At VDNKh, for the sake of returning its original appearance to the ensemble, the overhead facades of the era of "the fight against excesses" are being dismantled, under which in the late 1950s - 1960s. hid the decor of the Stalinist era in order to give the exhibition pavilions a modern modernist look. However, such a desire to restore historical truth in the city's landscape has many precedents in history, and the most striking of them is the reconstruction of the ancient monuments of Rome at the initiative of Benito Mussolini in the 1920s - 30s.
Back at the end of the 19th century, Camillo Zitte, the patriarch of the scientific discipline of urban planning and the author of the famous book Artistic Foundations of Urban Planning, which was published in Vienna in 1889 and translated into many languages until the middle of the 20th century, scolded "the passion to isolate everything" at the end of the 19th century. Zitte criticized the then widespread method of building reconstruction, when the monument was restored to its "original appearance" by demolishing the later buildings surrounding it and creating a square or lawn on the vacated site. Then Zitte was one of the first to talk about the naturalness of the later additions to the monument - even devoid of artistic value. He confirmed his words with the example of Roman churches, which for the most part were complex, formed over the centuries by architectural organisms. Young Roman architects armed themselves with Zitte's work at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the new secular government began to adapt the former Papal Curia to the needs of the modern capital of the United Italy. “To preserve the city, it is not enough to preserve the monuments and beautiful buildings, by isolating them and building a completely new environment around them. It is also necessary to save the historical environment with which they are closely connected,”wrote the then young architect Marcello Piacentini in 1916. However, very soon - less than ten years later - Roman architects and city planners - in the forefront among them was Piacentini - heeded the words of the new Royal Prime Minister Benito Mussolini that "it is necessary to free all of ancient Rome from mediocre layers", and that "the monuments of our thousand-year history should rise in the solitude they need."
Under this slogan, the then called "archaeological" work was carried out, as a result of which antique columns were re-emerged from the mass of medieval, Renaissance, Baroque buildings. The excavations of the late 1920s-1930s had a rather distant relationship to the science of archeology, they were led by the Technical Department of the Governor's Office of Rome, carried out by construction firms, and archaeologists were not involved at all stages. The most extensive intervention was the quarter between the Capitol, Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum, demolished in order to clear the forums of Trajan, Augustus and Nerva. In the course of these works, in addition to the ordinary buildings of the 15th-17th centuries, several churches were lost, erected in the Middle Ages on Roman ruins and decorated in subsequent eras up to the 17th century, the original building of the Academy of St. Luke was lost (in 1934 the Academy moved to Palazzo Carpegna Francesco Borromini), and the Church of Santa Rita at the foot of the Capitol was dismantled and rebuilt under the direction of G. Giovannoni at the Teatro Marcellus. On the site of this quarter, between the Roman and Imperial forums, a main highway was laid - the street of the Empire, or, as it was called by the propaganda press of those years, "the new Via Sacra of the fascist nation." This street connected Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum, opening from the window of the Duce residence a view of the ancient amphitheater.
Theater of Marcellus was also restored to its original appearance. This ancient ruin, one of the largest in Rome, was rebuilt by Baldassare Peruzzi at the beginning of the 16th century into a Renaissance palace of the Savelli family, becoming one of the first examples in history of artistically conscious reconstruction and adaptation to the modern needs of an archaeological site. In the late 1920s, traces of Peruzzi's work were destroyed, and the Renaissance palazzo was again turned into an ancient ruin. In a similar way, the Temple of Hadrian in Piazza di Pietra, reconstructed at the end of the 17th century by Francesco Fontana and became the building of the Roman customs and exchange, was cleared - first at the end of the 19th century, then in 1928. Today, on the site of the baroque decoration, which turned the columns of the antique portico into pilasters of a colossal order, there is again a portico, and where the additions of the Fontana could not be demolished, there is an indistinct beige plaster imitating the original intercolumnia.
