The Colossus of Mussolini

Abstract

In 1933, Renato Ricci, President of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, proposed to move the place of Benito Mussolini’s gatherings from Piazza Venezia to the slopes of Monte Mario, into the Foro Mussolini, a complex mainly dedicated to sport activities. Ricci entrusted Luigi Moretti with the design of the vast esplanade of the Arengo delle Nazioni and a huge bronze statue of the Genius of Fascism upon the hill of Monte Mario, which was to incarnate the physiognomy of Mussolini himself. For the first time, the projects produced by a group of engineers, architects—Mansutti and Miozzo, Paniconi and Pediconi, Del Debbio, and Moretti himself—and Aroldo Bellini, the sculptor chosen to create the new Colossus of Rome, are here systematically reordered, analyzed, and discussed in the historical, political, and artistic scenarios of 1930s Italy to reconstruct a forgotten chapter of the megalomaniacal plans promoted by the fascist regime to turn Rome into the capital of a new empire.

1. Introduction

In the early 1930s, the fascist leader Renato Ricci entrusted a group of architects, artists, engineers, and craftsmen with the design and construction of a colossal bronze statue of Hercules to depict the Genius of Fascism in Rome. This project was almost unique in the Italian and European panorama not only for the proper sculptural and iconographical aspects of the immense statue, shaped by Aroldo Bellini, but also for its architectural and structural features, which were to transform the landscape of the Eternal City. The site chosen for the statue was the top of a hill by Monte Mario overlooking the Foro Mussolini, in the northern part of the city, near the Tiber. On this occasion, Enrico Del Debbio and Luigi Moretti, who were responsible for the general development of the Foro, were joined by other architects—Mansutti and Miozzo, Paniconi and Pediconi, and Costantino Costantini. They took turns designing the Colosso Littorio, the surrounding area, and part of the sport facilities. However, by the end of the 1930s, the idea was gradually shelved and a veil of silence fell. It lasted for decades. Even today, information about the Colossus’ story is scarce and fragmentary. Historians and journalists cyclically revive the topic (Lombardo 1994; Luzzatto 2008; Isman 2021), but they generally only address the main impressive aspects. Occasionally (Quintini 1988; Vicario 2015), these aspects are taken from the reports of some witnesses of that age (Navarra 1946), but they are rarely cross-referenced with other documents. From an architectural point of view, scholars have mentioned the project within biographic works on Ricci (Setta 1987; Greco and Santuccio 1989) and the main architects involved (Muntoni 1987; Mulazzani 2005; Neri and Muirhead 2006; Greco 2011). However, besides an early version of this paper (Vyazemtseva and Malich 2023, pp. 335–54), there is no monographic study on the design process of the Colossus and its iconographical and landscape implications.

The analysis of known and unpublished documents, the systematization of information, and the critical redrawing and three-dimensional modeling of some projects preserved in some Italian archives allowed the authors to shed light on some aspects. Reordering the documents contributed to understanding the narrative of and figurative references for the colossal statue of the Duce, as well as to understand how, as the project developed, the building at the base of the Colossus came to become the Museum of Fascism to house the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs and the Fascist Revolution Exhibition, set up in 1932 in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. In this sense, the formal evolution of the project was related to the political scenario, which saw the regime first search for legitimation in the past and then isolate itself in its autarchic reaction to international sanctions for its colonial policy, and to the artistic scenario, with particular attention to the theme of the representation of power and the body of the “leader”.

2. The Rise and Fall of the Colossus

The origin and development of the Foro Mussolini, today known as Foro Italico, is tied to the name of Renato Ricci (1896–1956). Born in Carrara, he was an early fascist and contributed to the foundation of the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB). As President of the ONB, Ricci proposed the creation of an Academy of Physical Education, a citadel dedicated to fascist youth as a promise of perpetual revolutionary momentum. Somehow, the name itself—Foro Mussolini—already represent the importance of connecting the magnificence of the past (Foro) with the primum movens of the present (Mussolini). As Mario Paniconi wrote, “the Foro Mussolini was intended to have a higher and more complete meaning, almost a solemn celebration of the everlasting Italian youth and strength, almost a hymn to Fascism, which has framed, organised and animated this youth to lead it towards the highest, unfailing destinies” (Paniconi 1933, p. 84). In this sense, it would also convey the training of educators and managers through the exaltation and artistic interpretation of the male body. The activities of the “boys, only boys, with tanned naked torsos” (Magi-Spinetti 1934, p. 454) were echoed by the white stone of the statues of the athletes, which manifested a beauty as attractive as it was idealized and “necessary not only as an aesthetic ideal, but also as a call to order and discipline” (Benadusi 2009, p. 47).

Ricci had entrusted his fellow countryman and friend Enrico Del Debbio (1891–1973) with the architectural project. Del Debbio designed the two symmetrical buildings for the Academy of Physical Education and Music (intended in a paramilitary key), the Stadio dei Marmi, which was crowned by sculptures of athletes donated by the Italian provinces, and the guesthouse for academics in the southernmost area.

