thing to say if you consider Rome’s special role over the centuries,
a leitmotif in European writing (by historians, geographers and travellers) on the city. I would like
to quote here George Simmel, the distinguished German sociologist, who wrote at the beginning
of the twentieth century: ‘What is not comparable in the impression that Rome affords, is that the
disparities in times, styles, personalities, and lives, which have left their trace here, and are more
extensive than in any other part of the world, are nevertheless bound in a unity and homogeneity not
to be found in any other part of the world. If we try to analyze psychologically the aesthetic effect of
Rome, from all angles we arrive at this centro’ which indicates d’emblée its external image: the most
extreme opposites in which the story of the highest culture is split, have given here the impression
of a complete organic whole. I must however [Simmel feels the need to add] exclude totally from
this review the parts of Rome that are uninterruptedly modern, and thus of an uninterrupted ugliness,
although these are situated in such a way that foreigners, taking a few precautions, have no contact
with them’ (Simmel 1922).
2 The peculiarity of the Rome problem

his role as general surveyor, successfully promoted a massive programme of clearance

and redevelopment. Bernini, in contrast, was forced to squeeze his new buildings into
the essentially static urban form of Rome.
In Bernini’s era almost nothing was touched in Rome after the earlier work of the
‘town planning popes’ (Nicholas V, Sixtus IV, Alexander VI, Julius II and Sixtus V) in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who limited themselves to laying down main roads
without great clearances. Moreover, with the collaboration of experts on ancient Rome,
Sixtus V seems to have followed the old layout of Roman roads in the construction of
new ones.
Some appreciative commentators have praised the unwillingness of Baroque plan-
ners to clear the cityscape of classical and Romanesque streets and monuments. But,
however we assess that penchant for historical preservation, it is obvious that Ro-
man planners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not under any great
demographic pressure to reshape the city.
Rome’s population, after the splendour of the imperial era that had seen it reach
numbers that were incredible for the time (at least a million inhabitants in the first
century AD), fell progressively throughout the Middle Ages. By the tenth century its
population had fallen to less than 20,000, and by the sixteenth century it had risen again
only to about 100,000 inhabitants. At the time of the unification of Italy, when Rome
assumed the role of capital of the new kingdom (1870), it still did not have more than
200,000 inhabitants. (See Table 1.1 for a comparison of population growth in European
cities.)
In short, unlike other great European capitals, Rome did not experience a population
boom in earlier centuries that demanded spatial restructuring. The boom in Rome only
began at the end of the nineteenth century and then continued through most of the
twentieth century: the metropolis housed roughly 200,000 people in 1870 and three
million in 1970.
By 1900, however, the tram and a culture of conservation had taken root in Rome
and, indeed, across Europe. Planners thought it better to concentrate on the periphery
rather than to reshape the medieval and Renaissance historic centres. Conservation of
historic centres had quite different implications in cities that had been opened up by
redevelopment in the Baroque era, compared with cities such as Rome that tried to adapt
a Renaissance city to the automobile, the modern office building and department store.
In Rome’s various instances of redevelopment in the twentieth century, development
was limited to the construction of a few central arteries and to a certain widening of
other roads but did not go as far as the destruction of the existing layout. Despite their
exaggerated rhetoric, the ‘Umbertine’ period (see below) (1870-1914) and then the
Fascist regime (1922-44) did not ‘gut’ Rome. They managed only to demolish some
‘isolated’ areas without altering the essential spatial pattern.
Unlike Rome, the great European capitals that had experienced a population boom
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued the redevelopment of the Baroque
era into the nineteenth century by virtually annihilating the spatial layout left from the
medieval and Renaissance periods. Of course, insignificant islands of the earlier layout
have sometimes been maintained; however, certainly none with any special central
role has survived. This was the case in all the great European capitals (London, Paris,
Vienna, St Petersburg, Berlin, Madrid and Brussels) and in many other cities with more
than one million people.
 The peculiarity of the Rome problem 3

