Few res loom larger in the modern imagination than the engineer. Invoked as the emblem of a dreamed-of immediate linkage between art and life, as embodying the new norm to be followed by less technically grounded practitioners of thought or art, and as an idealized agent of orderly democratization, the engineer hovers at the center of the revolutionary fantasies of the avant-garde. In the famous 1923 pamphlet in which he identified the Bauhaus with the will to erect the "cathedral of socialism," Oskar Schlemmer called reason and science the "regents" of the present era and the engineer "the sedate executor of [their] unlimited possibilities." 1 His was that "idealism of activity that embraces, penetrates, and unites art, science, and technology, and that influences research, study, and work [so as to] construct the 'art-edifice' of Man, which is but an allegory of the cosmic system." 2 Likewise in Le Corbusier's 1920 program for a new architecture, engineering leads and architecture follows: "The engineer's Aesthetic and Architecture are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state." 3 He continues: "Working by calculation, engineers employ geometrical forms, satisfying our eyes by their geometry and our understanding by their mathematics; their work is on the direct line of good art" (PMA, 59). Off the direct line of good art, architects have instead mired themselves in ornamentation, the false beauty of secondary forms. Their present task is thus to return to practical geometries: to "arrive at the 'House-Machine,' the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful" (PMA, 62)--to become, in short, the executors of the unlimited possibilities opened up by modern technology. As already indicated, the modernist concept of engineering bears within it rative extensions into the domains of individual and collective subject formation, morality, spirituality, and even a utopic, human-centered cosmology. Hence for the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), led by Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky, "constructivism must become the highest formalistic engineering of all life." 4 Hence also for the self-designated man of steel, Joseph Stalin, the once "useless" writer was to become an (at least rative) engineer working in the service of the supreme engineer, the builder of the State: "We need engineers who build living quarters. We need engineers who build automobiles and tractors. But we need engineers just as much who build men's souls." 5
Many other instances could be cited, but the point would remain much the same. The modern movement consecrated the engineer's passage--carried out during the second half of the nineteenth century--from the periphery to the center of the industrial world, from the status of a mere technician, the passive implementer of visions of others (poets, politicians, generals, social reformers) to that of socio-political visionary, at once creator and protagonist of modern times. This event's impact has been well studied in the American, German, French, and Soviet contexts, but less so in that of Italy, where even so vigorous a proponent of industrial civilization as the Futurist movement clung to what remains, at base, an individualized model of production resistant to routinization and rationalization. For all its celebration of modern machinery and mechanized humankind, Futurism rejects analytical reason and tends to imagine all manufacturing as artistic creation, the latter usually understood as a solitary act carried out by the titanic individual of late romanticism. It thus thinks mass production in terms not of the proletariat's genius as marshaled by and embodied in the engineer, but instead in terms of a "proletariat of geniuses": a proletariat of Prometheus-like heroes of the everyday life world, each endowed with full autonomy. Cast in a similar mold, Italy's Fascist decades have often been found wanting in the scientific-technical domain. "Fascism," wrote the great physicist Emilio Segrè, "was substantially indifferent to science, which it did not understand. It recognized a few of its applied aspects and, especially, its publicity value, but not the relations between science and technology." 6 While probably true in Segrè's own field, statements of this sort underestimate the decisive role performed if not by "pure" scientists, then by technicians and engineers in Italy's conservative revolution. Repeatedly dubbed by Mussolini "the category [of workers] that best embodies the morality of fascist times" (la categoria che meglio impersona la moralità del tempo fascista), engineers were often among the truest believers in the Fascist cause. 7 Most eagerly embraced the regime's ambitious program of public works projects and shared the view of the national secretary of their union that "our engineers, because they are in regular contact with the people, have the feeling that they have been appointed fiduciaries, propagandists, and popularizers (divulgatori) of Mussolini's word. Ours is less a technical role than a practical political role." 8
This essay tells the story of one such practitioner. Not a mainstream practitioner, to be sure, but a symptomatic one who strove to translate a Fascist politics into the language of modern technics in the domains of architecture, theater design, animal husbandry, and transportation systems. The engineer in question, Gaetano Ciocca (1882-1966), achieved considerable renown during the 1930s ( 1). Author of Giudizio sul bolscevismo, Economia di massa, and La strada guidata, as well as of an influential body of essays; close friend of Pietro Maria Bardi, Ernesto Rogers, Valentino Bompiani, and of other prominent writers and architects; inventor of the "fast house" (casa rapida) and of the "guided street" (strada guidata), Ciocca dedicated himself to building a new society through technical innovation. This enterprise took him from the battlefields of World War I through the Fascist era through the period of postwar reconstruction and, therefore, raises important questions regarding the interconnections between Italy's Fascist and post-Fascist eras. But his activities during the 1930s and 1940s form the core of his biography, for during those decades Ciocca emerged as a key mediator between Fascist Italy and the countries that he considered the "two most genuine representatives of class capitalism": the Soviet Union and the United States. 9 In his writings on these two countries, Ciocca contributed to defining the much vaunted "third way" to industrialization that the Fascist regime claimed to have discovered. In his mass theater projects, published in important reviews such as Quadrante and Meridiano di Roma, he responded to Mussolini's call for a theater of masses for masses: a theater much like that which Ciocca had encountered in the Soviet Union, but Italianized and Fascistized. In his architectural experiments he devised new, industrially produced peasant and worker housing units, rational in design and entirely prefabricated. In his ventures into animal husbandry, he brought to the agrarian world the same enthusiasm for rationalization and standardization that he had brought to the design of corporatist city plans, fast houses, and mass theaters. Finally, he labored tirelessly--and mostly in vain--to bring about his most ambitious dream: the construction of nationwide transportation system of self-steering vehicles on guided roadways; a system that would reconcile the need for mass transit with private circulation, the collectivity with the individual. Whether in this cluster of undertakings or in his important contributions to the postwar reconstruction of northern Italy, Ciocca lived to the fullest his personal ideal (and, not incidentally, that espoused by Fascism) of an activist, praxis-minded intellectualism summed up by the phrase that provides the title for his first contribution to Bardi and Bontempelli's Quadrante: "Against Sedentary Intelligence" (Contro l'intelligenza sedentaria). 10
Ciocca completed his engineering degree at the University of Turin in 1904 and devoted his earliest years (1905-15) to working on steering and suspension components for railway cars. He served with great distinction in World War I, participating in the battles of the Carso and Vittorio Veneto, building roads, hospitals, barracks, anti-nerve-gas defenses, and radio antennas, and devising an ingenious bridge-building method that he would later patent. By his own account, the first shadowy glimmerings of what would later become the guided street entered his mind on these Alpine battlefields: battlefields on which the army's recourse to fleets of individual trucks, each of which required costly refueling, inspired fantasies about lengthy truck-trains pulled by a single tractor and guided by rail-like structures.
Ciocca's transportation ideas came to slow fruition in the course of the interwar decades. In the immediate postwar years, he developed patents and worked as an engineer and consultant for the city of Milan on city planning, public housing, and mass transit projects, and for his hometown of Garlasco on several drainage and land reclamation projects. Ciocca's forays into these and other areas of civic and mechanical engineering led to collaborative ventures with Fiat (the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), and these, in turn, to a contract with Fiat's RIV (Villar Perosa) division in June 1930 with the twofold charge "first, of overseeing the design of our Moscow factory for the production of ball bearings and, second, of overseeing its construction and start-up phase. . . . " 11 The responsibilities in question were very substantial, given Ciocca's relative inexperience in the domain of manufacturing, and were to have entailed a three-year commitment. The RIV factory was to be the world's largest production facility of its kind, larger than even its Detroit counterparts and more thoroughgoing in its integrated approach to ball-bearing manufacture. It was to be built, as was then standard Soviet (and Fascist) practice, at breakneck speed, so that it could be featured as one of the crowning achievements of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan. Last but not least, it was a key component in another five-year plan: that devised (and successfully realized) by Fiat to break the virtual stranglehold enjoyed by American companies such as Ford on industrial development projects with the Soviet Union.