The Foro Mussolini was inaugurated on 4 November 1932, with the celebration of the erection of Costantino Costantini’s (1904–1982) monolithic obelisk, carved in a single marble block coming from Carrara, of course (D’Amelio 2008). Its design echoed a constructivist composition by Nikolai Alexandrovich Ladovsky exhibited in Konstantin Mel’nikov’s Russian Pavilion at the Expò of Paris 1925, which had been sketched by Del Debbio (Neri and Muirhead 2006; Giunta and Nizzi 2010). However, this was only the first part of the project. Ricci’s ambition to become closer and closer to the Duce can be measured by his ideas to develop the Foro as a sort of “architectural projection” of Mussolini himself. In this scope, he first sidelined Enrico Del Debbio, although he would eventually continue to play a significant design role in the Stadio dei Cipressi, later called the Stadio dei Centomila (One-hundred-thousand-people Stadium). Then, he called Luigi Moretti (1906–1973), a true prodigy of the Roman professional scene. In the formal definition of the Foro, Moretti was assisted by several architects: the Roman duo Mario Paniconi and Giulio Pediconi; the Paduan duo Francesco Mansutti and Gino Miozzo, who were very active on behalf of the ONB; Enrico Del Debbio, who remained as part of the project with minor tasks; the unknown Cino Pennisi (Damiano 2020), one of the several collaborators of Moretti’s office; and Costantini himself (Mulazzani 2005, p. 70), who would complete other structures of the Foro, such as the swimming pool building, the two tennis court stadiums, and the northern guesthouses by Ponte Milvio.

Ricci asked Moretti for a change in function and architectural language for the Foro, which at that time was presumed to host the sports facilities for the 1940 Olympic Games. In particular, Ricci and Moretti stressed the growing importance of the cult of personality and sporting successes in the regime’s international communication to seduce Mussolini.

Moretti focused on connecting together the existing buildings through a refined design of the ground pavements and a study of the visual perspective cones. Added to this, he planned an expansion centered on a vast square called Arengario delle Nazioni, a monumental place for rallies and parades facing the river. As a sort of exclamation point, the immense square was to be shadowed by the mass of a colossal statue shaped by Aroldo Bellini (1902–1984) to be erected on the hill above (Figure 1). A 86-m-tall Colossus in the form of Hercules was designed to surpass, by 26 m, the colossal statue of the Goddess Germania that Albert Speer (1905–1981) had envisioned as the crowning glory of the grandstand of the Märzfeld in Nuremberg (Genna 2019). The statue also sought to challenge the 93 m (including the massive base) of the Statue of Liberty, whose plans Ricci had sent to him (Rome, Archivio Centrale di Stato, F. Ricci, b. 2, issue 4–7; Setta 1987, pp. 159–64).

An early version of the Colossus appears in the architects’ drawings in the summer of 1933. It is included in two charcoal sketches Del Debbio made to visualize the horseshoe-shaped Stadio dei Centomila, leaning against the side of the hill, and the first of the nine projects outlined by Mansutti and Miozzo (Rovereto, MART, F. Architetti Mansutti, Miozzo). The Stadium featured a ring with two complete tiers of stands that extended with further tiers of steps along the hillside, with a canopy roof enclosed between two lateral towers. The complex was integrated with an open-air theater, placed orthogonally to the first basin, connected to it through a system of porticoed squares, perhaps following suggestions coming from the sanctuaries of the republican age.

One of Mansutti and Miozzo’s sections fixes the building at the base of the Colossus 100 m high above the level of the Foro, while its feet rest on the roof 20 m higher. The plans show that the Arengo and the Colossus would form a new compositional axis between the axis converging to Ponte Milvio and the one coming from Ponte Duca d’Aosta, which had been planned since 1927 but was defined only after the 1935 competition, won by Vincenzo Fasolo.

Mansutti and Miozzo’s drawing shows the Colossus as a hooded figure, wrapped in the leontè, the skin of the Nemean lion defeated by Hercules in his first labor. The lion characterizes the iconography of Hercules, a figure also linked to the mythical origins of Rome and present in several representations of the fascist age (Follo 2013, pp. 155–58). It also recalls the astrological birth chart of Benito Mussolini, who was a lover and an owner of a lion cub, and suggests a sought-after and desired parallel even in terms of the feral smell. The robe, tied around the waist, falls vertically between the spread legs, to hide the virile attributes and offer structural support to the statue; the right arm is raised toward the sky, in the fascist salute.

An intermediate version of the statue is recorded in one of Mansutti and Miozzo’s drawings dated November 1933. Here, the face of the colossus already shows the unmistakable features of Benito Mussolini. The body appears in an upright position, with the legs slightly apart. The right arm is stretched out toward the sky while the left one is bent to shield the gaze from the blinding light of the sun, a symbol of glory. While the virile attributes are here wrapped in a suspensory, the leonine cloak that falls behind the Colossus constitutes the third support of the statue. In the final version of the statue, probably arranged already in early 1934, the hand that protects the face from the sunlight rests on the head, perhaps also to simplify the structural issues (Figure 2).

