Framing St. Peter's: urban planning in Fascist Rome

Alessandro Viviani drafted the capital's first master plan (Fig. 10), and he, too, projected the simple extraction of the spina of the Borgo, but government officials could not ratify his proposal of 1873 because they were still unsure about the extent--if any--of territorial concessions that might eventually be made to the pope. (17) Ideas of reserving a small bit of land inscribed by the preexisting Vatican Hill fortifications, or ceding the entire right bank of the city, or even diverting the Tiber River around the Castel Sant'Angelo as a rerouted water boundary were considered at the time to provide for a separate papal state. But in 1876 the incoming Leftist majority in Parliament adopted tough interventionist policies with regard to the Church and proceeded unilaterally in capital expansion and urbanization on Rome's right bank. The new minister of justice, for example, chose a site as close as possible to the Vatican for the Supreme Court building, a seat of temporal justice to counterbalance the spiritual symbolism of St. Peter's. (18) Although Viviani, who went on elaborating ideas, was inspired by Sistine urban planning, the streets laid out on the right bank provide neither a vista nor a direct traffic connection to the church. In the end, the medieval Borgo was entirely ignored in the nineteenth-century expansion. To the contrary, pro-papal planning ideas, like a scheme by Giuseppe Bertagnolio, anticipated a papal state on the right bank and a centralized street pattern with respect to the dome (Fig. 11). Viviani's master plan for the capital was eventually ratified in 1883, and it guided urban development in Rome for the next twenty-five years. The plan did not intervene in the Borgo except to demolish the fortification walls that bordered the area to the north, the only part of the circuit walls of Rome destroyed in the modern era.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Political tensions between the papacy and the Italian government eased in the late 1880s, and Viviani correspondingly explored the possibility of an open, crosstown vista to the "Cupolone di Michelangelo"--as nineteenth-century planners referred to the Vatican in secular terms. With the intention of either binding the monumental church to the city or setting it within its own independent sphere of urban influence, designers of various political stripes pondered what to do with the Borgo. Andrea Busiri-Vici conceived a covered galleria of iron and glass in 1886 by which he attempted to focus the view down a narrow passage. (19) This time, the real estate collapse of 1889 stopped all planning, leaving the Borgo's redesign an academic exercise. A fellow at the American Academy in 1915, Henry Gugler, dedicated his Rome prize to the problem. (20) The wide variety of proposals belied the fluctuating and uncertain process toward a reconciliation of church and state during this period.

Intervening in the urban setting of the Vatican was still too politically volatile. Improvements were again omitted from consideration in Rome's second master plan, of 1909, because of Mayor Ernesto Nathan's strident anticlericalism. The year 1911 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Italian national unity, and the capital hosted a world's fair, which the mayor called Rome's secular jubilee. Thirty-year-old architect Marcello Piacentini designed the fairgrounds around a columned piazza and domed structure whose correspondence to the architecture of the Vatican nearby made the event explicitly a secular equivalent to ecclesiastical celebrations. (21) Without official diplomatic clarification of the role of the Roman Catholic Church within the Italian state for its first fifty years, a radical political climate developed and rather grandiose projects for the Borgo appeared, like that by the neo-Baroque designer Armando Brasini in 1916. (22)