nm0048: there's a sign-up sheet starting from him and going to the front 
hopefully so if you suddenly realize you haven't got it give us a shout now 
what i want to do today is to look at another case study 'cause we were looking 
last time at er the Imperial Way Via dell dell'Impero at the centre of Rome 
connecting the Colosseum up to the Victor Emmanuel monument yes remember that 
bit maybe bit hazy so there's a message also from namex that your seminar this 
week er which if you haven't got the sheets from last time 'cause i gave them 
out there are some there so collect one on the way out they will be on Friday 
he's going to put a sheet up on the board to sign up to put you into groups so 
as usual seminars this week there's no lecture on Thursday right so today we 
want to look at what is known as Foro Italica it's where the Olympic Stadium is 
in Rome and what was happening in terms of the setting up of that architectural 
space so we want to carry on with our theme of looking at 
architecture as a setting for modern activities in this case with reference to 
sport in particular in the nineteen-thirties nineteen-twenties and nineteen-
thirties and looking at the references back to antiquity now to do that we have 
to do a certain amount of modern history which we'll try and keep to the 
minimum i mean in terms of dates events et cetera things to know so i want to 
start off with a quick run-through of the things which are happening in terms 
of modern history which are needed for doing this bit of the course right now 
the key thing here is the there's a reference back to antiquity always when it 
comes to the Olympics by the Olympic movement er on the bibliography there's an 
article by namex History department looking at the earlier history of the 
Olympics so if you want to know more about the Olympics generally now key 
things in terms of what is happening in Rome once again Mussolini isn't 
starting something completely new it's a key 
thing here is it's not completely new nineteen-o-eight Rome had made a bid for 
the Olympic Games definite bid to get the Olympic Games into Rome there were 
plans to build a new stadium build a new sporting complex so in this case we 
get an example of something which has been thought of been done before but is 
going to have a greater relevance in the nineteen-thirties in terms of actual 
happening the Rome is also making a bid for the Olympics of nineteen-forty and 
nineteen-forty-four and it was decided in the late thirties that Rome would 
have the Olympics in nineteen-forty-four which never happened after the Second 
World War this building over here became the headquarters of the Olympic 
movement so although this is strongly associated with fascist Italy its use 
today is linked in to that tradition of the Olympics now in terms of what we 
need to know here there is something called the O-N-B right now the O-N-B is 
it's on your handout most of the factual details 
you'll find are on your handout the O-N-B is a national organization for youth 
and in terms of what it does it's a very male it's called the Opera Nazionale 
Balilla Balilla was a revolutionary in Italy in the seventeen-forties who 
revolted against Austria brought Italy away from Austria so it's a reference 
back to Italian history but if we look at the organization this is the male 
organization the female organization is quite is simple in terms of it's a 
different structure if you're between the ages of nought and fourteen you are 
er the female children of Italy if you're from fourteen to eighteen you are the 
young women of Italy so again there is a er a female aspect to this as well as 
the male aspect the male aspect has more references back to antiqui-, to 
antiquity the structure of the whole organization is imbued with ideas of 
antiquity between the ages of nought and eight you're in what's called the 
groups known as the Sons of the Wolf now we're 
straight back to Romulus and Remus here we're straight back into that idea of 
antiquity but then between the ages of eight to fourteen you're what known 
you're in what's known as the Balilla the Balilla is again this revolutionary 
from the eighteenth century so that's a reference to Italian history it's 
creating the two together in between fourteen and eighteen you become members 
of the Advanced Guard so in terms of that structure we have an automatic 
reference back to antiquity reference to Italian national history and then a 
reference to what's going on now to seems to er see the Advanced Guard of 
Fascism and again the cult of youth is very important here now when you go 
through the actual organization as well in terms of how the boys are organized 
eleven boys is what's known as a squad then you have three squads equals a 
maniple a maniple is one of those names used for military organizations in 
ancient Rome then you have three mam-, maniples makes up a 
century typical idea of Roman organization the century again and then you have 
three centuries equals a cohort and three cohorts equals a legion they don't 
replicate antiquity but they make reference to antiquity's military 
