The Danteum is an unbuilt monument proposed by a scholar of

Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian people, Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', origin ...

, approved by the Benito Mussolini's Fascist government, designed by the modernist architect

Giuseppe Terragni Giuseppe Terragni (; 18 April 1904 – 19 July 1943) was an Italian architect who worked primarily under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and pioneered the Italian modern movement under the rubric of Rationalism. His most famous work is the C ...

. However, in the end about all that remains now are some sketches on paper, scraps of an architectural model of the project and pieces of a project report (''Relazione''), written by Terragni. The structure was meant to be built in Rome on the Via dell'Impero. The intention was to celebrate the famous Italian poet

and extol the virtues of a strong fascist state that bases its foundations on the glory of imperial Rome. The residues of the project give us the unfulfilled dream of Terragni for a monument to Dante, in which the ''

Divine Comedy The ''Divine Comedy'' ( it, Divina Commedia ) is an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun 1308 and completed in around 1321, shortly before the author's death. It is widely considered the pre-eminent work in Italian literature ...

'' was projected in an architectural scheme.

History

In 1938 Rino Valdameri, then director of the

Brera Academy The Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera ("academy of fine arts of Brera"), also known as the or Brera Academy, is a state-run tertiary public academy of fine arts in Milan, Italy. It shares its history, and its main building, with the Pinacoteca di ...

in Milan and president of the ''Società Dantesca Italiana'' (Italian Dante Society), had proposed to the

Mussolini Cabinet The Mussolini government was the longest-serving government in the history of united Italy. The Cabinet administered the country from 31 October 1922 to 25 July 1943, for a total of 7,572 days, or 20 years, 8 months and 25 days. On taking offi ...

to build, in time for the Universal Exposition of Rome E.42, a ''Danteum'' to celebrate the great poet. The project was commissioned by Valdameri to Terragni and Pietro Lingeri and was supported by steel industrialist

milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...

ese the count Alessandro Poss who had made available the sum of two million '' lire'' as a personal contribution to the project execution.T.L. Schumacher, cit., p.21 Valdameri had also proposed a board of directors of twenty members to the nascent institution, made up of ministers, supporters and intellectuals, ''under the high supervision of the Head of government'' (Mussolini). The Valdameri himself had proposed some names for the board, including

Giovanni Gentile Giovanni Gentile (; 30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian idealist philosopher, educator, and fascist politician. The self-styled "philosopher of Fascism", he was influential in providing an intellectual foundation for ...

and Ugo Ojetti. November 10, 1938, at the

Palazzo Venezia The Palazzo Venezia or Palazzo Barbo (), formerly Palace of St. Mark, is a palazzo (palace) in central Rome, Italy, just north of the Capitoline Hill. The original structure of this great architectural complex consisted of a modest medieval hous ...

, the Valdameri and the designers present the project and they obtained the consent of the ''Duce''. However, because of the political developments that led to the entrance into the

war War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, destruction, and mortality, using regular o ...

, the subsequent hearings to discuss the project, still they had been continuously postponed. At the very end the dream of the realization of the building dedicated to Dante Alighieri and the ''Divine Comedy'', remained on paper.

The Project

Regarding the project papers, we are left with a few copies of the boards of the panels with bas-reliefs, that had been photographed and entered in the drawings, and the project report of Giuseppe Terragni. Compositionally, the Danteum was conceived as an allegory of the ''

''. It consists of a sequence of monumental spaces that parallel the narrator's journey from the "dark wood" through hell, purgatory, and paradise. Rather than attempting to illustrate the narrative, however, Terragni focuses on the text's form and rhyme structure, translating them into the language of carefully proportioned spaces and unadorned surfaces typical of

Italian Rationalism In architecture, Rationalism is an architectural current which mostly developed from Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Vitruvius had claimed in his work ''De architectura'' that architecture is a science that can be comprehended rationally. The formu ...

. Because of the complex of literary, artistic, and architectural meaning associated with the design, the theorist

Aarati Kanekar Aarati Kanekar is an academic, writer, researcher, and architect. Biography Aarati Kanekar graduated in Architecture at the "Center for Environmental Planning and Technology" in Ahmedabad in India in 1989, she completed her graduate studies from ...

regards it as exemplary of how a spatial structure can express a sophisticated poetic meaning without an explicit "vocabulary" of architectural symbols.

References

Bibliography

* Thomas L. Schumacher, ''The Danteum'', New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1985 * Aarati Kanekar, "From Building to Poem and Back: The Danteum as a Study in the Projection of Meaning Across Symbolic Forms" in '' The Journal of Architecture'' volume 10 issue April 2, 2005 (RIBA & Routledge) {{DEFAULTSORT:Barca de Aqueronte Italian fascist architecture Cultural depictions of Dante Alighieri Unfinished buildings and structures Works based on the Divine Comedy