From fascism to the postwar era: The “two lives” of Cesare Valle, architect and urbanist

Roman engineer Cesare Valle (1902-2000) was a leading figure in 20th-century Italian architecture and urbanism, although his name is not widely recognized except among specialists in architectural history of the interwar period. His career can be divided into two ‘separate lives’. In the first one, from the mid-1920s until the early 1940s, he was one of the protagonists of Fascist architecture, working in Italy and its colonies. In the second one, after World War II, he worked as an urban planning expert for the Ministry of Infrastructures and Transport, playing a prominent role in postwar Italian urban development policy. This chapter will present Valle and his work in Rome in the 1920s and the early 1930s, focusing on his collaboration with renowed engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. Then it will analyze his work as both an architect and an urbanist for the Fascist regime in the 1930s-1940s, with special concern for a series of projects in the Romagna region and for the plans of the cities of Carbonia in Italy and Addis Ababa in the Fascist colony of Ethiopia. Finally, it will present some concluding remarks on his career as an urbanist working for the Italian government after the Second World War. In addition, it will employ the recent restoration of Valle’s Casa del Balilla in Forlì as a case study of the debate on the re-use and re-signification of the Fascist Era architecture in Italy.