organization now what does the O-N-B do really it's a organization for children 
to be in principally it's also involved in physical education physu-, physical 
education and the setting up of athletics organizations so the link comes from 
this voluntary organization it's a sort of after school organization you could 
see parallels with things like the Hitler Youth in Germany the other thing the 
O-N-B which is all you need to know don't try and learn the long title what 
it's doing in Rome is it's setting up plans after it set up in nineteen-twenty-
six we see the first plans for the sports complexes in Rome now the key here is 
the g-, link between sport education and politicalization the three things go 
together and what is also set up in that year is 
the fascist Academy of Physical Education and that academy is was going to be 
in this building here right right next this is the Olympic Stadium people may 
know from football and on this side over here was going to be the er Academy 
for Swimming so on this side you have swimming this side you have athletics 
right in the middle you have the football stadium so what we want to look at 
here is to think through how this structure is being set up what are the 
architects doing in terms of references back to antiquity and what are they 
trying to do in the present so here what we see when we go to Foro Italico 
sorry over there today we see the setting for this organization the setting up 
for seeing the idea of sport education and politicalization all running 
together so just have some more dates on this side and then we're go and look 
at the actual structures themselves which is probably more interesting now 
originally what was going to be set up was a Forum of Sport 
Forum of Sport had always been on the cards the idea of the ancient concept of 
a forum this had been an idea floating around from the nineteen-o-eight 
Olympics bid that there should be a new Forum of Sport now that concept the 
plan to set up in nineteen-twenty-seven and gradually as the plans evolve we 
find that Mussolini is starting to im-, be put over the top of those plans 
nineteen-twenty-seven you have to remember was only five years after the march 
on Rome by Mussolini so the state the fascist state is only five years old now 
in nineteen-thirty the Forum of Sport is renamed the Forum of Mussolini today 
we call it Forum of Italy because it was re named again after the war 'cause it 
couldn't any longer be called the Forum of Mussolini it wasn't politically er 
we would say today correct or politically acceptable then in nineteen-thirty 
it's renamed by the architect the Forum of Mussolini at this point there is a 
linking back of the person onto if you 
think in the nineteen-thirties early nineteen-thirties the excavations of the 
Forum of Augustus are beginning as we saw last time or the Forum of Julius 
Caesar or the Forum of Trajan so again the associations of the word forum 
suggests sort of basically a square around which buildings are placed in terms 
of antiquity but by linking it to a named person you have a link back to the 
emperors of Rome so again we have this link with antiquity now the actual 
structures take have been being constructed up to nineteen-thirty-two and this 
is the te-, for the tenth anniversary of the march on Rome they are inaugurated 
so again nineteen-thirty-two's a very important date to know as we saw last 
time when we were talking about the Imperial Way in the centre of Rome 
connecting the Colosseum to the Victor Emmanuel monument so tenth anniversary 
Mussolini goes to inaugurate the first buildings are completed and its the 
first buildings included the Obelisk here the Athletics 
Academy and the stadium's behind it what we then find is in nineteen-thirty-
seven additional structures are being built nineteen-thirty-seven is the year 
in which empire is declared for Italy and this is where we find Piazza 
dell'Impero or the Piazza of Empire which is in here before you get to the 
Olympic Stadium that is completed for nineteen-thirty-seven and what we 
gradually see in terms of what this structure's doing it's outside Rome it's to 
the north of Rome but it's going to be the entry point into Rome 
so it's almost as though this is going to be the first point on what you could 
say is the entrance into Rome entrance into modern Rome right so in terms of a 
boring date that will keep you going for your exams basically in a year's time 
that's all the dates you would ever need to know there are some more on the 
handout but that's the overall political structure is there so key thing let's 
think back it's not a new project but there's going to be something different 
about it once it becomes more er organized by fascism and will have a greater 
reference to antiquity right so to look at the structures themselves we're 
mostly going to be concerned with the athletics area the i put on your handout 
er illustrations of all the buildings we're actually going to be referring to 
so afterwards you can look through them rather than having to depend on memory 
