Stile Littorio

Stile Littorio denotes an architectural language developed in Italy in the 1930s and featured in a large number of public buildings commissioned by the Fascist regime until its fall.

The emergence of Stile Littorio is closely linked to the development of a fascist architectural policy in which, through the direct and indirect influence of the fascist institutions up to Mussolini himself, a formally exemplary, emphasized and dogmatic architectural language, ultimately monumental, had to be promoted, to express the greatness and historical dimension claimed by the regime.

[1] In the history of Italian architecture, the term Stile Littorio refers to those buildings and urban spaces from the fascist period which were built in "mostly rhetorical and monumental forms".

The Stile Littorio therefore denotes an expression of state architecture that aimed to homogenize the various currents of architectural language in Italy in the twenties, merging monumentalism and classicism with rationalism in search of a unitary, connotative and recognizable national style, at the service of an image of the fascist state that was connoted as progressive and at the same time as the continuer of a great past, above all to demonstrate its power through the measure and volumetric simplicity emphasized in a state monumentalism.

The term Stile Littorio was used for the first time when Saverio Palozzi presented the results of the first competition held in 1934 for the national headquarters of the Partito Nazionale Fascista.