Stimulated by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and by the apparent death knell that it sounded for economic liberalism, the early 1930s were a period of worldwide fascination, fear, and expectation with regard to the Soviet economy. And nowhere more so than in Fascist Italy, where Mussolini's regime was putting into place a system that, by coupling workers and capitalists within state-sponsored corporate units, each responsible for a given sector of the economy as well as for coordinating their policies at the national level, was purported to offer a "third way" to industrial development, combining the advantages of Soviet centralized planning with those of liberal decentralization. "Moscow or Rome?" was the question of the day, at least in the minds of many Fascist intellectuals, and in the words of one contemporary journalist, "among the human endeavors of the present day, the Five-Year Plan is, at least in its conception, the most intriguing and perhaps the most important." 12 The regime's special interest in its Bolshevik enemy twin was, however, also of a practical order. Italian exports were sagging as the Great Depression began to deflate the Italian economy, so a series of measures were implemented to promote exports, particularly of capital goods, to new or underdeveloped markets like the Soviet Union. 13 In short, the stakes of Ciocca's charge were both corporate and national.
Within days of Fiat's offer, an accelerated design process was underway. Fiat's owner-founder, Giovanni Agnelli, demanded a state-of-the-art production facility, and Ciocca delivered. And quickly so: "The overall project that you asked me to devise in forty-eight hours has remained intact right to the end," Ciocca would later brag, adding that "This overall design has redeemed even technological weaknesses" ( 2). 14 The weaknesses in question emerged as a source of conflict several months later, when Ciocca initiated his two-year residency in Russia. They were not machine related, but rather hinged upon Ciocca's rigid insistence that "a clear sequential and systematic synthesis of the [manufacturing] technologies in use" be developed ex novo so as to allow for a full rationalization of the production line. 15 "This task can be addressed only by an intellect that, accustomed to bringing clarity, is unbiased by standard work habits" Ciocca would argue, making a virtue of his inexperience: a position that bred dissent among his more experienced peers as well as among his Russian clients, all of whom favored a less global, more pragmatic approach. 16 Aggravated by the Russians' tendency to worry less about efficiency than about meeting unrealistic production deadlines, the rift grew to the point that, by July 1931, the Soviets were demanding that a genuine specialist in manufacturing take charge of the factory's start-up phase. A personal plea by Senator Agnelli (also in July 1931) was unable to alter their view, so Ciocca soon found his contract restricted to the construction phase of the factory.
However painful, the shift in duties proved congenial to Ciocca, since it freed him up to introduce his two great passions--the development of new transportation systems and of rationalized building techniques--into the RIV project. In subsequent months Ciocca carried out experiments with prefabricated worker housing in addition to his usual duties. Most of all, he secured the necessary patents, ensured the collaboration of another Fiat engineer (A. Piccin), and developed plans for the construction of the first Autovia Ciocca (Ciocca roadway) in the Soviet Union. This futuristic system, later known as the "guided street," proposed to place trucks and tractors on rails in order to link up Moscow's suburban factories and city center at reduced cost and with increased efficiency ( 3, 4). Ciocca's ideas were in line with contemporary experiments being carried out in England, France, and Germany. His aim was to create an intermediate form of transportation between the train and the automobile. In Ciocca's own words:
The development of a new transport system is a matter of some urgency. Such a system would have to be significantly cheaper than either roadways or railways. It should be able to substitute either in most cases: in the case of trains, furnishing heavy-duty, intensive, long-distance transportation; in the case of automobiles and trucks, providing brief light-duty service to isolated locations. 17
The solution was to devise "not a motor vehicle suited to railways, but rather a special roadway for automotive trains," a roadway that allowed ordinary trucks, tractors, and trailers to circulate on inexpensive reinforced concrete tracks. 18 An upraised inner wall was to have kept the truck and trailer wheels aligned, with steering for heavy vehicles provided by pairs of lateral rotors extending down beneath the vehicle's track rods and pressing against the inner wall of each track. Other technical features of the Autovia will be discussed in due course, but for present purposes it is worth noting that Ciocca and Piccin's proposal was greeted with anxiety by Fiat and with enthusiasm by the Soviets. The former wished to dissociate itself from what it (correctly) viewed as an unproven technology and proceeded to do so by forcing Ciocca to leave Fiat's employ. The latter appointed Ciocca director of an experimental unit, funded by the state companies Ziat and Zudotrans, whose mission was to realize the guided street. Construction of a twelve kilometer wood prototype that was to link up a railway station to two quarries was initiated between May and September 1932 and seemed to have been yielding mostly satisfactory results. But from that moment on construction ceased and Ciocca was forced to return to Italy. 19
Despite the many conflicts, detours, and obstacles encountered along the way, the RIV factory proved an outstanding success. Ground was broken in the spring of 1931. The lateral structures and outbuildings were up by late October ( 5). In early January 1932--the "allegorical date" established long in advance by the Soviet authorities--the first ball bearing was duly manufactured, even if it had little more than "scholastic value." 20 And less than a year after it was begun, the complex, in the form of a vast single hall surrounded by outbuildings, was inaugurated. A stately ceremony was held on 29 March 1932 that included representatives of the Soviet government, the Red Army, the Communist Party, youth organizations, the Italian ambassador, and the world press. It featured Ciocca as its keynote speaker. Our engineer had received his letter of dismissal from Fiat only two hours before the ceremony, so he was feeling more than a little disgruntled. But his commitment to the Autovia project kept him eager to please his Russian hosts and to sing the praises of Italian discipline and technology. His speech, reported in the press above a subtitle that read "The Americans Express Admiration," cast the undertaking in a distinctively Fascist mold. It celebrated the close collaboration of Italian and Russian engineers, praised the accelerated pace of construction, and described the factory as if it were a Mussolinian bonifica (land reclamation project): "One year ago, there were only swamps where now there are worker houses, tramway lines, and vocational schools." 21 Ciocca continued by noting that the new facility's technology was unequaled anywhere--surely a barb directed at the Ford Corporation, Fiat's American rival--and that it offered the most modern solutions available in the domains of hygiene and worker safety. The speech closed by noting the importance of training Soviet engineers and workers to run the plant.
