There are urban legends that endure strongly, that endure over the years, transmitted orally and not through documents. When it comes to a disputed building, even repulsive to some, the game ends quickly. I am referring to the so-called Torre Littoria, known as “Mussolini’s finger” or Casa del Fascio, which stands in Piazza Castello in Savoy.
A few days ago we discussed it, in a meeting at the Pannunzio Center, between Gianluca Giani and I, who wrote the book “The Enchantment of the Tower”, whose author is the nephew of the designer Armando Melis. The building, owned by Reale Mutua, was built solely as a prestigious residential building, that is, simply a real estate investment or rather a real estate speculation in the nascent Sant’Emanuele block.
Michele Guerrisi writes: «The artist did not want to give the impression of a mass constituted by the mechanical superposition of numerous apartments, whose existence could be indifferent to the third or the fifteenth floor, but he wanted to link it to a unique expression of audacity. and from grace a universal feeling, he would say of pride and civic audacity, something very similar to the feeling that germinated the Garisenda and the Tuscan towers of the Palazzi del Popolo.”
The thing is that, in addition to the aforementioned real estate investment, the surface was not large, so it was necessary to grow vertically, Turin lacked a Tower, present in all Italian cities, especially those with a strong medieval connotation. Furthermore, it was intended to carry out the rehabilitation, today we would say urban regeneration, of the second section of Via Roma, between Piazza San Carlo and Piazza Carlo Felice.
39 projects were presented, after the competition – in which Melis himself participated – where it was recommended: «a style that did not contrast with the beautiful 18th century eurythmy of Piazza San Carlo and with the elegant neoclassical severity of Piazza Carlo Felice, but with these it harmonized without heaviness or monotony, continuing the noble tradition of that elegant architectural style, which is the characteristic glory of Turin.”
Melis responded in the pages of the magazine “Urbanistica”, which he founded: “It is useless to waste words on the recommendations that the Commission wanted to dedicate to the architectural question. It is an area that would have been better avoided and no one would have complained about it, especially as the Commission had no specific mandate to fulfill in this matter. We hope that the buildings of Via Roma emerge without prejudices of harmonization, sincere and adherent to their craft, dressed in the only beauty we can give them: that of our time.” This is how the new Via Roma emerged from a group of architects coordinated by Marcello Piacentini , academic from Italy, one of the Masters of Rationalism, along with the group of 6 from Turin, Betta, Pagano, Levi Montalcini, Perona, Soldiero, Morelli and other other architects such as Adalberto Libera, who work in other regions, Cesare Valle, Terragni, Rava, Figini, Pollini, masters not only of institutional or regime architecture but of very modern living spaces such as our Reale Mutua residential tower.