As Bellini was focusing on the aesthetic features of the statue, the architects involved by Ricci and Moretti contributed to the architectural aspects of the project, focusing on the base of the Colossus and the connections with the rest of the Foro. The designs of November 1933, with the intermediate form of the statue, allows us to date the solutions that Mansutti and Miozzo, Paniconi and Pediconi, and Del Debbio developed individually for the building beneath the statue in the following months. The Paduans proposed a compact and striated parallelepiped, excavated by a rectangular courtyard behind the statue, with an entrance at its feet. Del Debbio broke down the base by raising and advancing the inclined central block and leaving space for two staircases that rise to the level of the rear courtyard bordered by two long buildings with porticoes (Rome, MAXXI, F. Del Debbio, 13: Grande Statua, 23579–83). As revealed by Mulazzani, their work did not follow the formula of the competition by invitation, as previously thought, but developed through comparison and mutual influence. Mansutti himself described a meeting in Rome during which Ricci showed him the progress of the alternative design proposals (Mulazzani 2005, p. 71).

However, the changes in the shape of the building beneath the statue are also a consequence of functional redefinition. Originally, it had been conceived to welcome visitors to the Colossus, an entrance to the stairs and elevators. However, around 1934, the program changed drastically. The building was indicated by Ricci as the new location for the materials of the Fascist Revolution Exhibition. The successful exhibition had been set up by Adalberto Libera e Mario De Renzi in Pio Piacentini’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 1932 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the March on Rome, the first act of the regime’s conquest of power (28 October 1922). At the end of the exhibition, the materials had been moved into a wing of the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna. In 1933, they had been included in the functional program of the huge Palazzo del Littorio, the new headquarters of the Fascist Party to be built in Via dell’Impero, by the Colosseum. Announced on 27 December 1933, the program of the competition for the Palazzo del Littorio explicitly asked for a museum to provide a permanent house to those materials as well as for a Casa del Duce, a sort of transparent office able to reveal the presence of the tireless leader. The general impasse after the first-grade competition also caused changes in the program. In 1937, when the second stage of the competition was announced for a different site by the Aventine Hill, the museum had been removed from the program.

Ricci is likely to have assumed the task of finding a new home for the Fascist Revolution Exhibition at the Foro Mussolini shortly after the results of the first-stage competition, in the fall of 1934. The structure designated for this purpose was precisely the building beneath the Colossus. Architects began to redesign it as the ONB Museum (or Museum of Fascism), providing it with “vast and bright halls in order to welcome the Fascist Revolution Exhibition and the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs” (Setta 1987, p. 162).

The museum destination was already clear when Mario Paniconi and Giulio Pediconi developed their project for the building, which was presented through plans, sections, elevations, and perspective and axonometric views on nine sheets (Rome, Archivio Centrale di Stato, F. Paniconi-Pediconi, Colosso, sc. 66, b. 4; Archivio di Stato, F. Moretti; Muntoni 1987). The three-dimensional reconstruction of their project has highlighted small inconsistencies (especially for the upper floor) but also a series of interesting solutions (Figure 3). The general layout shows a massive pyramidal block under the statue. The main entrance on the short side looks like a canyon between two large-stepped pyramids, but the two secondary staircases on the long sides also have massive walls as boundaries. This apparent reference to Egyptian, Etruscan, and Roman architecture is confirmed by the interior organization of the museum, which is composed of a system of underground rooms carved in the pyramid around the massive core that contains the foundations of the Colossus and the vertical lift system. The circuit of the museum and the secondary entrances lead to the main lower hall at the rear, which is open towards a quadriportico, and the upper hall, which has no windows and is lit only by three skylights that frame the back of the statue. In general, this project is particularly interesting because it seems to negotiate between two different formal approaches: on one side (the main entrance to the valley), it looks like an archaic building; on the other (the rear courtyard toward Monte Mario), it borrows the forms of Rationalist architecture. In this sense, the main hall, with apses carved on the southwest wall and stone brise-soleil among pillars on the northwest side, is emblematic of the attempt to conciliate the language of Del Debbio, shared by other architects working for the regime, with that of Moretti and his young collaborators.

Another important element was the path running up the hill to the Colossus’ base. Architects had proposed different solutions, from a monumental straight double staircase with waterfalls marking the Arengario–Colossus axis (Del Debbio) to informal winding paths, which were to provide a series of delighting views of the landscape (Mansutti and Miozzo). On the contrary, Paniconi and Pediconi proposed a peculiar system with which to reach the base upon the hill. Near the monument, they designed an elaborated inverted-cone system, composed of ramps and walkways within concentric exedras of increasing size, that could resemble Dante’s Inferno spatial organization.