from the slides i show you right the first action which is taken in this 
process is to drain this 
area just to the north of the Tiber in doing so a law is passed that all Rome's 
rubbish should be deposited here for two to three years and so it gradually 
builds up the embankment of the Tiber here this is just a marshy area which is 
going to be reclaimed and we see in that reclamation is is using a useless 
piece of land and reclaiming it through modern technology to create something 
new to create a new quarter of Rome and you might thinking here of s-, 
parallels with things like the draining of the Pontine marshes one of the most 
famous activities of the fascist government the plan itself is fairly simple in 
terms of a series of stadiums series of areas for which people are going to be 
mostly to do with sport now the key thing after nineteen-thirty-seven there's 
going to be a greater influence of politics politics becomes more important and 
the idea the architect's vision of what the area should look like the area is 
down here of the sports stadiums and 
overlooking it should be the monument to fascism this rather strange victory 
monument which they made a model of it a mock-up of it again what we're going 
to see throughout the Forum of Mussolini is the idea of the male body the male 
body and the cult of the body is going to come through time and time again so 
the plan to overlook it is a colossal struc-, statue now colossal statues in 
the ancient world er you probably know that the Colossus of Nero next to the 
Colosseum was one of the enormous statues from antiquity here you're going to 
see a ca-, a colossus put next to and overlooking the modern sports stadium and 
it's significant that the Colosseum in Ancient Rome gets its name from the 
colossal statue next to it so again putting a colossal statue in there is not 
an original idea it has a reference straight back to antiquity now in terms of 
structure this is nineteen-thirties view of the stadium so remember the modern 
stadium modern Olympic Stadium got 
extended for the last World Cup in nineteen-ninety here we see something 
different so if you were coming to the s-, to the stadium itself we want to 
move through what you would see the first thing you see is this enormous 
obelisk which is the first thing we want to look at then we want to look at 
this piazza the Piazza of Empire before looking at this structure here the 
central area for athletics in fascist Italy and looking at the stadium behind 
it before finally moving on to what was the football stadium itself so and 
we're going to pick up references to antiquity right the way through 
sf0049: are all those buildings part of the forum 
nm0048: yeah the thing with the forum is if in Ancient Rome in republican Rome 
the forum is a piazza which is surrounded by buildings put placed around it so 
when we say a forum we mean the whole area the whole area is called Forum 
Mussolini or Foro Mussolini so the individual buildings make up the forum right 
the first thing is the obelisk now this obelisk as you can see 
has Mussolini's name on it and says D-U there's an X there Dux so leader 
reference back to Julius Caesar being perpetual dictator just as Mussolini is 
perpetual dictator however significantly this is made out of virtually one 
block of Carrara marble Carrara marble you may know is the white marble which 
Michelangelo uses that was f-, used for the first time in Augustan Rome the and 
you can see inscribed in it is one of the fasciae which we were talking about 
last time so always look for things like fasciae they crop up everywhere after 
a while the cutting of the block itself this was the biggest block of Carrara 
marble ever quarried again that idea of we're going to be better than 
everything which has gone in the past is there we're going to use the biggest 
piece of Carrara marble so it was d-, cut out at the quarry and then it was 
dragged by oxen through the towns of Italy it was something which was reported 
in Italian magazines and in the Italian press it was an 
event in itself to actually bring this thing by road through the towns north of 
Rome and the spectacle it's almost like the spectacle of the monolith of 
Mussolini this is going to be the new idea of the obelisk where as we're going 
to talk about think about how that relates to obelisks from antiquity in a 
moment it was set up er in a way which was used by the Popes to set up obelisks 
in front of Saint Peter's and using hydraulics again the idea of modern 
technology and its utilization to be celebrated is also part of the fascist 
ideology so it uses modern technology but will have a reference back to 
antiquity now in terms of what it looks like this is and architects' drawings 
actually show you a l-, a lot about how people th-, the architect is thinking 
about things in terms of light and dark you always have a lot of very dark er 
sort of the white and dark is very strong in Italian fascist drawings now this 
is what the architect sees it looking at it now the other thing to 
think of parallels with antiquity here is with the parallel with the Augustan 