In the mid-eighteenth century, London and Paris, which each had over 500,000
inhabitants, had introduced their own town plans (which I will define as Baroque’).
These plans significantly restructured the pre-existing historic centre of medieval and
Renaissance origin and greatly extended the built-up area. ‘Baroque’ town planning in
European cities answered the needs of the grandiosity demanded by the megalomania
and triumphalism of the absolutist monarchies (and their capitals), as well as the
demographic changes that had to be faced. In this sense one can understand the claim
of Andreina Griseri, a scholar of the Baroque, that Baroque plans in the European
capitals are ‘differently orientated’ with respect to the interventions in Rome of Sixtus
V and his architect, Domenico Fontana, and that ‘a sort of baroque classicism takes
place, as a sort of mediation, which estranges art by reducing it to an exclusive means
of representation, and directing it to the triumph of the absolute monarchy’ (Griseri
1967).8
It is difficult to say whether historical events (revolutions, restorations and the In-
dustrial Revolution) and the great town plans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were the cause or effect of the process of major urbanization. Whatever the direction
of the influence, the equivalent process in Rome took place a century later, as reflected
in a simple comparison of contemporaneous population figures. This chronological
discrepancy was to lead to an important difference.

Rome: a ‘post-Neoclassical’ development

The nineteenth-century increase in urban population gave an impulse, in almost all
the European cities that we can today compare with Rome in size and function, to a
‘Neoclassical’ restructuring of initially Napoleonic and then Haussmannian inspiration.
(Naturally this restructuring was proportionate to the size of the population: for example,
mid-nineteenth-century Paris had already reached a population of 1,300,000 inhabitants
and London 2,300,000.)
Rome’s population, as mentioned above, began to expand only at the end of the
nineteenth century. Rather than coping with this expansion through redevelopment of
the historic centre, as other cities did, Rome immediately adopted what has become
by now the standard strategy for dealing with a growing population: peripheral urban
sprawl. But other cities that adopted this strategy already had a restructured and extended
historic centre, tailored to the needs of populations of more than half a million or a
million people: great esplanades, wide boulevards, ring roads. In short, these were cities
that were easily adaptable to the circulation of omnibuses and the first motorcars, as
well as for promenades and military parades. In Rome, however, the already very large
historic centre retained its pre-Baroque layout. Nor did any sort of Napoleonic grandeur
have a role in Rome. Rome’s peculiarity is that it was a century late in its growth and a
century early in its commitment to preservation.

8
Quoted in B. Zevi (undated), p. 48. On these points see, in general, the work by G. C. Argan, L’Europa
delle Capitali [The Europe of Capitals] (1964). More recently R. Krautheimer (1982) has analysed the
redevelopment plans that the last of the town planner popes, Alexander VII, prepared together with
Gianlorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona between 1665 and8 . The plans were certainly grandiose,
it would seem, but the concrete realizations were modest. From the end of the seventeenth century
and through the eighteenth century the urban restructuring activity of the popes in general opinion
– declined greatly. And the same can be said for the nineteenth century up until the annexation of
Rome to the Kingdom of Italy.
4 The peculiarity of the Rome problem