As for developing the general plan of the Foro Mussolini, apparently drafted mainly by Del Debbio and Mansutti and Miozzo, Luigi Moretti also focused on the museum and the statue. Although some of Moretti’s drawings concerning the Colossus are surely missing, the documents preserved in Moretti’s archives (Rome, Archivio Centrale di Stato, F. Moretti, b. 34.033; Archivio Moretti Magnifico; Archivio Greco) allow us to confirm collaboration between the architects—a sheet shows a perspective view from below of Paniconi and Pediconi’s project—and to order the designs in a sequence. An early sheet presents a plan, section, and elevation of the Colossus in the intermediate version at a 1:250 scale. An axonometric view shows a general organization of the area as an articulated sequence of terraced spaces, buildings, porticoes, and gardens (Greco 2011); the Colossus is here placed upon a cylindrical building connected with a generic rectangular-plan building on the rear. While some sketches explore the entrance and interior of the cylindric building, another one explores the view from the distance and shows lictorian arches that recall the entrance to the original Fascist Revolution Exhibition, which had been designed by Libera and De Renzi after a small sketch by Del Debbio. In general, here the building looks like a low parallelepiped surmounted by a cylinder on which helical ramps run. Somehow, Moretti combines the image of Stockholm Library completed by Erik Gunnar Asplund in 1928, which also recalls the architectural vocabulary of Libera, with a modernist interpretation of the Roman honorary columns with the statue of the emperor on the top.

Another sketch reveals that Moretti later added another box-shaped building to articulate the entrance to the Museum of Fascism (Greco 2011). The sketch shows the interior of a Rationalistic cubic hall, whose walls are organized as a grid, according to solutions he was parallel testing for the Casa delle Armi (1932–1936) and the Casa della Gioventù Littoria (GIL) in Trastevere, Rome (1933–1937). A large rectangular skylight—a solution shared by Paniconi and Pediconi’s proposal—evokes a sort of peristyle of an ancient domus and reveals the Colossus towering above. The Archive Moretti-Magnifico (Rostagni 2008, p. 53) also preserves a canvas painted by Moretti to present this project. In particular, it shows the processionary route to the monument, with white geometric propylaea and two rows of brown columns accompanying the visitors towards the museum and the lower part of the Colossus shining against the blue sky.

Moretti’s designs show that the mantle of the Colossus was also gradually reshaped. Unlike the early sketches, where it enlarges to provide a large structural support, Moretti reduced the mantle to obtain a sort of huge column, a support that looks like a third leg between the actual legs. This formal evolution had the visual consequence of revealing the sky between the legs of the statue and having the legs themselves look narrower in the backlight. In any case, it also indirectly demonstrates the parallel work that was carried out by both Bellini and the engineers of the Officine Savigliano. The architects developing the museum also had to take into account the final shape of the statue and the structure inside it, of course. Bellini established the final version of Hercules first in a 1:200 scale model and then in a 1:100 scale model, made in two parts, which was to serve as a reference for sculpting the pieces at full scale (Figure 4). A large studio hangar had been arranged near the observatory of Villa Mellini on Monte Mario, overlooking the site chosen for the Colossus. Here, Bellini had been building full-scale parts of the statue in clay, onto which he was to emboss a bronze sheet of a few millimeters starting from 2 × 2 m sheets. The few remaining photos document the construction, dating back to 1936–1937, of the head and at least one foot of the Colossus (Figure 5). Ernesto Rosselli, an assistant in Bellini’s workshop at the time, recalls that a dinner was set up inside the newly formed foot for the eight people in the atelier (Lombardo 1994, p. 101), mimicking the lunch served in the belly of the horse of the equestrian statue of Vittorio Emanuele II after it had been placed on the pedestal of the Vittoriano, the mausoleum of the first king of united Italy dominating Piazza Venezia and inaugurated in 1911.

In parallel with Bellini’s work, the engineers of the Officine Savigliano in Turin were designing the metal structure intended to support the weight of the Colossus. Some unpublished heliographic reproductions of 20 February 1935 in the Bellini collection show the design of the large structure on a 1:100 scale in plan and section. The structure is inclined by about 16° with respect to the vertical, rests at navel height on a trestle hidden in the legs of the statue, and is crossed by two elevators and a staircase (Figure 6).

However, the political scenario was rapidly changing. As a consequence of the Italian conquest of the territories of the Horn of Africa, on 18 November 1935 the League of Nations approved the first economic sanctions against Italy. Mussolini reacted by first proclaiming autarchy and then, on 9 May 1936, the birth of the Italian Empire and, in July 1936, as a courtesy towards his new allies, Rome left to Tokyo the right to host the Olympic Games in 1940. Although these political choices were transforming the national scenario and depriving Moretti of one of the central purposes of the works in the Foro Mussolini, apparently Ricci did not change his agenda. On 19 July 1936, the press announced that “a very large area by the Foro Mussolini has been limited by a tall wall; in the centre of the area will rise that bronze 86-m-tall colossus depicting the Fascist Italy” (Piccolo 1936, p. 3). In the following months, while Moretti was completing the Casa delle Armi, a building at the south end of the complex for the practice of fencing as a paramilitary discipline, and the gorgeous personal Palestra of Mussolini in Costantini’s swimming pool building, with Hercules-based decorations, early photographs of the first parts of the statue begin to circulate (Pooley 2013).