sundial the Augustan sundial in Rome was made of an obelisk captured from Egypt 
brought back to Rome the obelisk itself was the pointer for the sundial now 
that structure is almost paralleled with this one 'cause it had the obelisk in 
the centre of this piazza which is which is called Piazzale di Impero or little 
piazza of Empire but on each of these blocks is recorded a date from the 
fascist age so whereas the Augustan sundial recorded things like hi-, 
Augustustus' horoscope in this case we're going to find put on here inscribed 
stones with significant dates from the modern state so the structure parallels 
the ancient sundial of Italy of Augustus but we have here the inscription of 
exact date rather than the pointer trying to point to them right so when you go 
there today and it's almost the same as it was then some of it's fallen apart 
and the blocks recording the various years of 
the fascist state are graffitied over deliberately as a sort of anti-fascist 
concept now in terms of what we have here is we have a piazza the obelisk is 
this way on and as you walk to the football stadium you walk over these modern 
mosaics modern mosaics which make reference back to the past but also contain 
very obvious fasciaes and then as you go across them you see various images as 
you move towards the stadium for instance on one side let's go back should 
point it out that on this side we have images in the mosaics of modern Italy of 
nineteen-thirties Italy and on the other side over here you have Ancient Rome 
so we were talking about last time how you have this juxtaposition of past and 
present so on the left you have the past on the right you have the present so 
they're put next to each other as this technology of power 
so we have obvious things like the Tiber the Tiber is generic because it's 
ancient and modern we also have on the other side the bull the symbol of Italy 
the idea of the whole of Italy so the Tiber in a way represents Rome whereas 
the bull will represent the whole of Italy and as you go up on the ancient side 
you find buildings such as the Theatre of Marcellus laid out in plan or some 
temples laid out in plan with their name put next to them then very clear 
mosaic idea then on the other side surprise surprise you have a plan of the 
Forum of Mussolini so again you have that juxtaposition between the ancient 
theatre the place of the games in terms of scenic ga-, games and then you have 
the modern one which you have various structures like the stadium the Olympic 
Stadium there and another sports stadium there so you have this constant 
juxtaposition even when there isn't antiquity actually there it's not present 
in any 
form in the Forum Mussolini as you go through you also see the blocks with the 
inscriptions now this one is the first block that you would see in terms of the 
sequence the sequence begins on the twenty-fourth of May nineteen- fifteen 
Italy enters the First World War that is the first action which is recorded 
here the first action is militaristic from recent history then as you go past 
them you see other ones this one is the ninth of May nineteen-thirty-six the 
proclamation of empire there's one for nineteen-twenty-two the fascist march on 
Rome so this is a way of marking the important dates from the recent past but 
putting them in the context of something which looks quite antique the 
architect's deliberately quoting from antiquity and the last one which is 
something which is reappropriated is the twenty-fifth of July nineteen-forty-
three the end of the er fascist regime and then after that there are a series 
of blank blocks and it's written under here a little graffiti 
which says instead it's continued so again its political commentary can be made 
on the monuments themselves and be reappropriated at the end of the piazza you 
find this fountain structure this is called the spherical fountain or the 
Fontana dei Sfera which is made out of another block of Carrara marble and to 
represent the Earth very much so like you see winged victories from antiquity 
standing on a globe so a reference to the idea of the whole empire around it we 
have fish mosaics mosaics which are very similar to those you find in Roman 
bathhouses so you could actually go to the monuments of Rome to see bathhouses 
and be here and you'd see modern ones made of slightly stylized fashion 
stylized differently it's the other thing you find in the mosaics as you get 
closer to the athletics stadiums are emphasis on what goes on here and you find 
here we have two boxers but they're placed in a di-, sort of rather antique 
form in terms of creating the bit of tree behind them 
as though it's some form of pastoral scene and you find other ones which some 
of them here we have somebody with a lionskin club looks very like Hercules so 
whoops so you can have modern ones and then you can have overtly antique 
references as well and you have a strutting very modernistic eagle running over 
the top again we saw eag-, the importance of eagles last time now the spherical 