The triangular frame of reference implicit in the keynote speech, based upon the study of convergences and divergences between Fascist Italy, Communist Russia, and liberal-democratic North America, is indicative of the way that Ciocca viewed his entire Soviet experience. Indeed, this very triangle would shape the two books that established Ciocca's reputation as a writer and cultural-political mediator: Giudizio sul Bolscevismo and Economia di massa . The former's subtitle was Com'è finito il piano quinquennale (How the Five-Year Plan Came to Term) in keeping with its key concerns: collectivization and the role of the state in economic planning. It enjoyed such immediate popularity that it underwent six printings between August 1933 and February 1934. Beefed up as of the second edition with prefaces by "Il Popolo d'Italia" (Mussolini) and Pietro Maria Bardi, Ciocca's book became the defining work of the "Russian journey" genre: a genre whose success can be measured by the existence of similar travelogues by Bardi, Corrado Alvaro, Mirko Ardemagni, and V. Beonio-Brocchieri, among others, and by the publication in Italian of works such as René Fülöp-Miller's The Face of Bolshevism and Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker's The Soviet Five-Year Plan and The Menace of Red Commerce . As regards Ciocca's study of the new economy of masses (to be contrasted with prior "economies of privilege"), limitations of space preclude my going into detail, but suffice it to say that the acclaim garnered by Giudizio sul bolscevismo was such that the Italian Royal Academy decided to honor Ciocca with a grant so that he might extend his study to the American continent. This he did in the course of 1934 and 1935, and the result was not a travelogue--Ciocca had spent barely four months in New York--but instead a theoretico-practical study of industrialization and economic rationalization in which the American case was examined critically and comparatively. 22
Whether in the first or the second of these works, Ciocca's fundamental concern was with the link between modernization and specific forms of political organization. He viewed modern industrial societies as mass societies in which privileges once reserved for the few were increasingly being extended to the many, but how to reconcile the drive to democratize prosperity with the pursuit of a higher collective good? How to curb the activities of socio-economic agents such as oligarchies, trusts, or an omnivorous state, which would diminish the collective's prosperity by restricting its economic freedom? Ciocca's answer is at once technical and ethical. It calls for "the courage of dictatorship, a heroic remedy to kindle the collective will by means of the spark provided by a single will." 23 A dictatorship whose natural extension is the corporate state:
The need for a newly ordered state, able to regulate economic freedom and to engage in advance planning, arises in this manner. All governments, from free-market America to collectivist Russia, are cognizant of this fact. But in both Russia and America we see the state limiting its purview to the purely material aspects of production, as if the individual were entitled to define his economic needs yet were deemed incapable of satisfying them. This is the opposite of the truth. . . . It is up to the State to create the context in which individuals operate and up to individuals to operate within that context. Individuals cannot encroach upon the sphere of action of the state any more than the state can encroach upon the sphere of action of individuals without upending the fundamental economic principle of the division of labor. The solution is thus neither a state of capitalists nor state capitalism, but rather state initiatives and private initiatives converging with and completing one another. The first [state initiatives] create the possibility for power; the second [private initiatives] transform this possibility into a reality. 24
Moscow, New York, and Rome were for Ciocca the three laboratories in which the future of humankind was being prepared. Hence the "special interest for Italians" of his two case studies. 25 The transition from a class-based economy, whether capitalistic or communistic, to a fascist economy required an avoidance of predecessors' errors. In the case of the Soviet Union, the lesson Ciocca gleaned was that, however powerful a tool is the centralized planning of production according to national needs, it cannot right the imbalances created by a state that has abolished all private property and, therefore, all individual economic incentives, and in so doing has impoverished the masses and subjected them to the whims of a bureaucratic elite. In the case of America, the lesson was instead that the state's abdication of any central planning role left the collectivity at the mercy of enormous trusts operating at cross purposes with the national interest. The result was a tyranny of individuals akin to the bureaucratic tyranny exercised by the Soviet government. Proof of these failures could be found in the bread lines of Depression-era America and in the fully (under)employed and impoverished Soviet work force. But the diverging symptoms concealed a common malady: "Russia and America are today the two most genuine representatives of the capitalism of class that arose in the course of the last century to replace the traditional capitalism of caste. They have adopted the same program: to excessively concentrate and mechanize production, thereby reducing all social and economic questions to matters of industrial accounting" (GSB, 25). 26 This reduction bespeaks a shared spiritual poverty:
Russia, on the one side, and the great plutocratic nations, on the other, follow their respective courses on the basis of the same materialist conception of life. They are both under the spell of the same miraculist mirage [illusione miracolista]: a mirage that promotes belief in the prospect of unlimited, nearly inevitable progress along prosperity's open orbit.  The force of things bends all trajectories and that which is launched towards infinity is fated to come tumbling down into the contentious circle of the real. [GSB, 55] 27
Here and elsewhere in Giudizio sul bolscevismo, Ciocca's intention is to differentiate the acritical worship of the machine purportedly practiced by Americans and Soviets from the "realistic" approach to technology ushered in by fascism and adopted by practical politicians like himself. For Ciocca "realism" implies a sober, practically grounded approach to technical solutions that views modern technology and science not as ends in themselves, but as means to a higher collective good. It demands a rejection of utopic expectations regarding technology and an intensive concern with addressing actual social problems, however intractable they may prove. It eagerly seeks out mechanical, utilitarian or functionalist solutions to what ails humankind but, keenly aware that human existence must always be defined by deprivation, work, and struggle, and that nature's laws are irrevocable, it is immune to the "miraculist mirage" and wary of the quick fix. Technological realism dictates moderation so as to insure that the Fascist "third way" to modernity will escape the pathological consequences of the first and second ways:
[Fascism] consists in cooperation inside the orbit of the state among all the forces active within society, whether individual or collective, whether of the body or of the mind. These are brought together in order to insure that the nation's productive energies achieve maximum results and that the resulting benefits are distributed in a manner that is both equitable and in keeping with a collective good; a collective good that is less material than it is moral and whose ultimate expression is the nation's spiritual grandeur and power. [GSB, 33-4] 28
Ciocca's state steers a middle course between liberal statelessness and communist statism, between hypertrophic individualism and hypertrophic collectivism, between the pursuit of material prosperity and of spiritual grandeur. Its moderate approach yields increases in efficiency inasmuch as the state is strong enough to gather within itself all productive forces, but not so strong as to diminish their productivity. Like a supercharged engine, it is able to transform this collective input into a maximum output that, optimally redistributed back into the input stream, contributes in turn to sustaining ever higher outputs. What it generates and, for that matter, feeds upon, is not reducible to the materials, statistics, and statistical persons favored by industrial accountants. Rather, it is a volatile blend of body and spirit--a moral capital, identical to the spiritual totality that is the nation.
Some six months following Ciocca's return to Italy, Mussolini addressed the members of the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) and summoned them to create a mass theater that would "arouse the great collective passions, be infused with a sense of intense and deep humanity, and bring to the stage that which truly counts in the life of the spirit and in human affairs." 29 The crisis of the theater, il Duce averred, was neither inevitable nor insuperable. Nor was it the result of the triumph of film as a popular art form or of the masses' greater passion for athletic competitions. Its resolution demanded both "spiritual" and "material" answers:
The spiritual aspect concerns authors, the material aspect the availability of seats. The time has come to prepare a theater of masses, a theater able to accommodate fifteen or twenty thousand [persons]. La Scala was adequate when, a century ago, Milan's total population equaled 180,000 inhabitants. It is not today when the population has reached one million. The lack of seats creates the need for high prices which drive the crowds away. But theaters, which, in my view, possess greater educational efficacy than do cinemas, must be designed with the people in mind, just as dramatic works must have the breadth that the people demand. 30
Ciocca had not yet completed Giudizio sul bolscevismo at the time of Mussolini's speech (April 1933). An open letter to the daily newspaper L'Ambrosiano defending Bardi's Moscow dispatches against accusations of filo-Sovietism had helped to earn him a place among the founding contributors to Bardi and Bontempelli's Quadrante. Established in May 1933, Quadrante managed for nearly three years to bring together the leading advocates of a modernist interpretation of Fascist culture. 31 It was an openly polemical, militant monthly whose articles covered a wide spectrum of cultural-political topics, from architecture and urban planning to contemporary literature, music, and dance. Along with its successor, Meridiano di Roma (started in December 1936), it became the principal venue for Ciocca's contributions on theatrical, architectural, and economic arguments, and was largely responsible for his reputation as one of the most inventive technical interpreters of the Fascist revolution.
