Monumentalism

Monumentalism defines the architectural tendencies that during the first half of the twentieth century had as their essential canon the inspiration and connection to classicism and neoclassicism.

Neo-Baroque (Baroque Revival) shows a return to the eighteenth century with the proportion of orders becoming gigantic, enriched with ornamental friezes.

Its major theorist will be in Italy the architect Marcello Piacentini who dominates the fascist twenty years with his canons, crowding out the rationalists, who attempted to reconcile the themes of the Modern Movement within an authoritarian regime.

Piacentini will develop two essential canons: the exterior modernization of the style and the classic structure of the architectural design, with: Some scholars identify traits that of the Novecento Italiano in architects who straddle the nineteenth-century language and the Modern Movement, as in the last works of Auguste Perret, where the features are however much more sober and somehow refer to the classical French tradition, as in the Public Works Museum of 1937.

Some include in monumentalism, even if in part, the so-called metaphysical architecture of interwar Italy, typical of which some fascist-era cities of foundation such as Portolago (on the Greek island of Leros) or Sabaudia.