fountain has a reference back to a small shrine of the goddess we don't have 
any yes we do a small fountain near the ancient forum is of where is it must be 
the other one Juturna J-U-T-U-R- N-A the Lacus Juturnae the fountain of Juturna 
is in the Forum at Rome so similarly in the Forum Mussolini we found a fountain 
structure as well again another reference back to the idea of a forum in 
antiquity being made in this very modern sports stadium area right the next 
building we need to look at is the Academy of Physical Education Academy of 
Physical Education stay 
on the Academy of Physical Education is one of those structures right antiquity 
also has mosaics and one of the boasts of these mosaics in the Forum of 
Mussolini is they are bigger than any mosaic from antiquity so it's almost that 
idea of remaking antiquity but bigger again and you have words such as er duce 
for us again key things key political messages to make the mosaics more 
didactic in a way that antiquity never had them so a way of putting Mussolini 
physically into the mosaics themselves don't have to do a picture of him you 
just use the word dux repeatedly and the word Mussolini right so we've looked 
so far at this area the entrance area if you were coming to see athletics or if 
you were going to be there at the planned nineteen-forty-four Olympics the 
athletics area this is the Academy for Athletics and behind it is what's known 
as the Stadium of Marble and on the other side this very low flat Olympic 
Stadium in its original form so we want 
to look at this one this one and the last one now Academy of Physical Education 
is built in a very modernistic style it looks different from flat buildings if 
you look at its overall plan it's built in a very peculiar modernistic fashion 
again we're talking about the futurism the rejection of everything to do with 
the past this building would add up to the same thing its structure not 
surprisingly you can spot the fasciaes here but it's full of statues statues 
crop up time and time again through these buildings and at the back in the 
stadium Stadio dei Marmi Stadium of Marbles we find eighty statues have been 
placed around the seating area so if you're watching the athletics or the 
events which are done here in terms of political events as well the thing which 
is looking over your shoulder are these four metre high statues they're all of 
males they're all in vaguely heroic forms now the statues themselves are 
donated by individual cities of Italy the statues are given they're individual 
cities commission the statues there's quite a few on your handout 
the donation all the specifications are that they should be four metres high 
they're all slightly different they're not all done by the same artist and give 
you an idea of one's this one is outside the stadium which shows huge muscular 
figures again this emphasis on the body and one of the things which Mussolini 
does regularly if he goes to visit people in the campaign for wheat which he 
the fascist stage orchestrates Mussolini takes off his shirt and starts helping 
to cut the wheat or he goes to the beach he takes off his shirt and goes in the 
sea so there's a cult of the body in Italy coming out here cult which can be 
produced through sport organizations or things like the O-N-B in particular and 
they're organizing it for adults but they're also organizing it for children to 
train children in the ways of physical exercise so i think very strong emphasis 
on being 
physically fit whether you are young or old now the statues themselves once 
you're inside they all repeat the similar theme of body perfection and the 
muscular body and they become vaguely heroic they're not like ancient statues 
key thing is they look like because they're naked they look like ancient 
statues but if you actually look at their features their far more modernistic 
style the style is quite different from let's say the Prima Porta Augustus 
Prima Porta Augustus looks like Augustan statues look very thin very effeminate 
in a way compared with this so the emphasis here is on the real man whereas st-,
statues of things like Apollo don't add up to that concept i-, within Italy of 
the real man the other feature of this stadium is its lowness it's very low in 
the ground now the stadiums all the stadiums were quite flat they were dug out 
of the ground and the Olympic Stadium you just have to block it out but again 
that would be a very low stadium so one of 
the things you're going to find is there are sculptural points which stick up 
'cause you tend t-, the statues stick up above the drop into the stadium itself 
now the stadium structure in terms of the organization of the stadium how you 
go into it also has parallels from the Colosseum because the spec-, the 
spectators come in this way having seen things like the spherical fountain 
mosaics et cetera they come in from this angle the people involved in the 
actual sport come in down this ramp into the what you could call the arena area 
there and this structure is paralleled in that of the Colosseum it's paralleled 