Ciocca had no prior experience in the domain of theater design. His Soviet sojourn had coincided with the 1931 competition for the new Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, a key component of which was a fifteen-thousand-seat auditorium for party functions. So Ciocca had occasion to view the losing projects submitted by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Hans Poelzig, Erich Mendelsohn, and by Blum, Lubetkin, and Sigalin, as well as the winning one by Boris Jofan. 32 In addition, several passages in Giudizio sul Bolscevismo confirm Ciocca's fascination with Soviet stadia, theaters, and cinemas, as, for instance, the following:
Among the thousand Soviet contrasts, the most telling is that between the gloomy monotony that oppresses the average citizen in his family life and the mirthful excitement of collective events. In cinemas and theaters, the audience, always unbelievably overflowing, constitutes a spectacle unto itself. It enraptures the performers and is enraptured by them. [GSB, 167] 33
The strong impression made by the large size of Soviet audiences and by their electrifying response to theatrical shows prompted Ciocca's decision to answer Mussolini's April 1933 call. Between July 1933 and January 1935 he published nine major statements on this subject, as well as a range of supplementary newspaper articles. These varied from brief synopses to full-scale technical proposals, accompanied by technical drawings and by calculations regarding sight lines, acoustics, and crowd flow ( 6, 7). All envisaged a large-scale covered arena, similar to contemporary indoor stadia, built according to strict geometrical principles. The basic design consisted in two intersecting circles: one large, marking the periphery of a concentrically arranged seating area comprising a floor area as well as balconies; one small and centered on the perimeter of the larger circle, functioning as a stage. The theater's walls (twenty-seven meters high) sloped downward into the hall, such that the diameter of the floor was somewhat reduced (ninety-two meters) with respect to its upper diameter (one hundred meters). A network of spiraling corridors, wide enough to permit the passage of only one person at a time, ensured the rapid but disciplined inflow and outflow of spectators. (Scientific crowd-flow studies were one of the era's passions.) Rejecting the window-box stages of the prior century, Ciocca's theater employed a very large semicircular thrust stage (forty meters wide) that reduced the orchestra pit to a bare minimum and jutted out some thirty to thirty-two meters into the auditorium. It initially assumed the form of a three-part stage, each of whose parts could slide along parallel tracks (into and out of the auditorium), rotate (on or off the parallel tracks), and be lifted up (for the initial preparation of sets on a second floor tech studio). 34 Subsequent designs increased its size and replaced the track system with a bipartite rotating platform. In either case, Ciocca's stage was designed to both minimize and equalize the distance between spectators and actors, to reinforce the sense of immediacy and even intimacy (despite the massive scale), and to underscore the life-like three dimensionality of the show ( 8). For too long, he argued, theaters have flattened reality out into two dimensions, "like a flower between the pages of a book" ("ITM," 8). 35 The mass theater would instead bring absolute reality to the stage: "Everything appears, just as it should, in three dimensions: trees are trees, houses are houses. The stage director need concern himself only with arranging . . . the true images of things" ("ITM," 8). 36 Like many other proponents of the Fascist mass theater, Ciocca assumes that the artful arranging of "true images of things" within the theater's compressed and intensified reality will yield a spectacle form as hallucinatory as the cinema, yet more seductive and complete, because anchored in the palpable reality of the body.
The early 1930s were a period of enormous stadium-building projects, whether in Italy or abroad. So Ciocca's studies not only found a receptive audience but seemed modest when compared to proposals like Pier Luigi Nervi's for the construction in Rome of a stadium for one hundred twenty thousand people. 37 Their impact on public debates concerning the "theater for twenty thousand" was substantial, to judge by coverage in the Italian, French, and even Japanese architectural press; and by the seriousness with which they were discussed at the 1934 and 1935 Lictorial Games of Culture and Art (Littoriali della Cultura e dell'Arte), an intellectual Olympics for Fascist university students. 38 Substantial enough, in any event, to determine Ciocca's inclusion in one of the major international theater conferences of the decade: the 1934 Volta Congress on the theater. Presided over by Luigi Pirandello and sponsored by the Italian Royal Academy, the Volta Congress brought together men such as Edward Gordon Craig, William Butler Yeats, Walter Gropius, Walter Unruh, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jacques Copeau, Gerhardt Hauptmann, and Alexander Tairoff for a five-day discussion of the dramatic theater's past, present, and future. The Italian delegation included a Futurist contingent made up of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Enrico Prampolini, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; the critic Silvio d'Amico, and the writer Bontempelli (like Marinetti and Pirandello, a member of the Royal Academy). Ciocca's name had not red on the original list of invitees, a star-studded cast that included Federico Garcia Lorca, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Eugene O'Neill, Karel Capek, and Paul Claudel. It was added at Pirandello's insistence because of the "great competence" with which his publications had addressed the topic for the second day: "Theater Architecture: Mass Theaters and Little Theaters." 39 Because both he and Gropius were assigned to the same panel, Ciocca's Volta Congress presentation followed directly upon that of the Bauhaus's founder (concerned with the Total Theater that he had designed for Erwin Piscator). It bore the title "The Technique of the Mass Theater" (La tecnica del teatro di massa) and examined the features that a facility with the requisite visibility, acoustics, capacity, economy of construction, and ease of entry and exit, would have to possess. Illustrated by technical diagrams and by a large wood model built especially for the occasion, it generated one of the Congress's most animated and publicized debates: a debate in which Ciocca and Gropius found themselves lumped together and praised for the audacity of their technical solutions but criticized for putting the horse before the cart ( 9). 40 Why design such a facility, the critics objected, when no repertory for the mass theater yet exists? Shouldn't authors rather than architects take the lead?
Ciocca responded to his critics in essays published in Quadrante and Corriere della Sera. In revolutionary times, he argued, questions of precedence are irrelevant: "In the case of the theater . . . the real question is what would occur if large cities had at their disposal an auditorium equipped for every possible type of spectacle and capable of seating twenty thousand spectators." 41 Ciocca's answer brought him back to Mussolini's original example: the Teatro della Scala in Milan. If La Scala, he reasoned, were able to place its shows on a mass stage every weekend, it would be able to multiply its audience by a factor of ten and reduce its ticket prices by the same factor, without any loss in income and without renouncing its weekday performance schedule. Such an operation would not only democratize what was once an elite cultural form, but also generate new revenues. All that it required was the elimination of all the inefficiencies of bourgeois theater architecture, so that the same quality of spectacle enjoyed by La Scala's patrons could be made available to the maximum number of spectators at the lowest possible cost. Rationalization was the first step towards democratizing elite culture. The second step was to devise so flexible a theater architecture that it could be adapted to every sort of show, from rallies to cinema to dramas and operas. The final step was to foster the development of new mass political/cultural forms:
Above all else, the mass theater is a political, social, and cultural weapon of the greatest efficacy. . . . It could host parades, great corporate and popular assemblies for the diffusion of propaganda, films that enlighten culturally, grand operatic and musical performances, eternal sources of joy and of spiritual elation for the masses. And why not plays? I believe that the greatest and most enduring dramatic works, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, were destined for the masses. The matter has nothing to do with geometry, but let me state that I feel certain that a glorious future awaits the Italian dramatic theater. Marinetti was right when he expressed the wish that erotic plays and thrillers be banished from the Italian stage. The mass theater will instead exalt energy, struggle, speed, and progress. It will reawaken faith and arouse a new corporatist consciousness. 42
Despite their technical nature, Ciocca's theater writings do not shy away from defining the model of spectacle required by the new corporatist consciousness. The model in question, instead of relying upon the effects achieved by individual actors, demands mass choreographies and choruses not unlike those employed in ancient Greek tragedy but dedicated to the celebration of Humanity triumphant (and not of Fate). 43 Parades lead the list of its sources of inspiration, because they are the "synthesis of the work of the collectivity, the glorification of the people's labors, the expression of the nation's passion" ("ITM," 10). 44 In parades the mass theater fulfills its highest calling. The mass audience is invited to gaze upon itself, as if in a transring mirror: "While twenty thousand admiring and applauding spectators cram the hall, thirty thousand others, gathered backstage and under stairwells, file across the stage amidst bright lights and flashing screens: a prize to men of good will, an incitement to tepid souls, a warning to doubters" ("ITM," 10). 45 This narcissistic gaze promises release into pre-Oedipal bliss or threatens exclusion and eventually punishment. It structures a theater within which there can be no gap between auditorium and stage, mass audience and mass actor, or, for that matter, fantasy and reality--a theater that is the allegory of a corporative nation that has little room for waverers or doubters.
