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Framing St. Peter's: urban planning in Fascist Rome
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2006 by Terry Kirk
The Via della Conciliazione in Rome is the thoroughfare that leads to St. Peter's basilica in Rome (Fig. 1). The construction of the "Street of the Reconciliation," which entailed gutting the medieval neighborhood in front of the Vatican known as the district of the Borgo, opened a vista to St. Peter's and linked the church complex to the city. The street extends from the edge of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's piazza at the location of an unrealized terzo braccio, or "third arm" of enclosing colonnade, eastward to the area of the Castel Sant'Angelo. A variety of preexisting and newly designed buildings face the wide street, and twenty-eight obelisks that line its path serve also as lampposts. The Via della Conciliazione was begun under Fascist rule in 1936, designed by Marcello Piacentini and Attilio Spaccarelli and completed in 1950. Their conception took cognizance of many earlier urban design proposals for this site dating back to the Renaissance. At the same time, it incorporated symbolic aspects of the Lateran Pact of 1929, which normalized diplomatic relations between the Italian Fascist state and the Roman Catholic Church. The street frames St. Peter's, particularly its problematic facade, in a new vista, makes concrete the union of church and state imperative to Mussolini's political agenda, and exemplifies strategies of urban planning widely used in Fascist Rome. The Via della Conciliazione is the visual and political frame in which we understand the relationship of the Catholic Church and the Italian state today.
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Received opinions on the Via della Conciliazione are roundly negative. (1) They rest often on a blind rejection of modern intervention in historical places, a regret for the effect on Bernini's piazza, or nostalgia for the lost Borgo. For scholars of the Baroque piazza, like Rudolf Wittkower or Hellmut Hager, who hold that Bernini's work cannot ever be finished, the Via della Conciliazione appears to be an insensitive intrusion driven by reprehensible politics. (2) Bias against the Via della Conciliazione is largely due to a prevailing view of Bernini's piazza as an enclosed environment, despite evidence presented by Wittkower and others that Bernini explored other options. It is not uncommon to find scholars forsaking the thoroughfare for the dark alleys to accentuate an experience of contrast on finally entering the bright piazza.
Such scholars overlook the long history since the Renaissance of proposals to clear the Borgo to which the modern designers made explicit reference. In addition, the 1929 Lateran Pact between the papacy and the Fascist regime furnished a political context in which the ultimate project was conceived. Within the aesthetic parameters informed by the architects' own explanations and responses of contemporaries, Piacentini and Spaccarelli featured St. Peter's in a reconfigured "frame," or inquadratura, to provide for the first time a strategic adjustment of the view to its facade and dome and a comprehensive vision of the Vatican (Fig. 2). The new street's vista, with certain aspects having been edited out, structures the viewer's gaze to isolate a significant historical site and celebrate particularly Michelangelo's monumental architecture. Under Benito Mussolini's close supervision, their design also emphasized the regime's diplomatic union with the Church, using the latter's supranational authority to further its own imperialist agenda. The Via della Conciliazione is the most complete example of the strategies used to reshape the urban experience of Fascist Rome.
Five Hundred Years of Proposals to Clear the Borgo
Clearing the Borgo district of its medieval fabric was an idea half a millennium in the making. The renaissance of Rome and the papal seat at the Vatican envisioned by Pope Nicholas V in the early 1450s would have required the total revision of the area between the church and the Castel Sant'Angelo. (3) For the Holy Year 1500, Pope Alexander VI sliced through part of it with a straight street called the Borgo Nuovo (Fig. 3). (4) It marked the path of the possesso, the ceremonial march from the Vatican by which, as temporal ruler, the pope took possession of his capital. From the other direction, the Borgo Nuovo focused the arriving pilgrim on the front door of the Apostolic Palace, not the church (Fig. 4). The vista accented the presence of the pope both as resident at the church of the apostle and ruler over the city of Rome. Between the new street and an older street, the Borgo Vecchio to the south, a thin sliver of buildings called the spina remained.
When the architect Donato Bramante undertook the total rebuilding of Old St. Peter's basilica into a Renaissance construction for Pope Julius II in 1506, he may also have considered a corresponding urban design. A drawing attributed in the nineteenth century to Bramante (in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) suggests a rebuilding of the Borgo (Fig. 13). (5) Classical architecture lining the area here would have, as in many of Bramante's projects, created a controlled perspectival frame in which the church would be best viewed. Bramante's idea of a scenographic urban setting for St. Peter's remained, however, on paper, the first proposal in a series to accumulate across the centuries for the rebuilding of the medieval Borgo area to accord with the classical grandeur of the new church.