in that of the Circus Maximus from antiquity as well so again we can play this 
game of snap where there's something modern something antique very deliberate 
organization the and not surprisingly in the athletics area you have mosaics of 
people jumping running et cetera it's all still there today and it would have 
been er pristine at the time and you 
have things like equestrians and whatever this person could be doing presumably 
some form of wrestling but again that cult of the very big bulky body very 
muscular body is there even within things like the sprinters again there's this 
emphasis on the very sort of muscle toned male and one of the things is there 
are no female images on this at all whatsoever it's as though female sport just 
didn't exist and you see up here in the inscription is the inscription of O-N-B 
the organizers of the whole thing now that's one aspect of it terms of the 
sport aspect if you look at the middle photo here which has just slipped out of 
focus the here you see a military parade in that Stadium of Marbles with the 
statues around here another feature of the Forum of Mussolini is the idea of 
politicalization politicalization in terms of having great events occur here 
it's one of the things which children from all over Italy were sent to Rome to 
stay in the Forum of Mussolini 
for a number of weeks and one of the things they can see are the mass rallies 
of things like soldiers but another thing is the actual doing and one of the 
things they do is they grow wheat next to the Forum for children to come and 
cut again there's this thing in fascist Italy of the campaign for wheat but 
it's a very ideological campaign to grow more wheat and to bring children into 
the idea of growing more wheat they were brought here to practise sport but 
they also went out to cut the wheat in the summer as well so there's a double 
purpose here in terms of ideology the building in the background is a building 
which has now become the Italian Foreign Ministry this is the Palace of the 
Fascists the Palace of the Lictors and this structure is set up as the new 
headquarters of fascism in Rome of the Fascist Party not of the government but 
of the Fascist Party there's a difference to be made there and outside of it in 
this square here was a huge piazza area piazza area which 
could contain four-hundred-thousand people sort of very like Tiananmen Square 
in China similar type of structure and in architect's drawing not surprisingly 
you have things like an obelisk horses here ideas about Castor and Pollux put 
two horses together in if you've imbued everybody with the ideology of fascism 
people automatically think of Castor and Pollux and Castor and Pollux of course 
helped the Romans in a battle so it's those twins again Roman history made 
large by association and the key element here is if you are watching a 
spectacle here or taking part in the spectacle you can always see the fascist 
headquarters this idea of visibility is very important what other monuments you 
can see so there is the political headquarters is put next to the sporting 
headquarters of Italy in terms of the Fascist Party 
now to look briefly at the Olympic Stadium because it's a bit sport fanatics in 
terms of what it looks like today it's been had another stadium put on to 
increase the seating capacity originally it was a s-, a stadium this stadium 
still lies underneath it if you go to this er to Italian football match today 
you come out of one of these things and then there's about that much more 
stadium on top of it now the thing with this stadium is it seats fifty-five-
thousand people is the design it's a design it was going to be called the 
Stadium for Fifty-five-thousand people it is now that number in itself is the 
same number as it's estimated was as the number of people who'd get in the 
Colosseum so if you think about the forums of of Ancient Rome next to the 
Colosseum here we have the forums of modern Rome next to the stadium the 
Olympic Stadium the structure of it is again seating a low surround but on 
top of it are these huge eagles now the eagles also contained floodlights again 
so there's again there's technology here one of the things which you see is 
that use of technology modern technology but you turn the floodlights into 
eagles to make them look classical so there's a double usage here something 
very modern but it has a reference back to antiquity and the other feature of 
it a series of flagpoles this is used for Hitler's visit to Rome in the ninet-, 
nineteen-thirty-eight and for the huge displays of government of sort of 
government popularity what are called sometimes the oceanic displays like it's 
a ocean of people in front of it right so if we're going to think about the 
effect of all this in terms of Rome and the effect of what the intention is one 
of the things we talked about very beginning today was the idea of a triumphal 
route the idea of the Forum of Mussolini as being the entry point into the city 
Forum of Mussolini being where people came into 
the city and the concept is to create a triumphal route from the Foro Mussolini 