Whether in his Volta Congress address or in his other writings, Ciocca identified his mass theater designs with architectural rationalism (the label employed in Italy to denote the International Style):
When geometry is applied to architecture, the latter assumes the name of rationalism. The Coliseum and the Roman acqueducts, to this day the most compelling instances of rationalist architecture, are geometry pure and simple. The false rationalisms that sometimes afflict us are little more than false geometry, erroneous theorems, logical receptacles riddled with holes. What I propose to do is to demonstrate how a strictly geometrical method, based on a simple and clear set of norms, can resolve all the problems entailed by the construction of a mass theater. But to discover a method is not to discover the method. Better solutions will be found tomorrow. 46
Bardi, Terragni, Nervi, and others had long ago devised the stratagem of countering the antirationalist attacks of cultural moderates (like Marcello Piacentini) and conservatives (like Ugo Ojetti) by emphasizing rationalism's Mediterranean roots, sometimes straining the limits of credulity. But in the hands of an engineer, much of whose lifetime had been devoted to designing canals, sewage systems, and drainage projects, the praise of Roman acqueducts was surely genuine. 47 Evidence to this effect may be found in Ciocca's arena, whose circular contours suggest a tilted, streamlined version of Rome's Coliseum. But it is important to note that, for Ciocca, the connection was founded on sound engineering and design principles (not iconography). His direct sources of inspiration were the great assembly hall of Le Corbusier's Palace of the Soviets and various Soviet theaters (among them that in Kharkiv). These he freely expanded upon and modified, rejecting, for instance, Le Corbusier's recourse to microphones, in favor of the "natural" projection of music and human voices according to meticulous acoustical calculations. 48 True to his training, he devoted a great deal of effort to the mathematical study of audience flows according to the principles of hydraulics in the pursuit of "the minimum possible exit time from the theater." 49 Just as in the design of the RIV ball-bearing plant, Ciocca's goal was to devise a modern, fully integrated facility, of the highest possible efficiency at the lowest cost: "not the cavern of Cacus that are traditional theaters, but a spectacle factory, clean, orderly, and luminous like a modern factory" ("ITM," 9). 50 A factory of and for Fascist subjects.
In the months following the Volta Congress, Ciocca's theater seemed on the verge of becoming a reality. On 10 January 1935 he wrote excitedly to Bardi:
Now I have to tell you in all confidentiality that, according to a reliable source, an extremely wealthy Milanese industrialist appears ready to shoulder the theater's costs. The same source claims that the Comune is prepared to cede the needed land. . . . It appears, moreover, that it will be necessary to put this industrialist in direct touch with the head of the government, in order that a conversation with Mussolini provide the springboard. 51
Eight days later, a deal appeared imminent, even if its shape had changed:
I need Bontempelli's and your advice . . . on whether the head of the government would approve the construction of a theater financed by a small number of major Lombard industrialists. How can we find this out? It would be best to have a face-to-face conversation, but who should speak to him? Bontempelli, me or you? 52
Another four months passed and, by his own account, Ciocca was still "receiving requests [for offprints of his Volta address] by persons of good will who are talking about its construction. Even the Japanese are interested!" 53 A contemporaneous letter to Vittorio Mussolini, il Duce's son, indicates that his sights were still set high: "Italy needs twenty theaters for twenty thousand: one for every two million inhabitants: 400,000 seats in all." 54 All this came to naught. Of Mussolini's involvement in the construction of Ciocca's theater little is known, and even less so of Japanese interest; neither twenty, nor ten, nor even one arena was ever built. 55 The spectacle factory was fated to remain on its inventor's drawing board, despite Meridiano di Roma's attempts in 1937 to relaunch the mass theater movement and Ciocca's continued publications on theater architecture. 56
If Ciocca failed in his first great architectural enterprise, he mostly succeeded in his second. This is perhaps attributable to the fact that his active involvement in housing and urban planning issues stretched back into the early 1920s. As early as July 1921, for instance, more than a year before the March on Rome, he had drafted an ambitious study, entitled "For the Resolution of the Building Crisis," which proposed a proto-corporatist solution to the nation's housing woes: the creation of a public entity that would "summon not just capitalists or workers, but workers and capitalists" to address jointly the grave problems faced in the area of social housing. 57 Many public works projects later, the expertise he had developed in Milanese city planning issues led to his being asked to join BBPR--the noted architectural firm of Belgioioso, Banfi, Peressutti, and Rogers--to assist in the design of a radical new "corporatist" city plan for Pavia. (The plan was rejected, but Bardi transformed it into a major cultural event by devoting an exhibition to it at his influential Galleria del Milione [ 10].) But, however great was Ciocca's devotion to planning and building the corporatist city, his deeper commitment was to rural Italy and, in particular, to the agricultural world of his native Lombardy.
These ruralist convictions came to a head in early 1935. Prompted in part by his North American travels (which had included suburbs and farming districts), in part by a desire to transplant the period's city-based architectural debates in soil that was at once more familiar and politically fertile, Ciocca undertook construction of a prototype rural house at Cascina Valbona, a bonifica located in the outskirts of Garlasco ( 11). 58 This model home approached the question of rural housing in the integral, totalitarian mode demanded, Ciocca believed, by Fascist corporatism. "Half-way solutions are costly and solve nothing," he would write, "they compromise the full resolution of problems." 59 His point of departure was, therefore, not traditional rural building types, but an entirely new kind of housing specifically designed for Italy's peasantry: an attractive, modern, hygienic, and extremely inexpensive house-machine developed with the same repertory of techniques and geometrical tool kit employed in the RIV factory and mass theater designs. The project was copiously documented, explained, and theorized in essays published in Quadrante under Ciocca's usual rubric of "Services to Mussolini" (Servizi a Mussolini). Bardi honored it with a series of full-page spreads, juxtaposing images of the clean modernist machine-house with decrepit traditional peasant housing: a procedure he had followed only in a few prior polemics. His tribute aroused jealousy within the circle of architectural contributors. But Bardi smelled victory: "rest assured," he wrote to Banfi, "if we hit the jackpot on the rural house, all of Quadrante's architects will have plenty to do." 60 The hope was that the close fit between the regime's campaign to modernize Italian farming--Mussolini had recently spoken out on matters of peasant housing--and Ciocca's practical-minded project would lead to the latter's adoption on a national scale. If so, Ciocca's rural house might become the means to a glorious end: the de facto adoption of architectural rationalism as the official corporatist style.