In 1937, the ONB published the book Il Foro Mussolini (ONB 1937) to demonstrate the achievements and the future development of the complex. It presented not only more pictures of the head and foot of the statue but also the first consequences of the economic crisis produced by the autarchic regime. Moretti’s definitive plan of the Foro show that the Colossus was no longer aligned with the Stadio dei Centomila, as tested in some of Mansutti and Miozzi’s plans and bird’s eye views. It had been relocated down the hill, by a vast esplanade named Arengo delle Nazioni. Moretti and Cino Pennisi designed it after the example of Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld in Nuremberg. Here, Moretti applied the first intuitions of what he was to define as “parametric architecture” and designed the steps according to theoretical curves of visual “equi-appetitability” centered on the grandstand. The Colossus, placed behind the grandstand itself, was called to create a sort a monumental backdrop against the hill slope. Some prints of the metal structure project on a 1:100 scale, dated 3 March 1937 (Rome, Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna, F. Bellini), contain adjustments that can be related to this transfer from the top of the hill to the bottom of the Arengo.

However, the book shows signs that the Colossus was no longer a central element in Ricci and Moretti’s project of the Foro Mussolini. For example, the general plan of the Arengo includes the footprints of the Colossus but there is no trace of it in the photos of the model, where instead it would have appeared well proportioned with respect to the 300 × 300 m square (Figure 7). While this “absence” could be a consequence of inattention, surely the difficulty of finding the metal caused by the international embargo produced a general review of national resources and interests. Added to this, on 16 September 1937, the ONB was militarized, renamed the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL), and placed under the direct control of the Fascist Party (PNF). Although named the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Corporations, Ricci actually lost most of his power and influence on Mussolini. In October 1937, the second phase of the competition for the Palazzo del Littorio was also completed, won by Del Debbio, together with Arnaldo Foschini and Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo. The following winter, with a coup by Achille Starace and Mussolini himself, the building was relocated right into the heart of the Foro, eventually preventing the construction of Moretti’s Arengo. Del Debbio, Foschini, and Ballio Morpurgo were called to arrange the winning project to the new site. Their perspective views show the bulk of the new building, which was destined to become the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the war, and the wooded hill behind it. There is no trace of the Colossus.

In this whirlwind of political events, while the Colossus was silently removed from the regime’s agenda and people’s imagery, the whole Foro Mussolini was gradually redesigned as a setting for visits by foreign delegations and rallies. Moretti continued to work on it, with increasingly ambitious projects, until 1943, when he presented the so-called Forma Ultima Fori project (Greco 2011). He also built the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs in the north guesthouse building (Giunta and Colonnese 2021), while the idea of the Museum of Fascism was discarded and the materials of the Fascist Revolution Exhibition were dispersed in the turbulent days following the liberation of Rome in June 1944. In the same days, the Foro Mussolini became the site of the rest camp of General Clark’s 5th Army. In particular, the Stadio dei Centomila, which had been arranged with ephemeral complements for the staging of Wagner’s Lohengrin on the occasion of Hitler’s visit in 1938, was chosen to provide shelter for US army vehicles. Eventually, the parts of the Colossus that had been built became lost, maybe melted down to reuse the bronze in the construction of weapons, the way Pope Gregory 1st was reported to have utilized Nero’s statue in 5th century in Castel Sant’Angelo (Ghio 1997, p. 173).

3. Considerations

In the feverish succession of projects aimed at exalting the benefits of the fascist revolution and the figure of their undisputed leader, the unfinished Herculean statue of the Genius of Fascism constitutes a little-explored chapter in the history of architecture. This silence is due to the post-war damnatio memoriae and the dispersion of documents following the American occupation of Rome. Added to this, there was a general lack of interest in classical naturalistic sculpture, disliked by the artistic avant-gardes and architects of the Modern movement, whose heritage influenced the post-war decades. Still today, central questions remain unanswered.

Who had the idea for the colossal statue? Somehow, the image of a gargantuan Duce first appeared in some English satirical sketches. In the practice of identifying the chief of a nation with the nation itself, caricatures often showed geographical-sized human figures. Already in 1923, Mussolini was depicted as a sort of Colossus of Rhodes dressed like Julius Caesar who leaps over the Adriatic Sea to trample onto Corfu (“The Latest Caesar”, Punch, or the London Charivari, 12 September 1923)—such a “format” would be taken up again years later by Bernard Partridge on the occasion of the Italian conquest of Albania (“The Colossus of Oaths”, Punch, or the London Charivari, 19 April 1939).

However, it was the novelist Vitaliano Brancati (1907–1954) who first conceived a colossal statue of the Duce (Gazzola Stacchini 1972). The idea was expressed in his play Everest (1928), which premiered on 5 June 1930 at the Salone Margherita in Rome under the direction of Luigi Pirandello’s son Stefano Landi (Gaborik 2023). Brancati imagined that, 2000 years forward in the future, a group of people push themselves to the top of the tallest mountain to discover that it has been sculpted in the image of Mussolini, leader not only of Italy in the past but of the entire world, eventually replacing the British Empire with the Italian Empire. Mussolini appreciated Everest. He had a meeting with Brancati in 1931 and offered him “the position of editor of a magazine supported by the regime (Quadrivio) and the transfer to Rome” (Parisi 2006, p. 51).