you go across the river you go into through the city walls of Rome the original 
third century A-D walls of Rome you go down the road to the piazza with 
Augustus' mausoleum in which we were talking about last time you then move on 
to the Victor Emmanuel monument in the centre of Rome and you end at the 
Colosseum now that route is so strongly created in terms of traffic route that 
today after a great victory by Roma or Italy or Lazio in the er the football 
stadium people go straight down that route it's exactly the same route into 
Rome er to celebrate at the Colosseum and in front of the Victor Emmanuel 
monument so what's being created is not just the Forum of Mussolini the Forum 
of Mussolini is being created to connect into the rest of the architecture of 
Rome it's going to become an important point within the architecture of Rome 
now so one key thing is to link the celebration of 
things like the sport which takes place in these low buildings with the vision 
of the statues around in the Stadium of Marble and at the same time within the 
stucture you have the technology of floodlights this is opening of the Olympic 
Games stuff the style of the nineteen-thirties i think we all know about the 
sor-, opening of Olympic Games seem to be completely over the top events of 
choreography but this also happened in the nineteen-thirties and would be lit 
up at night again that use of technology to use the stadium at night's there 
the other thing as you can see from this picture which is the football stadium 
you can always see the Palace of the Fascists nearby it creates that link with 
the Fascist Party but the other thing which is nearly always visible from 
anywhere in the original stadium is the Obelisk of Mussolini so Mussolini is 
there if not present at the opening of these events is present by simply seeing 
the enormous obelisk which has been 
reported in the press so successfully and typically people stand in these 
arenas so you can get lots of people in there's none of this seating problem 
which is the current football stadium reduces the number of people in there the 
other key thing to think about although a lot of the artistic style is has a 
reference back to antiquity the way it's drawn and the way it's represented is 
linking in to er Italy's modern artistic movement which has a particular 
emphasis on the body emphasis on the body and those chunky sculptures people 
are making a lot of sculptures out of of things like peasantry in the nineteen-
thirties there's a you go to Rome's modern art gallery you'll see a lot of very 
very chunky these chunky sculptures can also be found in art galleries as well 
as in the stadium itself so in terms of themes from antiquity what are we 
seeing the key theme of the Forum of Mussolini sure you can go backwards is the 
idea that it links in with the Forums of 
Augustus Trajan Nerva Julius Caesar and it seemed to be bigger than them like 
the mosaics are larger than those of antiquity the piece of Carrara marble cut 
for that obelisk is bigger than any ever so bigger than any ever is important 
so there's comparison but there's surpassing antiquity to create the new state 
of Italy ver-, sorry to create that new idea of civilization we always find 
with people who start using classical antiquity they're always creating 
something new and classical antiquity is almost the reference point which it's 
going to be better than that brave new world idea sort of modern utopia the 
other thing to think about is there's reference back to antiquity via the 
seating capacity with things like this stadium it's er automatic why is it 
called the Stadium of Fifty-five-thousand it's because the Colosseum held the 
same number there's that reference back to antiquity you can also see that this 
structure is the beginning of the triumphal 
route into Rome whereas the Colosseum is the end so you begin with the modern 
world and you end with antiquity so a new triumphal route into Rome is being 
created by this new structure the other link is to empire and to always think 
of the dates the inauguration dates you keep that nineteen-thirty-two is when 
the obelisk the Stadium of Marbles and the football stadium were all completed 
inaugurated by Mussolini nineteen-thirty-seven the inauguration of the Imperial 
Square with that round fountain in it is the next stage so those two dates 
incredibly important the other thing to link in terms of empire is the cult of 
the body the idea of youth and in particular the fact that 
you can always see images of empire wherever you go in this building you see 
images of things like the eagles holding the floodlights you see Mussolini 
placed onto the architecture so in terms of architectural setting the 
architectural setting creates the ambience of a certain type of thinking about 
the Italian state certain type of thinking which goes back to the ancient world 
but also looks forward to a modern future which will surpass that of the 
ancient world right it's ten to so it's lunchtime if you have any questions do 
come and ask er and your seminar's on Friday