The industrial mass production of housing had been one the heroic themes of the modern movement in architecture, at least since Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture. 61 But, with the lone exception of North America, where prefabrication became well established soon after the turn of the century, European architects approached it in a mostly piecemeal fashion until the 1930s and 1940s. These years stand as the first golden era of prefabricated building technologies and Ciocca's rural house is one of this era's most characteristic monuments. Its purpose was straightforward. "If I succeed in demonstrating that houses can be built with the same methods that are used for building automobiles," he claimed, "I will have implicitly demonstrated two possibilities: that the benefits of mechanical progress can be extended to the building sector and that homes can be perfected and popularized just like automobiles" ("SCR," 6). 62 In Ciocca's hands Le Corbusier's "house as machine for living" was to become a quite literal house-machine, improvable and therefore expendable, and composed of 5,436 carefully studied, prefabricated parts:
In this rural house, I have attempted to anticipate the precise form and position of each piece, prefabricating the greatest possible number of elements. Where an aperture is required, the piece is cast with an aperture. Where a bracket is required, the piece is cast with a bracket. ["SCR," 17] 63
The 5,436 elements were reducible to an "alphabet" of ninety-one precast concrete forms ( 12). Their simplicity of design was meant to streamline the assembly process and reduce the time that it required:
As is well known, the greatest advantage of rational building procedures is the time savings that they allow. Fantastic results have been achieved in automobile manufacture; the same can be done in the manufacture of housing. During the construction of my model home, I timed various operations and was able to determine that many tasks that now take five minutes could be reduced to a single minute; hour-long tasks can be reduced to a mere two minutes. Planning and organization are all that are needed. ["SCR," 18] 64
These economies of labor were redoubled by Ciocca's careful selection of autarchic building materials. In line with the Fascist government's latest directives regarding Italy's economic autonomy, he sought to sharply curtail the use of iron, "a material whose use we must limit in every possible way" ("SCR," 17). 65 Hinges, closures, and locks for doors and cabinets were simplified and standardized. Rebar or steel reinforcements for the roof were abandoned in favor of wood beams and a light metal netting. Utilities--water supply, water heater, heating and cooling systems, sewage and drainwater pipes, stove pipe; sinks, shower, and toilets--all were concentrated in a single central wall, the house's "spinal column," so as to rationalize their layout and reduce the need for steel tubing. The air and water heating systems were integrated into the cooking facilities; all drainage systems--for rainwater, bathwater, and sewage--were unified. Like most of the edifice, sinks were made of precast cement: a cheap and protean building material whose production required the expenditure of far less carbon energy than its rivals brick, terra-cotta, or ceramics. In Ciocca's pursuit of economy no detail could be spared: even the varnish for built-in closets, window frames, and fenestrated doors--to be derived, he suggested, from used motor oil "which costs nothing and works perfectly" ("SCR," 17). 66 The result was a total cost, or so he claimed, of only 7,000 Lire versus 35,000 Lire for even an "ugly and inefficient" ("SCR," 18) traditional house. 67
The layout of Ciocca's house-machine prototype was spartan and functional. Consisting of two floors evenly divided by the central utility wall, it allowed for five small rooms: three on the ground floor (a utility room, a living room, a small bedroom); on the second floor, two bedrooms (one with an oval balcony) and a bathroom. The two were joined by a spiral staircase that doubled as a stairway to the roof (which was flat so as to permit the drying of fruit and the hanging of laundry). The house's dimensions were extremely modest (around seven and a half meters wide and six meters deep), but would grow in his single and twin residence designs of the late 1930s ( 13). Each abode was to be detached from the landlord's house and surrounded by its own fruit and vegetable garden, so as to grant a modicum of privacy. But each was envisaged as part of a cluster of identical homes, homes that put on display the "aesthetic of uniformity" characteristic of the new corporative order. 68 Such clusters form an idealized double of the Fascist city:
I am certain that when our economy will be fully regulated by corporatism . . . we will provide new peasant housing with light, air, adequate space, shiny flooring, hygienic kitchens, heating, ventilation, cold and hot running water, showers, flush toilets, built-in closets, all without exceeding the current costs for providing none of the above. And every grouping of rural homes will be granted radios, newspapers, books, and maybe automobiles, and thus the possibility of attending every Sunday . . . the purest, most passionate, and imaginative of theaters: the theater of twenty thousand peasants. 69
In Ciocca's rural utopia the mass theater occupies the place once assigned to the church. Accessible to landlord and peasant alike thanks to the availability of automobiles, it provides a place to worship a beneficent state that aims to extend bourgeois luxuries to the peasantry, but not to level socio-economic hierarchies. For all its collectivizing and standardizing tendencies, the corporative countryside is thus defined by a differentiated approach to planning. To the popular classes it proposes a new aesthetics of uniformity and clustering; to landlords, the same independence they have enjoyed over the centuries, but now limited by the demand for corporate discipline and autarchic restraint.
From the time that the Cascina Valbona prototype was built through the war years, Ciocca worked on refining his designs. Certain of their features had proved controversial: their use of flat roofs (ill-adapted to Italy's northern climes); their deliberate ephemerality (being meant to be replaced every forty years); their use of cloth partitions instead of inner doors; the tendency of their cement walls to sweat. 70 But even his critics were ready to grant them the status of "revolutionary." 71 Revolutionary or not, Ciocca was unable to persuade the ministries of agriculture, public works, or the colonies to embark on the sort of massive building program he envisaged (involving the construction of as many as one hundred thousand houses per year). His proposals met a warmer reception in the private sector. Sample homes or clusters of homes of various types were built in Vada, Ponte Ginori, Merano, Garlasco, and Condove, for patrons such as the Solvay and Montedison corporations. Encouraged by this success, he founded a corporation in 1938-39 for the mass production and marketing, both in Italy and abroad, of a variety of "Ciocca Rapid-Built Houses" (Case Rapide Ciocca): single or double homes, one to two stories in height, buildable in as little as seven weeks time ( 14). Limited success was again achieved, but any hopes for a transition to large-scale development were undercut by the outbreak of war.
Ciocca's integral solution to the problem of peasant housing was, of course, integral only in part. Small clusters of rapid built houses, no matter how effective they might be in bringing dignity to a disenfranchised peasantry, did little to rationalize Italian farming practices. This realization prompted Ciocca, during the very years of his housing experiments (1935-42), to undertake a parallel set of experiments. From an operating base on the Capanella farm, owned by the mayor of his native Garlasco, he set out to reengineer traditional Italian farming. In the course of these labors he devised and patented several inventions, among which a mechanical assembly that spun and compressed hay with such force as to produce airtight cylinders that could be stored in silos for extended periods. His principal passion, however, was for animal husbandry: initially involving geese, and later pigs. As Carlo Belli would recall many years later:
[Ciocca] finally succeeded in realizing his dream: a Grand Hotel for pigs. He had fought long and hard for the idea, firing off studies to Mussolini that violently denounced the vendors of pork for trafficking in contaminated meat. Why so? Because instead of being nourished rationally, swine were fed everything, at all times, indiscriminately. Today's pig, he used to say, is a building by Piacentini; we must transform him into a building by Le Corbusier. To this end he had built pristine and airy spaces, tidily furnished little rooms. They had a straw bed, a toilet, and a special feeding trough that permitted a . . . stream of food to advance only up to certain point. Then, bam! A little door would shut so as to limit the pig's intake of food. (The food was always nourishing, clean, and in modest proportions.) Then there was a small tub. The pig could hold down a small disk with his hoof and water would spout as long as he kept pressing.  Right after eating and drinking, he would drive them towards the toilet with a whip. After a few days the pigs would go without any prodding. In this manner he achieved unbelievable results: impeccable, bacteriologically pure meat; swine that instead of being weighed down with unhealthy fat, were lean and elegant in appearance. . . . But the project was discontinued because the swine raised at the Grand Hotel weighed no more than sixty kilos, while those that been raised on swill weighed well over a hundred. 72
Belli's portrait is accurate. In pig farming Ciocca found an ideal extension of his housing work. If in the rural house one of his key objectives had been to end, once and for all, the cohabitation of humans and animals, then why not also rationalize animals' abodes? Why not create a porcine "machine for living" that would also contribute to the well-being both of the peasants involved in pig farming and of the consumers of pork? Such indeed were Ciocca's goals as, in addition to devising Rationalist stalls, he carefully analyzed every phase of the pig's life ( 15). He developed an annual tracking system for individual porkers, which registered their girth and weight in relation to their dietary intake. 73 He experimented constantly with new combinations of foods, "always nourishing, clean, and in modest proportions." And, although he never published on the subject, he was surely aware of the symbolic reversal that he was attempting to effect. Ever since Book Two of Plato's Republic, in which Socrates had contrasted his ideal republic with a "city of pigs"--a city of day laborers and wage earners, dedicated alone to the pursuit of base carnal appetites--Western societies have identified the pig with abject filth, sloth, and excreta; with dangerous, undisciplined muck--the muck of the proletariat. 74 Through the alchemy of Rationalism, Ciocca wished to turn rative shit--whether proletarian, peasant, or porcine--into corporatist gold.
