The inscription, no longer extant, was realised in 1940 on the back wall of the Fountains Hall of the Palazzo degli Uffici (“Offices building”, i.e. the headquarter) of Ente autonomo EUR, now EUR S.p.a. (Via Ciro il Grande). It was removed and replaced by a futuristic painting of Gino Severini in 1953.

The text was authored by the otherwise unknown Latinist Paolo Fabbri and approved on 26 February 1940 by the commissioner Cipriano Efisio Oppo (Lux 1992: 150).

The inscription was sculpted in relieved sans-serif capitals of monumental dimensions (see the pictures from EUR S.p.A photographic historical archive published in Innamorati 2017 and here). Its shape bears resamblance to another Latin inscription  of the same year, still visible at Piazza Augusto Imperatore. The inscription had bronze busts of Victor Emanuel III to the left and of Benito Mussolini to the right: removed after the Second World War, they were rediscovered in 2005 and now they are shown in the Quaroni Hall, inside the building, while the shelves that originally supported the sculptures now bear Severini’s painting.

The text of the inscription commemorates the completion of the Palazzo degli Uffici, designed by the architect Gaetano Minnucci (1896–1980), of Rome’s new district intended to host Rome’s Universal Exposition of 1942 (EUR). The exposition should have been a celebration of Fascist Italy’s greatness, power, and prosperity, but never took place because of the outbreak of the war. In the Fountains Hall the reception and ticket offices were planned; thus, the Latin text and the busts of Victor Emanuel and Mussolini would have been among the first things visitors would see upon entering the exhibition venue.

The expression novae Romae maritimae, used in the text, does not just mean “maritime” but rather “extending to the sea”. This interpretation is suggested by one of Mussolini’s famous sentences (from a speech held on 31 December 1925), carved over the external porch of the Palazzo degli Uffici: “La terza Roma si dilaterà sopra altri colli, lungo le rive del fiume sacro sino alle spiagge del Tirreno” (“The third Rome will expand over other hills, along the shores of the sacred river all the way up to the beaches of the Tyrrhenian sea”) (Mussolini 1957: 48). “Third Rome” and “New Rome” in the inscriptions thus complement each other in one expansionist and imperialist project, embodied by the EUR district.

Bibliography

Greco, Antonella. 1992. ‘Severini e Quaroni, mosaici e affreschi’. In Il Palazzo dell’Ente Eur, edited by Antonella Greco, Giorgio Muratore, Simonetta Lux, and Elisabetta Cristallini, 151–70. Rome: Editalia.

Innamorati, Francesco. 2017. E42. Eur. Fotografia di un quartiere. Florence: Forma.

Lux, Simonetta. 1992. ‘La decorazione tra metafora e retorica’. In Il Palazzo dell’Ente Eur, edited by Simonetta Lux, Giorgio Muratore, Antonella Greco, and Elisabetta Cristallini, 141–50. Rome: Editalia.

Mussolini, Benito. 1957. Opera omnia. Dall’attentato Zaniboni al discorso dell’Ascensione. 5 novembre 1925 – 26 maggio 1927, edited by Duilio Susmel and Edoardo Susmel. Vol. 22. 35 vols. Florence: La Fenice.

Nastasi, Antonino. 2019. Le iscrizioni in latino di Roma Capitale (1870-2018). Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 755–56.

Antonino Nastasi