All of this has undoubtedly preserved the historic value of the city, which compares
well with other European cities (and we can only be grateful for this). But it has also
left, without doubt, a very onerous legacy: excessive densities in central areas, poorly
developed suburban extensions and an inefficient and ineffective set of urban services.
The historic area (the rioni or quarters of Rome that in practice are bounded by the
perimeter of the Aurelian walls) represents almost 2,000 hectares of urban fabric that
is in essence medieval and Renaissance and not changed by successive restructuring.
And so far this is the only area in Rome acting as a business and administrative centre
(centro direzionale).
Figures 1.1 to 1.11 show the extent of Rome at various times from the Classical era
up to the moment of the unification of Italy (1870). When Rome became capital of the
Kingdom of Italy it occupied roughly a third of the area of the city of the first centuries
of the Roman Empire.
No other European city has such a vast historic centre. Successive redevelopment has
created newer business and administrative areas adjacent to the few limited ‘islands’ of
the medieval and Renaissance layout that are more suitable for habitation and modern
traffic.
This is thus Rome’s peculiar problem, one deriving from the history of the process
of urbanization in the city – a process that differs in quality and chronology from the
‘standard’ process of urbanization in other European cities. Before we see how the
various problems relating to this growth have influenced the specific character of the
city, we will briefly examine one response to the problem of urbanization in Rome –
a response at the time of the beginnings of the discipline of town planning in the last
century.
2 An inadequate strategic response
One can conclude – in the light of the considerations in Chapter 1 – that Rome belongs
to the class of great metropolitan cities by dint of the size of its territory and its
population; but at the same time it could be said to belong to the category of small
and medium-sized cities by the nature of its urban fabric and the quality of its historic
centre.
Rome suffers from the problems of large cities with regard to the amount of traffic
and difficulty of access, lacking as it does an extensive network of wide, spacious
roads; and it suffers from the problems of small cities with regard to the limitations
of its central urban spaces, without having the associated small-city benefits of a low
demand for expansion and the consequent low traffic levels.
What I have wished to underline up to this point is that the old urban layout of
Rome has remained intact almost in its entirety, despite noteworthy extensions of the
city limits; and that this has conditioned the city’s entire expansion and development.
This is what makes for the peculiarity of Rome’s current problems, compared with
the typical problems of environmental degradation present in any large European city.
Rome has come to this point because in the past – and above all since a consciousness
of town planning took root in city management (from the beginning of the twentieth
century) – a strategic response to Rome’s problems has been developed that has been
systematically inadequate both qualitatively and quantitatively, despite a few isolated
cases of enlightened input from single authors or even in individual plans (in their
initial stages).
A strategic response to Rome’s problems was needed at the end of the nineteenth
century, when the city’s population was increasing considerably and there was thus an
unprecedented need for new building. A sensible strategic response would have been to
aim at creating, using suitable means, a modern functional alternative to the old historic
centre’s role as the single business and administrative centre. The strategy should have
been to quickly create at least one other centre and to anticipate additional centres
as time went on and the city grew. Unfortunately, even when planners discussed the
alleviation of the old centre’s congestion their solutions were inadequate.
The interventions undertaken during the Umbertine and Fascist periods do have some
merit that is often overlooked. Even when the interventions have been considered, they
have been resoundingly criticized. Both of these regimes took it upon themselves to
do what previous administrations had not dared: to demolish parts of the old centre to
create major arteries and new administrative districts. Umbertine planners cleared old
central areas around the Capitoline hill and the Suburra in order to create the Vittorio
Emanuele II Monument and the main traffic artery of the Via Cavour.1 Fascist planners
1
This monument in the heart of Rome (in Piazza Venezia) is dedicated to King Vittorio Emanuele II,
who was a key figure in the unification of Italy and who became the newly unified nation’s first king.
The king’s architects destroyed all the little houses around the Capitoline hill to build this eclectic
monument – half Neoclassical, half kitsch – of an incredible white marble (recalling the Pergamum
Altar). Consequently the monument has obscured the hill and its marvellous Michelangelo buildings
and has also ruined the view from the hill. (Some Romans have dubbed the monument the ‘typewriter’
or the ‘wedding cake’; others exalt the view of Rome from it because it is the only place from which
it is not possible to see the monument.) Suburra (from the Latin sub-urbe) is the quarter surrounding
the Capitoline hill that was destroyed to build the Vittoriano monument and the fascist ‘Imperial
Forums’ boulevard.
6 An inadequate strategic response

cleared areas around the Forum and Borgo Pio and also built the Esposizione Universale
di Roma (EUR). These relatively small clearances have excited much criticism. But the
demolitions – however they are judged from a historical, cultural or architectural point
of view – fell far short of the destruction of historic centres in other European cities in
preceding centuries, where a culture of conservation had not yet matured.

