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Typology: Buildings

Address

Address: Viale delle Olimpiadi, 60
Zone: Quartiere Della Vittoria (Roma centro)

Opening times

Can only be visited on special occasions

Description

The House of Arms is one of the buildings of the Foro Italico, the vast sports complex designed by Enrico Del Debbio at the foot of Monte Mario and inaugurated in 1932 as the Foro Mussolini.
The design of the Fencing Academy, originally called the Casa del Balilla sperimentale, was entrusted in 1933 to the young architect Luigi Moretti, who had just replaced Enrico Del Debbio as director of the technical office of the Opera Nazionale Balilla. Mussolini himself inaugurated it three years later under the name 'Fascist Fencing Academy'.

Considered a masterpiece of 20th-century rationalist architecture, the Academy consists of two orthogonal buildings designed to house multifunctional spaces: the Library and the Armoury. The two buildings are connected by an elliptical structure and linked by two overhead walkways. All the external surfaces are clad in slabs of white Carrara marble. The Library was conceived as a vast hall overlooked by two overlapping galleries for reading, which are aerial in space and totally visible from the entrance and illuminated by a very large window opening towards the Forum.
The other building is characterised by the great Hall of Arms, which would have allowed as many as 160 fencers to practice simultaneously. The roof, consisting of two staggered parabolic half-vaults cast in reinforced concrete and connected by a long window frame, and the large windows provide the room with diffused lighting that further expands the space.

Used for a long time as a courtroom (the so-called "bunker room"), it was heavily tampered with and then abandoned for a long time.

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Last checked: 2023-06-21 14:42