It may be that Renato Ricci witnessed Mussolini’s appreciation of Brancati’s Everest and conceived the idea of building a new Colossus with the Duce’s appearance. Arnaldo Bellini is also presumed to have played a role in this scenario. The Perugia-born sculptor had already created 13 of the statues donated to the ONB by the Italian provinces for the Stadio dei Marmi. On that occasion, he had sculpted the features of Ricci himself into one of the bronze groups of wrestlers placed on the sides of the grandstand—a detail that might have influenced Ricci about the Colossus’ potential. Added to this, Aroldo Bellini and the Carrara-born sculptor Bernardo Morescalchi (1895–1975) also provided the drawings of the medals coined to celebrate the inauguration of the Foro Mussolini in 1932 (Figure 8). The medals, which show Costantini’s obelisk on one side and the head of Mussolini caped with an open-mouth lion on the other, like Alexander the Great’s tetradrachm, indirectly testify that the iconographic program of the statue was defined in the same months. In this sense, the presence of a generic Herculean Colossus in the early sketches of the architects could be interpreted as a sort of preliminary caution by Ricci, waiting for Mussolini’s full approval of the project. Such an approval is partially testified to by the memories of Quinto Navarra, Mussolini’s butler for twenty-three years: “two elevators would carry the visitors in the Hercules’ head, a head so colossal that from the nose one could descend to the nostrils, designed as two vast panoramic terraces. […] But the reasons that, above all, pleased the Duce and induced him to approve the project were two: that the Hercules had the same face as Mussolini and that the colossus, built on Monte Mario, would have surpassed the dome of St. Peter’s in height […]. […] The ‘Colossus Littorio’ was put into construction. One day Ricci (president of the Opera Nazionale Balilla) brought the Duce a photograph of the thumbnail of a foot, melted into several pieces. It was a nail as big as a courtyard. The Duce appeared satisfied” (Navarra 1946, pp. 152–53).

Surely, Renato Ricci was the main sponsor of the Colossus. It was a fundamental part of his articulated agenda of projects conceived to gain Mussolini’s favor by moving the political–architectural barycentre, with all the most symbolic and mediatic places of the regime’s story and communication (the Arengario, the Fascist Revolution Exhibition, the Shrine of Fascist Martyrs, the Palestra for the chief’s body, etc.), from Palazzo Venezia and the historical city to the Foro, “his” Foro Mussolini.

The Colossus could have also been inspired by precedents of great appeal, such as the bronze statue of Nero, the San Carlone on Lake Maggiore, or the Statue of Liberty in New York, as well as coeval proposals. In 1928, the construction of Mount Rushmore in North Dakota had also begun. In 1932, Armando Brasini (1879–1965) had placed a large statue of Lenin at the top of his architectural proposal for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, which Boris Iofan would incorporate into his final project (De Magistris 2014). But in the same years, the strategy of “monumental propaganda” imposed by Vladimir Lenin since 1918 was replacing monuments to tzars and their servants with others dedicated to personalities of the Russian Socialist Revolution, like Lenin himself after his death in 1924, and Iosef Stalin after him.

The representation of a human figure on a giant scale has remote origins and traditionally alludes to regal and divine dimensions, as evidenced by the depictions of the temples of Abu-Simbel in Egypt, the bas-reliefs of the Hittite, Assyrian, and Persian civilizations, and the sacred sculptures of the Indian region. In Western civilizations, the roots of the representation of the divine go back to Hellenic archaism, starting from the aniconic wooden representations of the xoana up to the first chryselephantine sculptures—the effigies of Athena Promachos and Athena Parthenos in Athens and Zeus in Olympia—which were covered in gold, both as a symbol of power and as a financial reserve for the polis. However, the term “colossus” (Cruciani 1976) mainly recalls the 70-cubit-tall (36 m) bronze sculpture erected at the beginning of the 4th century BC by Chares of Lindos at the entrance to the port of Rhodes, as a celebration of the island’s resistance to the threats of invasion by the Macedonian Demetrius Poliorcetes (Vedder 2015). This marvel of antiquity inspired the Vitruvian myth of the architect Dinocrates and his project to reshape the promontory of Mount Athos with the features of Alexander the Great, which is also the main reference for the plot of Brancati’s Everest, of course. At the same time, Vitruvius and Brancati inspired other fascist re-proposals. In 1936, the cover of L’Illustrazione italiana (16 February) revealed an almost 5-m-tall effigy of the Duce’s head that had been sculpted in the rock at Addì Ghebbetà near Adwa, Ethiopia, by unknown Italian soldiers. In the same year, the sculptor Oddo Aliventi, la Milizia Forestale, and the quarrymen of the Furlo gorges along Via Flaminia remodeled the profile of the Pietralata Mountain according to that of the Duce, who could appreciate it during his travels to Riccione, his favorite seaside resort. These experiences, like others developed in Germany and the Soviet Union, intended to both involve local communities around a celebrative and artistic project and leave a concrete sign of power in territories that had yet to totally submit.