During the years of his building projects, Ciocca's greatest dream--notwithstanding Belli's statement to the contrary--was not a Grand Hotel for pigs. It remained the construction of a transportation system that would "eliminate the antagonism between the railway and the pneumatic tire" (LSG, 245). 75 In his 1939 volume dedicated to the topic, he would write, with characteristic fervor:
Today railways are in decline, but the perfection that they have achieved is such that to replace them with a new system will be difficult and will entail tough experiments, attempts, studies, and sacrifices. This said, it is high time that we set out to confront and overcome every obstacle and forge ahead fearlessly, because the problem of coordinating ground transportation by introducing something new and conciliatory between two entrenched antagonists, the roadway and the railway, cries out for immediate attention. I have written that the nation that finds a solution to this dilemma will be rewarded with the sort of economic hegemony that England enjoyed during the nineteenth century, thanks to its belief in Stephenson and steamships. [LSG, 46] 76
The task of locating a nation-state courageous enough to "forge ahead fearlessly" would prove daunting. First imagined on the Austrian front, proposed to the Italian ministry of war in December 1922, proposed anew to Fiat in 1928, nearly realized in the Soviet Union in 1932, the path leading to the construction of the guided street had already been a long one for Ciocca. And a long one it would remain. The major stepping stones may be resumed as follows. Between October and December 1935, a small circular track (eighty-five meters in length) was finally built in Pavia at the expense of the ministry of war, and was tested out with a truck, modified as per Ciocca's 1922 designs. The experiment yielded mixed results, leaving a ministerial commission unpersuaded regarding the system's feasibility as a permanent substitute for roadways and railways, but impressed with its potential as a provisional system for traversing marshlands like those found in Ethiopia. So off went Ciocca (and voluntarily so) to the Ethiopian front in February 1936. For the next ten months he served as chief military engineer in Special Division S, adapting guided street principles to the division's transportation needs as it attempted to conquer remote regions still under rebel control. His success was such that, after months of wrangling in the wake of his return, three ministries--the ministries of war, the colonies, and communications--agreed to contribute one million Lire each towards the construction of a full-scale line, so long as Ciocca could provide them with accurate budget res. This required, in turn, the construction of a full-scale prototype, for which purpose he was able to secure the sponsorship of an interested party ("interested" because the guided street was to be built of reinforced concrete): the Italian Federation of Cement Manufacturers (Federazione degli Industriali del Cemento). An advanced prototype was duly built at the Federation head's estate of Casal Fogaccia, in the outskirts of Rome, in mid-1938, and included bridges, turns, level crossings, and six-trailer truck trains ( 16). Its performance was deemed highly promising and was documented by contemporary newsreels in Italy and abroad, as were site visits by members of the royal family (King Victor Emanuel, the Crown Prince) and the Academy.
A momentary high point was attained with Mussolini's visit to Casal Fogaccia on 11 November 1938 ( 17). Already an admirer of Ciocca, as attested to by his glowing review of Giudizio sul bolscevismo (reprinted as a preface to the book's second edition), il Duce left Casal Fogaccia a convert. "This is not a roadway" he affirmed approvingly, with military applications in mind, "but rather a railway." 77 He promptly ordered that the ministry of public works consider the substitution of railways with guided streets in Italian East Africa and that a first line be built in Sicily. Two months later little had budged. So in early January 1939, Ciocca requested and received a private audience, described in the following letter to Count Fogaccia:
He [Mussolini] was visibly irritated at the lack of action and, after a probing conversation . . . he asked if I had a plan. I told him that my plan was to found a company, with capital from the IRI [Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale] as well as from private sources, that would build and administer guided roadways. He then queried me on which ministry would be best equipped to undertake such a project. I responded, naturally, "the ministry of communications." Without further ado il Duce phoned Minister Benni [minister of communications] to request a meeting with Commander Menichella of the IRI to be held the next morning. 78
The meeting took place and, in spite of Mussolini's pressure, revealed little interest on Benni's part in construction of a guided roadway between Diredaua and Harar (Ethiopia). Menichella, on the other hand, seemed well disposed and proposed the substitution of the IRI-owned railway line between Siracusa and Ragusa because "work could begin right away." Needless to say, it did not. A March 1939 meeting with IRI technicians led to a shift in lines, this time from Siracusa-Ragusa to Palermo-Monreale-Camporeale. Other meetings followed, but ominous signs began to trickle in over subsequent months. In late July, the page proofs of Ciocca's La strada guidata were returned to his editor, Valentino Bompiani, without deletions, but accompanied by the statement "the ministry of communications expresses its reservations regarding the theories developed in this volume." 79 Technical objections on the part of the National Council of Scientific Research (CNR) and the IRI were soon to follow. In September and November 1939, panels of engineers representing both entities' interest in the guided street project raised concerns about the resistance of the roadway's central cement railing, about the durability and cost of pneumatic tires, about the availability of sufficiently light yet powerful tractors, about the impact of weather and debris on a guided roadway, and about its adaptability to African conditions. 80 By year's end the project was dead in the water. Ciocca persisted, designing a propeller-driven guided street model for the Mostra delle Invenzioni (Exhibit of Inventions) held in Milan in the fall of 1939 and continuing to seek out Mussolini's support ( 18). Thwarted in Italy, he avidly pursued patrons in Argentina, Iran, Italian Albania, and especially Nazi Germany, sending copies of La strada guidata to Field Marshall Rommel and several other German military officials. Two decades later Ciocca was still pursuing possible clients in Tunisia and Brazil, and securing patents for his designs. The lone satisfaction that the guided street procured him came in 1959 when the Milanese public transit authorities adopted a subway system much like he envisaged. Despite its bearing the same name (and despite some early consulting imput from Ciocca himself), all references to the creator of the guided street were ommitted in the public presentation of a prototype car. A dispute over patent infringements erupted that would drag on almost until Ciocca's death in 1966.
