Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia. The history and difficult legacy of fascism

Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia was one of the regime’s great architectural enterprises. It was a demonstration of the Fascist government’s ability to modernise and renovate the city, to give a central part of Brescia a Fascist look. Here the proactive will of Fascism was identified with the architecture itself. Once completed, the square was elevated to an urban transformation model for dozens of other Italian cities. The forum was designed and built by Piacentini in a very short time. It was inaugurated in November 1932 by Mussolini himself. In the post-war period, this Fascist legacy was untouchable. Although the buildings that surround the square had to remain in place, this did not apply to the large statue, seven meters high, sculpted by Arturo Dazzi. the sculpture was called Era fascita. The colossus depicts a young man with a closed fist in an act of defiance, ready to strike. It was a suspended gesture which alluded to an act of violence, the kind of violence that Fascist ideology had elevated to a status of value. The statue was removed from the square in August 1945 and taken to a warehouse in the town hall. In 2012, the center-right council declared itself in favour of replacing the statue in Piacentini’s forum. The idea of ​​repositioning the statue was strongly contested. In 2017 Brescia hosted a year-long open-air exhibition by Mimmo Paladino. A statue in black marble, six meters high, occupied temporarily the original placement of Dazzi’s Fascist Era