However, the term “colossus” mainly identifies the 120-feet-tall (36.6 m) bronze colossus of Nero at the entrance to the Domus Aurea. Its huge symbolic value caught the attention of several emperors. The statue was first transformed into a simulacrum of the Sun God (Helios) by Vespasian; then it was moved, thanks to a team of 24 elephants, by Hadrian onto the Velia hill to the height of the amphitheater inaugurated by Titus Flavius in the heart of Nero’s residence, which eventually took the name Colosseum; and finally, it was reshaped as a portrait of Commodus, who “put aside the costume of the Roman emperors and wore a lion’s skin with a club in his hands” (Cadario 2017).

Like other fascist architectural operations, the idea of building a Herculean Colossus to identify the Genius of Fascism had the primary intent of highlighting the continuity with the Roman tradition and its ancient empire, exalted in parallel by archeology and cinema—it may not be a coincidence that in Italy, the term colossal or kolossal is adopted to describe gorgeous and expansive movies of the early 1930s. Think, for example, of the so-called Codex Mussolini, a report of the fascist revolution written in Latin by Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci on a parchment that was buried, together with the medals, under Costantini’s obelisk on 27 October 1932 (Reitz-Joosse and Lamers 2016, pp. 66–74). In any case, some of the “targets” of fascist propaganda were closer in time. An article from 1935 highlights some of the political objectives of the Colossus, destined to compete with antiquity—“the Capitoline Jupiter and Palatine Apollo, or the gigantic figure of Nero” and “the legendary Colossus of Rhodes”—and the symbols of foreign power—“the Nelson column” and “Bartholdi’s Liberty Enlightening the World” (MB 1935).

The choice of Monte Mario also contributes to this task (Fagiolo and Mazza 2016). In the Middle Ages, it constituted the end of the path that came from the territories of the former Holy Roman Empire. Here, sovereigns arrived who aspired to claim the symbolic legitimacy of power in the name of a generic Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, admiring the Urbe from above, dominating it visually and being fascinated by it at the same time.

The erection of the Colossus on the hill that overlooked the former area of the 19th century shooting range would have had a dramatic impact on the skyline of the city for those who stared north. In this sense, the diffusion of the early photos in 1936 (Pooley 2013) produced contrasting reactions. Dario Sabatello, a journalist and film producer, was concerned by the statue: “The thought that, from any point in Rome, the colossus will be visible, that—in the panorama and memory of the Eternal City—the statue will have a predominant part, as much as and perhaps more than the Dome of St. Peter, is unbearable” (Sabatello 1936; quoted in Tentori 1990, p. 60). The news even influenced the imagination of some religious communities, who interpreted it as a prophecy of the advent of a new world (Stamm 2020).

The Colossus would have been a true landmark, a fundamental visual landscape pivot in the great project of reorganization of the Foro in the context of Monte Mario and the Tiber river valley. Moretti himself, in some graphic notes relating to the design of the Casa delle Armi (Rome, Archivio Moretti-Magnifico), questions the visual impact of the Colossus, comparing it to the Vatican dome through a double reverse shot from the same observation point that establishes a curious but significant counterpoint between the symbols of the Second and Third Rome.

In artistic terms, the Colossus responds to the centrality of the figuration of the body, and of the body of the Duce in particular, in the context of fascist liturgy and its monumental architecture. As suggested by Carl Gustav Jung in a famous interview, Benito Mussolini was the archetype of the village chief who, due to his physicality and spontaneous communicativeness, naturally places himself in command of a group. The theatrical poses, the bulging eyes, and the forward projection of the lower lip and chin, together with the stentorian and exalted oratory, were used as a sort of modern acting technique. Through it, he intended to distance himself from the old politics, penetrate the collective imagination, and ignite that cult of personality that would have made the reason of state coincide with the leader who “is always right”. The Duce would constantly resort to the exhibitionist practice of the body, through which he exercised his attractive force, for the desire of emulation or direct contact. The propaganda machine worked to multiply the facets of Mussolini as a fighter, veteran, worker, caring father or voracious sexual predator, dancer, war wounded among the mutilated, pilot, motorcyclist, skier, fencer, horseman, reaper, and bricklayer. Like a tireless biological mechanism, he fed on the incessant narration by the first mass media, on the appropriately sifted rotogravure images, aspiring to myth-making (Luzzatto 1998, 2001; Franzinelli and Marino 2005; Chessa 2008; Porro 2010). In a parallel with the boxer Primo Carnera, the Duce is described as “a man of sport in the highest sense, because his physical and moral life marvellously harmonize and complement each other. His torso is powerful, his arms athletic. He seems made to knock down and crush; and on this exuberance of muscles and nerves, on this Herculean compactness our imagination stops, because we feel that no one can defeat him, that no one can sustain the comparison: a giant among the pygmies” (Cotronei 1934).

The people’s idolatry of Mussolini was conveyed not only by the mass media but also by art, which was committed to transfiguring the qualities of the Duce. In the early years of fascism, the representation of the Duce was in line with the most advanced European esthetic research, along the path traced by Futurism. Thanks to the mediation of Margherita Grassini Sarfatti, for example, the Milanese sculptor Adolfo Wildt created several portraits of the Duce bordering on anti-naturalism. Without worrying about verisimilitude, Wildt represented the tensions that emerge on the surface of the face, creating the portrait of a political predator, concentrated and alert.

