Danteum and the New Roman Empire
By Lillian Beegle
Watercolor painting of Danteum (left), with The Colosseum in the background. By Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri, 1939.
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Given Dante’s influence as one of the great Italian national poets, writing in the lingua franca, etc. his lasting image and works would loom large in the imagining of the modern 20th century Italian nation-state. One of Dante’s more powerful visions which reappear in his Divine Comedy is his renewed Italy within the larger Holy Roman Empire, restored from the current corruption, incompetence, and greed of the Italian city-states and the conflict of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. After the rise of Italian fascism in 1922, Benito Mussolini carves his Roman Empire onto the streets of the capital, and the new Via dell'Impero will house both ancient and modern architectural splendors, including new civic buildings which are supposed to exemplify and represent the ideals of Italian fascism. Among these plans was the Danteum, to be built across from the Basilica of Maxentius and Roman Coliseum, its location a tidy reference to the various figures of Greco-Roman, Christian and Imperial representation in the Divine Comedy.
Originally intended for completion for the World’s Fair in Rome in 1942, The Danteum was supposed to house a library of Dante’s works as well as a museum, and in an amusing metacommentary, artistic works inspired by the Divine Comedy. The building, designed by Giuseppe Terragni and Pietro Lingeri in an Italian Rationalist style, was to reflect in abstract the three canticles of the Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, plus a final section called “Impero” to tie the Divine Comedy into the modern Imperial context. Mussolini approved the project, which due to the outbreak of World War II was never completed. Among the few primary resources which survived the war are sketches of the building, architectural reports from the designers, photos of a small model, a set of beautiful watercolor drafts, and Terragni’s notes and proposals. Had it not been for fellow architect Lingeri moving these drafts from his Rome studio to his villa on Lake Como, much of this work would have been destroyed during the bombing of Milan in 1943.
While the space within the building was conceived as an allegory of Dante’s travels through the three canticles, Terragni didn’t design it to be a literal or overt representation of the story, but rather an interpretation of the feeling of each canticle, as well as evoking the rhythm and format of the poem itself through geometric symmetry. For example, as the visitor approaches the Danteum, the entrance is not some imposing doorway; instead, one is led to the side of the building through a narrow pathway, evoking the side path taken by Dante and Virgil in Inferno Cantos 1 and 2. A wall along the narrow pathway is constructed from one hundred marble slabs of varying sizes, representing not only the number of cantos in the Divine Comedy, but also their length. Beyond the pathway the visitor enters a space with one hundred towering columns, symbolizing the dark wood Dante traversed in Canto 1 before reaching the gate of Inferno.
The challenge of the architects to translate the Divine Comedy from literature into architecture led to a design both modern and classical, which plays with proportion, symbolism, geometry, light, and space to evoke the form and feeling of Dante’s journey. In Terragni’s interpretation of The Divine Comedy, he organizes the spaces around the golden rectangle and golden ratio, which can also be seen throughout the floorplan of the building. In this case the golden ratio in its logarithmic spiral pattern alludes to the descent of Dante through Hell, as well as inversely, his ascent in Purgatory. Constantine's Basilica was also built in the golden ratio, emphasizing the connection to both Imperial Rome, Christianity, and the unified whole and the divine in art.
A statute for the Danteum project, written by financial backer Rino Valdameri and quoted in Thomas Schumacher’s The Danteum: Architecture, Poetics and Politics under Italian Fascism, succinctly notes the role of Dante in this renewed Italian Empire:
“A “Danteum” is to be created in Rome: A National Organization that proposes to erect, on the Via dell’Imperio, in this epoch, in which the will and genius of the Duce have realized the Imperial dream of Dante, a Temple to the greatest of Italian poets.” (Schumacher, 37)
“Temple” is an apt choice of words: the atmosphere in the Danteum is supposed to be reverent and contemplative of the Divine Comedy rather than too literal or historicist. Here Mussolini is a passive figure and a part of the natural progression of Italian history, simply fulfilling the desires of a legendary figure in the Italian national mythos. The architects built this into the design of the Danteum as the progression of the Divine Comedy ends with the inclusion of the final section, Impero, or Empire. A long hallway perpendicular to the bright and glassy expanse of Paradiso, it is capped with an imperial eagle at its end. The eagle, a symbol of imperial glory and divine justice, is present in Cantos 18 and 19 of Paradiso. Dante describes the formation of the eagle in Paradiso as transforming from a great letter M, the last letter of terram, or earth. The “M” could also be a reference to monarchy, Dante’s ideal form of government and subject of his future treatise Monarchia. Terragni, in bringing the M and eagle imagery together in his Imperio space, adds the context of 1930’s Italy to invoke a triple meaning of M, for Mussolini. The unified symbol of the Imperial Roman eagle, divine justice, monarchism, and Italian Rationalism under the fascist umbrella are realized within the Imperio space. Guy Raffa summarized this symbolism in his work Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy thusly: “If the building functioned in part like a cathedral or church, then the imperial room was the central nave, with the Mussolini-like eagle at its end rising like a crucifix above the high altar of Dante’s temple” (Raffa, 235). Terragni, already well known for other works such as his Casa del Fascio, as well as extremely assiduous in his reading of the Divine Comedy, made a bold attempt to recontextualize the Italian poet and his vision of an ideal Italy free from the plagues of corruption and strife; his architectural interpretation successfully achieves the propagandistic needs of Mussolini’s Italy.
Works Cited
Raffa, Guy P. Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy. 1st ed., Harvard University Press, 2020.
Schumacher, Thomas L. The Danteum : Architecture, Poetics, and Politics under Italian Fascism. 2nd English ed., Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.