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# If you too sometimes feel that most Moscow architects, with all their arches, cappuccino colours and studiedly plain façades, are simply trying to copy some little-known famous building, your instinct has not failed you
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/esli-u-vas-tozhe-byvaet-chuvstvo-chto-bolshinstvo-moskovskikh-arkhitektorov-v-svoikh-proektakh-so-vsemi-etimi-arkami-tsvetom-kapuchino-i-narochito-prostymi-fasadami-prosto-pytaiutsia-sk/
- Published: 2025-06-16T06:34:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:29:44.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Architecture, Moscow, Society, Rome, Humour

Such a building exists. It is called the Palace of Italian Civilisation and was built in 1938-1940 by the architects Guerrini, La Padula and Romano, and its pediment still bears an inscription of Mussolini's words of 2 October 1935: "A people of poets, of artists, of heroes, of saints, of thinkers, of scientists, of navigators, of transmigrators".

The palace was built for the 20th anniversary of the March on Rome by the Fascists under Benito Mussolini and was to have opened at the World's Fair in Rome. This did not come to pass, because war broke out. In the Square Colosseum, as the Romans nicknamed it, the Germans set up motor workshops. In the years that followed it housed offices and desolation in place of the pompous Palace of Italian Civilisation.

The architecture recalls the Roman-Ostrogothic style, as though King Theodoric himself had devised it. The building is faced entirely in white limestone travertine. The palace has six storeys, each consisting of nine arches: six is the number of letters in the name Benito, and nine the number of letters in the surname Mussolini.

Around this magnificent building, which greets us from afar on the road to Fiumicino airport, 28 marble statues with allegories of the virtues and the arts stand in the colonnade, and in front of the palace are sculptures of the Dioscuri, the valiant twin brothers Castor and Pollux, legendary patrons of sailors and travellers.

What is interesting is not only that Mussolini's quotation has been preserved, but also the presence of the cult figures of the Dioscuri, who were, by the way, by divine genealogy, sons of the supreme deity, Zeus. The Christian tradition did not count the Dioscuri among rival cults and did not abolish their appearance in popular culture. In Rome people swore by the Dioscuri when concluding solemn vows and high-flown speeches, and the warrior brothers were most revered among the aristocracy. With the coming of Christianity they were identified with other saintly male tandems, the apostles Peter and Paul, or Cosmas and Damian.

Since 2015 the Roman brand Fendi has settled in the long-vacant building of the palace, placing its headquarters and fur workshops there.

It is to this structure that we must be grateful for a good half of the architectural projects of present-day Moscow. What originals these developers are!

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