Umbertine town planning

‘Umbertine’ town planning2 had to face the first great surge in Rome’s population
growth (from 170,000 inhabitants to 500,000 inhabitants in less than 40 years). Only 20
days after Piedmontese troops entered the city in 1870, the new government established
a commission ‘to study the embellishment and enlargement of Rome and, in particular,
a building plan for new areas in the part of Rome that lends itself best to new building’.
The first master plan was published in 1873. It was reworked in 1883 and incrementally
revised in subsequent years.4 (See Figures 2.1 to 2.7.)
Despite grand hopes of elevating Rome to the level of other great European capi-
tals,5 the 1883 plan was limited to street improvements in the centre (Corso Vittorio
Emanuele, Via Cavour and the lower part of Via Nazionale) and redevelopment of the
inner ring of neighbourhoods (Figure 2.2). There was, however, no design for a new
centre that would relieve the pressure on the historic core. Viable alternatives were
sought in the Piazza Esedra complex near Termini – the central rail station and the hub
of Rome’s bus and tram lines – and in Rome’s two other Umbertine squares: Piazza
Vittorio Emanuele and Piazza Cavour. But none of these squares or peripheral centres
fulfilled the strategic task of creating a serious alternative to the historic centre. Indeed,
they tended to strengthen the centre by pulling new development into its orbit.7

2
By ‘Umbertine’ town planning – giving it a chronology that is not completely appropriate (as King
Umberto I came to the throne in 1878) – I mean the town planning that was introduced in Rome
in 1870 and continued until the First World War (and thus about 15 years after the death of King
Umberto in 1900). It can be represented by the master plans of 1873, 1883 and 1908.
4
Among the members of this commission was the architect A. Viviani, who was to be called by the
City Council to run its Technical Office. He was to be the godfather of the master plan that was
first presented in 1873, and after various fortunes he approved, amended and amplified it in March
1883. The 1873 plan anticipated some lines of development towards the ‘high quarters’, such as
the Esquiline hill and the Macao and Castro Pretorio areas; but it wasn’t until the 1883 plan that
a substantial design for these quarters was given as well, integrating them with the disordered and
spontaneous growth that was already occurring towards other areas (Via Ludovisi, Prati di Castello,
Testaccio).
5
Among many other people, this plan had as loquacious and interfering godfathers both Giuseppe
Garibaldi and the most authoritative statesman of the era, Quintino Sella; and it was accompanied
by two ‘special laws’ for Rome passed by the national parliament. A classic historical contribution
to our knowledge of this time is the work of A. Caracciolo, Roma Capitale, 1956 (see in particular
Chapter 3 on the initial debates for the future of the city and Chapter 5, ‘From Building Fever to
Building Crisis’). A short summary of the master plans from the time of unification until the Second
World War is in Vendittelli (1984), from which I have extracted some drawings (Figures 2.1] to 2.8).
See also Ciucci (1984). For the involvement of Garibaldi, see the recent collection of republished
writings by Garibaldi on the deviation of the Tiber and the reclamation of the agro romano (Garibaldi
1982) as well as an essay by L. Rava (1923).
7
Some historians of Roman town planning have spoken of a ‘city without a heart’ (see Coppa 1960),
in that throughout history the centre of Rome has ‘migrated’: from the Forum of classical antiquity,
to Campo de’ Fiori and Piazza Navona in medieval and Renaissance Rome, and to Piazza di Spagna
in Baroque Rome, thus marking the lines of the city’s territorial changes. But today the ‘heart of the
 An inadequate strategic response 7

