Rome as State Image: The Architecture and Urbanism of the Royal Italian Government, 1870-1900

The ancient heritage of Rome served the Risorgimento as its most potent symbol of unity. For the nascent Italian regime, the possession of the Eternal City was necessary to ensure abiding unity and to acquire international prestige. Seizing Rome in 1870 and abolishing papal temporal power, Italian leaders confronted a city full of symbols of Church authority and a rival head of state in the Pope. His continued presence and assertions of sovereignty challenged Italian claims to the possession of Rome. Within this sociopolitical context, the Italian government undertook a massive urban works program, two-fold in purpose: to eliminate signs of Church control and to remake Rome into a state image, which, by evoking antiquity, would propagate the permanence, legitimacy and imperial power of united Italy. The program involved (1) the excavation and restoration of ancient monuments stripped of Christian accretions; (2) the opening of large streets through the old city and establishment of a new urban center in the ancient heart of Rome; (3) the construction of large and conspicuous public buildings along those new streets; (4) the burial of King Vittorio Emanuele II in the Pantheon and mythologization of the royal office; and (5) the erection of the enormous and highly visible monument to the King--the Vittoriano--on the Capitoline Hill as the centerpiece of the program. By analyzing each operation through architectural images, government documents, personal correspondence, newspaper reports and other contemporary published accounts, one finds that a small number of politicians directed the urban program and exploited the large-scale and prominence of its works for state propaganda. The intensely political character of the renovation of Rome by the Italian government differed markedly from the functional and commercial rationale of earlier urban renewals schemes and set an important precedent for Mussolini's work in Rome and Hitler's plans for Berlin.