Other experimental representations of the Duce can be found in the work of Enrico Prampolini, Renato Bertelli, Thayath (Ernesto Michahelles), or Mario Radice for Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como (Figure 9). Additionally, architects were trying to portray the “body of the leader” through aniconic, allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic solutions. In the Foro Mussolini, possible portraits of the Duce can be found in the cylindrical angle solution of Moretti’s Casa delle Armi (Giunta and Nizzi 2010) or the obelisk itself, of course. More explicit are Adalberto Libera’s tower in his project for the Palazzo del Littorio (1934)—a monumental abstract portrait of the Duce with the balcony as an extended tongue—or Mario Palanti’s project for a Torre Littoria in Milan (Palanti 1935). Designed in 1935 after the flop of the Mole Littoria in Rome (Neumann 2014), Il Duce presents an M-shaped plan that symbolically evokes Mussolini. This sort of “typographic architecture” had been invented by Fortunato Depero when he worked as a designer for Campari and can be found in other buildings of the same years—from the letters DUX in the general plan of social housing in Via Donna Olimpia in Rome to Palazzo M in Littoria/Latina. However, Palanti’s portrait acquires a further anthropomorphic reference by means of the embarrassing rostrum of the balcony that recalls a phallic symbol (Figure 10).

The portrait of the Duce became a topic that was interpreted and replicated countless times, but not always with an advanced artistic approach. As late as 1927, the Minister and Governor of Rome Giuseppe Bottai was still openly promoting a dialog with the artistic avant-gardes. He intended to contain the proliferation of hagiographic junk of the Duce that populated the provincial Case del Fascio: the “incredible pictorial decorations on the walls, horrible busts of colored plaster at every corner, colored emblems and banners for tapestries; fasces of gilded stucco that look like bundles of firewood, chromolithographs of the Duce in impossible poses, wooden sabers and lances painted with lampblack, here are the headquarters of the Fasci, the unions and many municipalities (…) calendars, horrible covers, a whole ridiculous junk and trinket, with a very serious disgrace to our artistic civilization” (Bottai 1927, p. 62). Yet, already after 1932, the year of the Fascist Revolution Exhibition, something began to change. The regime gradually turned towards a “return to order” that led to art being considered a mere instrument for political communication, with criteria similar to what was happening in Stalin’s Soviet Union. This change in perspective favored a rhetorical and naturalistic representation aimed at seeking popular consensus. This is demonstrated not only by the success of artists such as Mario Sironi but also by the hagiographic and retrograde results of the works competing for the “Cremona” Prize, which would be released by Roberto Farinacci in 1939 to promote popular art for the masses, an autarchic version of the realisms growing in Germany and the Soviet Union. In this sense, the figure of the Duce became exuberant, obsessively occupying every space in the life and imagination of the Italian population. Just think of the installation on the façade of Palazzo Braschi, the Roman seat of the Fascist Federation, on the occasion of the plebiscitary elections of 1934, where Mussolini’s face emerges from a pattern consisting of the obsessive repetition of the word “SI!” (YES!).

The project of the Colossus, the Genius of Fascism in the form of Hercules, belongs to this early phase of classicist and figurative restoration and is “perhaps among the most spectacular and disturbing [manifestations] of the personality cult built by fascism around its leader” (Nicoloso 2008, p. 177). Its political task, in addition to increasing the credit that Ricci was looking for by the Duce, is precisely that of immortalizing the body of the leader of the nation at the height of his strength. However, such an overexposure of Mussolini’s body repeated for years can also be related to the events that led to his end. His apparently incorruptible body would have shown signs of weakness only after the negative upheavals of the world conflict triggered by Germany in 1939 and his arrest after the armistice of 8 September 1943. Despite the liberation and resettlement in the north, at the head of the Social Republic of Salò, Mussolini was nothing more than an empty shell at the mercy of the Germans, who fueled a fratricidal civil war. The day after the liberation of Milan, which took place on 25 April 1945, Mussolini was arrested while trying to reach the border with Switzerland, confused among the soldiers of the retreating German troops. After a few days of captivity, he was summarily executed in Dongo, on the shores of the Lake of Como. The partisan command that had carried out the sentence went back to Milan, which had just been liberated, unloading the bodies of Mussolini and his officers on the pavement of Piazzale Loreto. While in other contexts people could express their wrath only against the simulacra of tyranny, like the many statues of Lenin and Stalin that would be knocked down after the fall of the Soviet Union, in Milan it was the actual “body of fascism” to suffer from the angry outrage of those people who had idolized it. Finally, his body was hung from the shelter of a service station and photographed to produce a new icon (and Mussolini’s remains were to experience a sort of afterlife by means of an incredible series of events that highlight their strong symbolic power and threatened to shadow the birth of the Italian Republic, sanctioned through a historic referendum in 1946).