Mostra d'Oltremare

For this purpose, the city of Naples was chosen, which, by virtue of its central position in the Mediterranean, was considered the ideal starting point for the enterprising colonial policy of the fascist regime.

In this way, the project was historically placed within the wider program for the revitalization of the city that Mussolini had enunciated under the slogan "Naples must live" and had articulated in the famous five points listed to neapolitan citizens in 1931: "agriculture, navigation, industry, crafts, tourism".

Inevitably, the construction of the exhibition influenced the entire surrounding urban environment, which, if it underwent the demolition of the ancient agricultural farmhouse of Castellana, however, saw the creation of a real business and residential center, whose fulcrum became the modern Viale Augusto, road axis with two carriageways separated by a large central flowerbed with palms and pines, a road with a slightly and imperceptibly curved course, suitable for leading up to the square at the entrance to the exhibition.

This colossal ornamental plant, arranged to integrate the architecture, immediately presented innovative and contradictory aspects, as it was the vast repertoire of a provisional nature that represented a significant avant-garde role, compared to real works of art, assuming a function primary homologation with the spaces of the entire complex.

The exhibition was closed again, if not for some spaces and some periods; this gave rise, especially starting from the sixties, to a long and inexorable process of dispossession and decay, characterized by the partial and improper use of many structures, by the neglect of the green areas and, in particular, by the damage caused by occupation of the land on which the displaced people of the 1980 earthquake were arbitrarily settled, with no respect for the work, under the banner of a widespread condition of decay, which reached its peak in the early nineties.

This design attitude of the plant by Canino shows that Naples, despite the neo-eclectic upsurge, has nevertheless absorbed the theoretical lesson of the Modern Movement, declining it to its geographical situation.

It was designed by Marcello Canino in 1940 and rebuilt in the rear part in 1952 by Delia Maione and currently restored by Luigi Casalini who has re-functionalized it in a hotel.

The building is configured as a compact block with three levels in tuff and covered with travertine; in the center there is the full-height cut of the entrance hall decorated with a semi-elliptical colonnade pronaos.

[4] It is the result of a national competition that featured designers with different linguistic and architectural approaches and is set to absorb the scenic backdrop of the main axis.

The group of designers was composed of Nino Barillà, Vincenzo Gentile, Filippo Mellia and Giuseppe Sanbito, the interiors were handled by Luigi Piccinato who intervened both in the 1940 version and in 1952.

This constraint strongly conditioned Carlo Cocchia to design the building in 1938 according to an asymmetrical T-shaped scheme characterized by the unusual functional coupling of an Olympic-size swimming pool with diving board in the stem of the T and the restaurant room at the head.

The interiors are characterized by the three-tiered division of the dining room which allows spectators, guests of the restaurant, to easily observe the 180-degree view of the swimming pool, the Flegrea Arena and the Esedra Fountain.

The pavilions were damaged by war bombings and subsequently restored for the reopening in 1952 on a project by Michele Capobianco, Arrigo Marsiglia and Alfredo Sbriziolo.

The 1952 project endowed the pavilion with a loggia characterized by a rationalist appearance with typical Nordic origins that recall in particular the Dutch neoplasticism and the slender steel structures of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Designed by Luigi Piccinato and Carlo Cocchia in 1938, on the occasion of the realization of the exhibition park, it is inspired by the monumental fountains of the eighteenth-century garden of the Royal Palace of Caserta; the scenic backdrop is entrusted to Monte Sant'Angelo, a relief of the Campi Flegrei.

The fountain consists of two bodies, a rectangular one that slopes down towards Piazzale Colombo characterized by a sequence of twelve communicating pools, and the other semicircular, called the water amphitheater, composed of four concentric crowns where the jets are positioned.

The façade, about one hundred and fifty meters long, is equipped with a pronaos of clear classical taste served by a staircase that acts as a stylobate to absorb the steep slope of the ground.

It was conceived as one of the heads of the north entrance of the exhibition, Cocchia endowed the building with a sculptural note emphasized by the ceramic façade painted with three-dimensional elements.

It was designed and built between 1938 and 1940, at the age of only twenty-six, by Giulio De Luca who was inspired by the architectural models of Greek and Roman theaters scattered around Magna Graecia.