But considering the times, the types of transportation in use and the relatively modest
(compared with what was to come) population growth, Umbertine town planning turned
out to be more imaginative and effective than that of its Fascist successors. New and
imposing – albeit ugly – residential areas were built, and government offices were
housed in an ’administrative city’ just outside the city walls; and many other ‘great
works’ were planned (from the Polyclinic to the Palace of Justice, from Parliament
to the Monument to the ‘Father of the Fatherland’). The governments and regimes
that have followed each other through the twentieth century lived off the back of the
achievements of this Italietta.8
The Umbertine conception was brave – and yet not sufficient to meet the demands of
the residents of a ‘modern’ rather than an ‘eternal’ city. If the new administrative ‘city’
and the colossal amount of new residential buildings had been placed well outside
the perimeter of the Aurelian walls, a distinctive and sustainable alternative centre
would have been created. As it was, a weak centre that was too close to develop its
own complete set of services fused with the historic core and amplified the latter’s
congestion.
But it is very difficult to complain about Umbertine town planning’s lack of fore-
thought. Taking into consideration the state of the ‘culture’ of town planning of the time
(which had not yet been defined as such) and the very limited capacities for planning
for the future, Umbertine town planning at least adopted a certain general development
strategy.
Fascist town planning
In turn, Fascist town planning – which found itself facing even greater population growth
(in absolute terms, whereas the relative increase was similar) than in the preceding
period, with an increase from 500,000 inhabitants at the end of the First World War to
1,500,000 on the eve of the Second World War – only reinforced the radial development
established by the Umbertine plans, in particular that of 1883. (See Figures 2.8 to
2.10.) With respect to Rome’s peculiar problem – the need for a new commercial and
administrative centre – Fascist town planning (as exemplified in the town plan of 19312)
did not provide any pertinent response.
It is only with the planning of EUR – brought about by the choice of Rome as the
venue for the projected 1942 Universal Exposition, thus not an occasion that by itself
entailed a deliberate and rational strategy for planning for Rome as a whole – that an
city’ may be considered as comprising all these ‘historic’ places overall. Moreover, with Umbertine
and Fascist town planning the Piazza ColonnaPiazza Venezia axis came again to represent the heart
of this historic centre. The best-known historian of this period is surely Italo Insolera, who developed
his research through a great quantity of writings (of which we could select Insolera 1959, 1960,
1971, 1979 and 1995). See also La Padula (1958). On the development of the population and the
nature of employment in Rome from the unification until the Fascist period, see writings by F. Maroi
(1934a, b and c).
8
Italietta was the ironic nickname given by the Fascists to Italy and its achievements during the
period from immediately after the political unification under the new monarchy until the First World
War. The nickname is intended to express the small role and prestige of the nation within the world
community, in comparison with its increasing role, prestige and ‘greatness’ under the Fascist regime.
In fact, Fascist Italy exploited and profited from the work begun in that previous era, in which the
foundations were laid for further development in several key fields of national life (from the railways
to social welfare, from the car and airplane industries to unionization, and from electrification to the
fiscal system).
8 An inadequate strategic response

urban project was initiated that may be considered as answering a historical need for a
serious alternative to the existing centre. Could this have been a motivation for EUR? It
is difficult to say. Some indications can be found in private documents that the problem
of establishing an alternative centre was felt even then. But other testimonies of the
time seem to indicate that EUR’s location was chosen more as part of an ‘expansion’
towards the sea – in the rhetoric of the era it was presented as a ‘conquest’ of the sea
– than as an alternative to the function of the old centre. The historic centre’s role was,
in fact, emphasized in imperialistic Fascist rhetoric, especially as the location of many
of the regime’s ‘great works’.
Clear evidence for judgement on this issue has not even been provided in the vast
documentation on ‘E42’ (the Rome Universal Exposition) recently highlighted by an
initiative promoted by the Ministry for Culture (the Central State Archive), Rome’s
City Council and the University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’ (see Calvesi et al. 1987).
Of the documents that emerged, only a few are clearly concerned with the aim of
creating a functional alternative to the centre of Rome. One document, presented by
G. Borrelli De Andreis at the Fifth National Congress of Roman Studies (April 1938),
recommends creating ‘not a satellite, but a new star of equal size, not a simple area of
Rome, but a new Rome, a modern Rome with equal characteristics of monumentality
and universality, etc.’ (Borelli De Andreis 1938). But the regime’s commitment, in the
town plan of 1931-2, to equipping the old centre with new monuments and business
and administrative areas was so strong that the principal aims that emerged in E42 were
those of an expansion of the city and an expansion ‘towards the sea’ rather than the
creation of an alternative centre.
However, the Second World War radically postponed these problems. And the town
planning of the period, which found itself occupied with managing EUR, was delayed
in any aims to establish EUR as a viable alternative to the historic centre. Moreover, in
the meantime resistance emerged to the idea of expansion towards the sea, for reasons
of a geographical nature that were, moreover, pertinent.
Postwar town planning
Unfortunately, not even postwar town planning (often called, though quite incorrectly,
‘modern’ town planning) managed to formulate an adequate strategic response to
the problem of Rome’s heritage and its continuing population growth (Figures 2.11 to
2.15). After 1945 Rome continued to grow rapidly, its metropolitan population reaching
3,000,000 by 1971. Although there was much discussion of Roman planning at the
time, as part of a national engagement with material and institutional development, the
city’s historic centre continued to be treated as sacred ground that could not be altered
in any way; and despite the completion of EUR no grand strategy for metropolitan
development emerged.
The most important strategic response after the Second World War was an asse
attrezzato (literally ‘equipped axis’ – a linear development along a transport route,
including a mix of businesses, shops and recreational and cultural facilities) to the east of
the historic centre, which in time was transformed into a plan for a Sistema Direzionale
Orientale (‘Eastern Business and Administrative System’) or SDO. Born in the debates
of the 1950s as an alternative to the Fascists’ intention of expanding Rome to the west
towards the sea and advocating instead development towards the east, the idea of an asse
attrezzato was incorporated into the master plan of 1962-5. The asse attrezzato (Figure
 An inadequate strategic response 9

