L’Ingegnere Vittorio Bonadé Bottino e l’albergo di Campo Imperatore. The Engineer Vittorio Bonadé Bottino and the Campo Imperatore Hotel.

From the early twenties of the last century, significant infrastructural interven- tions have determined a new configuration for the mountain area of the province of L’Aquila. The city, main character of a strong impulse towards modernization dur- ing the fascist regime and promoted by the Podestà Adelchi Serena (in office from 1926 to 1934), begun the transformation into an important tourist and excursion center, realizing the urban plan of 1916 developed by Giulio Tian, which underwent variations and modifications until its approval in 1930, under Podestà Serena. In the 1930s, the entire Gran Sasso area, which until the beginning of the twentieth century had retained its sole naturalistic vocation, was therefore affected by the construction of new and modern facilities. Among the most significant interventions is the Campo Imperatore hotel, a project made by the engineer Vittorio Bonadé Bottino (Turin, 1889-1979), which is also of historical importance for the detention of Mussolini in 1943. In the Campo Imperatore hotel, built strongly linked to the Italian rationalist language, Bonadé Bottino experiments and consolidates, in different ways, geom- etries and compositional themes already present in his previous works, such as the Hotel Towers of Sestrière (1932) and the “Edoardo Agnelli” marine colony in Ma- rina di Massa (1933). These and other links would make the Campo Imperatore hotel project worthy of further study.