Baroque facades were also removed from early Christian churches in order to return them to their original appearance. So, Santa Maria in Cosmedin lost its magnificent portal. One of the oldest churches in Rome - Santa Sabina on the Aventina - has lost not only the facade, but also a significant part of the decoration created over the centuries. The scale of the clearing of the Mausoleum of Augustus is striking, as a result of which the whole building was demolished - the concert hall of the Academy of St. Cecilia crowning this ruin - the Auditorium, built there at the end of the 18th century. The demolition doomed the Academy Orchestra to almost a century of wandering, and the architects to endless contests on the topic "What to do with this unsightly ruin?" As a result, the Academy received a new hall - in
a complex designed by Renzo Piano at the beginning of the 21st century. The Altar of Peace Museum by Richard Mayer was supposed to ennoble the area around the same ruin. But what to do with the mausoleum itself has not yet been decided, although almost a century has passed since the "clearing".
What were the goals of this restoration? What principles was it regulated by? What made you turn baroque festoons and medieval mosaics into construction waste? Why was one artistic era declared more valuable than another only on the basis of the fact that it is older? For what purpose were the “later layers”, which had been forming over two millennia, removed?
The author of a significant part of the Roman "reconstructions", Antonio Muñoz, who was in 1925-1944 the inspector for antiquity and fine arts of the Governor of Rome, said that the cleared ancient buildings are not "dead museum objects", therefore it is necessary to ensure that they "appear in this form that would make the contrast between them and the new buildings less sharp. " That is, the historical monuments had to be adapted to modern times. Often this "adaptation" was carried out according to the subjective tastes of the project managers. For example, the aforementioned Muñoz added a medieval-style loggia to a real medieval Argentina tower and erected again a conventionally medieval “Crescenzi House” at the Forum of the Bulls from materials from houses of different historical eras that he had dismantled.
In addition to the personal preferences of the management of the Office of Artistic Heritage, there was a political will behind the reconstruction, aimed at a radical change in the appearance of the Eternal City, and last but not least - its historical part, in order to leave its well-read mark there. The oldest quarters of Rome were still inhabited by the poorest, "unreliable" strata, and the reconstruction was a good reason to take out unwanted people outside the city. Baroque reminded too much of the Pope, the Renaissance - of the influence of Roman aristocratic families. Fascism did not want "anything outside the state", and restored the historical truth by its own methods and according to its priorities. The Savoyard royal dynasty, which was then officially the head of the Italian state, tacitly agreed with these actions and, in fact, shared Mussolini's motives. He, who actually ruled the country at that time, described in his speeches how new buildings were erected next to the relics of Ancient Rome, newly revealed to the world: "After the Rome of the Caesars, after the Rome of the Popes, today there is only Rome - fascist Rome, in which the ancient and modern are simultanous …" …
After the inglorious end of the fascist regime, the destruction of the historical center carried out by him took a firm place in the political discourse of Roman politicians. The controversy about the Imperia Street (now the Imperial Forums) is still relevant: when the "left" government is in power, projects for its dismantling are being developed, the "right" government stops their implementation. It is symptomatic that the first implemented item of the electoral program of the current mayor of Rome - the representative of the Democratic Party Ignazio Marino, who replaced the "right" Gianni Alemanno - was the closure of the Forum Street for automobile traffic, which was met with protests from the "right" parties and their adherents. Also today, the question is open about what to do with the Mausoleum of Augustus, which, due to the dubious desire of the Duce to return the greatness of the Empire, turned into the darkest and most abandoned ruin of historical Rome.
Today, a traveler who has arrived in Rome reads the history of the city, compiled in the 1920s - 1930s. Of course, the giant columns of the August Forum or the impressive exedra of Trajan's markets, once absorbed by the mass of buildings at different times, produce a striking urban planning and didactic effect. But what is the real historical image? The state of the building before the last "intervention"? Or at the time of the completion of construction, or maybe this is a project or even the original idea of the architect, which is often different from what was eventually erected? Isn't history a chain of interconnected events, and isn't this sequence the essence of it? To what extent is it worth exposing architectural historical truth? And is there no danger in this to create a story that never happened?