2.14) explicitly aimed to resolve a pair of interconnecting problems. First, it aimed

to break away from the traditional convergence of all development initiatives on the
historic centre and, importantly, to create an eastward urban structure as an alternative
to Rome’s dominant northsouth orientation. The second aim was to ‘equip’ this axis
with an infrastructure that would support traffic, access, communication, services, and
economic and cultural activities. Finally, there was also an explicit intention to create
an alternative to the historic centre that would alleviate the pressure of rapid growth.
Unfortunately, this response was limited and was shown to be insufficient to match
the city’s emerging needs. Moreover, the asse attrezzato never managed to get off the
ground; as a result, growth was never transposed to a different centre but instead contin-
ued around the periphery of the historic centre, spreading in virtually every direction.
The financial cost of some the works needed for the asse attrezzato to be realized (no
feasibility study was done) would have required very strong and authoritative manage-
ment capable of administering adequate operational contracts in order to negotiate the
interests and opinions of numerous institutional investors. However, public managers
proved unable to control private initiatives, and they soon gave up trying.
It is easy judge in retrospect, of course, but the proposed asse attrezzato was doomed
to fail from the outset. In its rationale it was several decades too late (perhaps it would
have worked in the 1920s or 1930s); its financial feasibility was never verified; and
it was entirely inadequate to handle the complexity of contemporary postwar urban
growth, let alone the predicted future expansion. Located mainly between the Tiburtina
and the Casilina main roads (to be more precise, between the Pietralata and Centocelle
areas), the proposed development lay away from the historic centre but well within the
peripheral areas that had already been drawn into the centre’s orbit and in which all of
the centre’s undesirable attributes of density and congestion were reproduced. The asse
attrezzato, had it been implemented, would have led to a conspicuous rationalization
and reorganization of an area that had grown in a disordered way – but an area that
had already been established. Strategically located too close to the old centre, the new
development would not have created an alternative centre. In short, this new proposed
business and administrative area was compromised and hamstrung before it was even
born.
Thus the master plan of 1962-5, and the asse attrezzato in particular, suffered the
same fate as the Umbertine and Fascist plans: instead of creating an alternative to
the traditional centre, they allowed its incremental expansion. All this has happened
because of the lack of a pluralistic vision for the city, because of short-sightedness
and the adoption of specious and narrowly technical schemes. These flaws in the
imagination of architects and planners reflected a larger political culture dominated
by narrow-minded landowners and deceitful politicians. In summary, what I wish to
emphasize here is that the town planning even of the postwar period, particularly the
master plan of 1962-5, has been, and will continue to be, an inadequate response to
Rome’s peculiar problems.
Franco Archibugi, Rome. A new planning strategy, London 2005, pp. 1 – 4, 17 – 21.