The saga just recounted helps to explain why, as early as 1939, Ciocca felt that the "guided street has proved an odyssey for me, not across the sirens' azure seas, but through offices and antechambers, and amidst reefs of private interests" (LSG, vii). 81 But the question remains: why embark on such an arduous journey? (A journey often undertaken at considerable personal cost.) For Ciocca, the answer was less personal ambition than faith--a faith that, with perhaps disquieting ease, was able to find a home both under Fascism and under democracy:
When Stephenson built the first slow, weak, and imperfect locomotive, he could never have imagined either the subsequent improvements or the benefits that it would bring humanity. His confidence in the future of railways derived from faith and not from practical details. As a matter of fact, faith is the conviction of things unseen and, as of yet, impractical, even if they remain certain. All progress arises not out of cold calculations, but out of faith in the future of humanity. [LSG, 44-5] 82
The passage is revealing and applies equally to all of Ciocca's technical undertakings, whether before or after the war. Its definition of faith merges a nineteenth-century credo of perpetual technical progress with Catholic eschatology. Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium ("Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen") reads Hebrews 11:1, inviting the faithful to contemplate the invisible but certain advent of the Eternal Jerusalem. 83 In Ciocca's version, the invitation is tendered by an engineer who is at once an empirical translator of the impractical into the realm of practice and a prophet inhabited by a vision that can only be handed down in imperfect form. Cold calculation, planning, and practical details address only his outer, bodily eyes. They are but the poor handmaidens of an inner spiritual-technical eye within whose depths is reflected the higher goal: a better future for humankind.
In the course of Italy's Fascist decades, this better future was, for Ciocca, identified with corporatism. All his inventions, from mass theaters to fast houses to rationalist pig farms, strove to foreshadow and to realize corporatist goals. The guided street is no exception. "The history of transportation systems is one with the history of civilization" (LSG, 49), Ciocca affirmed in La strada guidata, implying that the advent of a new transportation system must always entail a reordering of the world. 84 In the case of the guided street, the system's very design is coupled tightly to the "third" way to modernization celebrated in Giudizio sul bolscevismo:
At the root of the antagonism between roads and rails stands the conflict between freedom and constraint, between a liberty inherent to roadways and a constraint inherent to railways. One doesn't have to be a philosopher to understand that all physical or human actions occur in a context defined by the interplay of freedom and constraint. Equilibrium too always occurs between freedom and constraint. Accordingly, if we want to reconcile the truck and the locomotive, we must establish an equilibrium where now there is conflict by balancing the first's freedom of movement with the second's subjection to rails. 85
Between anarchy and tyranny, between capitalist individualism and communist collectivism, between private sector interests and the national interest, the guided street charts a corporatist middle course. In its pursuit of reconciliation between railway and roadway, it seeks to eliminate neither. Railways will continue to be built in the Fascist Eternal Jerusalem, but their use will be limited to what they are best at: high-volume, high-density lines. Roadways will also continue to built for use (mostly by private parties) on low-volume, low-density routes. Rather, Ciocca's faith consisted in the belief that by creating a link between the two, the antagonism would collapse and in its place would arise a unified three-tier system, held together by its middle term. He believed that the guided street could function as a glue because it crystallized the values of efficiency, autarchy, and discipline. Flexible and inexpensive, employing only "poor" building materials, it was half as narrow as a highway and twice as flexible as a railroad. Both private and state vehicles would be able to freely move on and off its network of cement guide rails, rejoining the roadway system at any given crossing. Once on the network, their rate of movement could be standardized (thereby reducing their consumption of fuel) as well as accelerated, since self-steering mechanisms would reduce the driver's task to braking alone. Self-guidance would also permit a substantial increase in the cargo-bearing and trailer-pulling capacities of trucks. Most of all, movements along the grid could be someday be optimized by rationalizing the roadway-railway-guided street links through central planning: the "unity of coordination will be absolute," Ciocca promised, and "will make its infinite force felt in the case of war" (LSG, 249). 86 Like the corporate state, the guided grid disciplines and directs independent forces; it preserves their relative autonomy but molds them into a single transcendent will. It can place the nation on autopilot because, in effect, Mussolini is in every driver's seat.
So, like Ciocca's mass theater designs and rural housing projects, the guided street is yet another allegory of corporatism. What, then, is one to make of the fact that Ciocca also sought to build it outside of the corporatist fold? Nationalist motives might well provide the answer. But what of its postwar continuation or, for that matter, of the postwar continuation of Ciocca's other projects, whether in Italy or abroad? Any response to this question, however provisional, must begin with a brief sketch of his activities during wartime and in the immediate postwar. Late in the conflict, as would be the case with many other Fascist intellectuals and engineers, Ciocca's allegiances shifted abruptly, perhaps out of frustration with the Fascist bureaucracy, and/or antiwar feelings (in the 1960s he became an avid antinuclear activist and esperantist) and/or for reasons of opportunism. The same practical politician who had once celebrated Hitler as possessing the "genius and intuition of an exceptional leader," thus began an entirely new political practice by spying for the Italo-British regional military command between September 1944 and April 1945 (LSG, 103). 87 No less significantly, between 1943 and the early 1950s Ciocca became a key planner in the reconstruction of the Lombard region under the Fanfani Plans of 1945 and 1949. That these activities predate even the end of the world conflict is far more typical than atypical, to judge by the special issues that Giò Ponti's magazine Stile was already devoting to postwar reconstruction in 1943-44. 88 In any event, by the end of 1945, Ciocca the rebuilder was every bit as active as had been Ciocca the corporatist builder. But he had gained far greater momentum. On New Year's Day 1946, with Amos Edallo, Augusto Magnaghi, Luigi Mattioni, and Mario Terzaghi, he presented the new city plan for Milan whose fourth article proposed "the preparation of the current athletic zone for mass spectacles." 89 In September he stood before the first National Congress for Industrial Reconstruction pleading for the mass production of prefabricated housing as a remedy for Italy's postwar woes and filed a proposal for building "small serially produced houses of rapid construction" in Milan. Many projects later, he was building the Necchi corporation Garden-Village in Pavia: a worker housing complex directly inspired by his designs of the 1930s, intended to demonstrate the efficiencies that could be achieved via industrialized construction. By 1950, he had resumed his full-tilt campaign to spread the gospel of the guided roadway. In the mid-1950s he returned to designing cinemas and auditoriums, drainage canals and sewage systems. His tool kit was again complete.
If Ciocca's story has a moral it is surely that "the circle of the real" is far more contentious and far less orderly than his own socio-economic and technical fantasies would seem to allow. The credo of intellectual activism, intransigeant nationalism, a "realistic" faith in the redemptive potential of certain technologies, a vision of the state as a forceful agent of social coordination and reform, a populism always teetering on the edge between autoritarianism and democracy, an idealization of the engineer as political practitioner: all these beliefs constitute a relatively solid (though not necessarily coherent) ground that is layered over with shifting stories and symbolic investments. It is not that the latter leave no trace in the technological artifacts themselves. Rather, these traces are always fragile and prone to slippage. Between the corporatist village and the Necchi garden-village of postwar Pavia, between the rapid rural house of Garlasco and the rapid mini-houses of Milan, between a nation piloted by a transcendental dictator and a republic piloted by a sovereign people, there are real differences, the differences of which history is composed. But they are differences that a half-empiricist, half-fideist dedication to building "a future for humankind" can overcome.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp is chair of the department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of The Transration of History , Staging Fascism , and Sign Margins Masks Maneuvers, Late Antique to Early Modern (forthcoming, 1996).
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are the author's.
1. Oscar Schlemmer, "The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar," quoted in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus--Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978), 65. This pamphlet, originally entitled "The First Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, July to September 1923," was seized upon by the institution's right-wing opponents as proof of its leftist leanings (despite Schlemmer's placement of the phrase "cathedral of socialism" in quotation marks).
2. Schlemmer, "The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar," quoted in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 66.
3. Le Corbusier, "Towards a New Architecture: Guiding Principles" ; quoted in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 59; hereafter abbreviated PMA. The point was also a favorite of Pietro Maria Bardi:
Because of their technical training--which is to say, basic mathematics, basic tehnics; the habit of simple, useful, coherent solutions deriving from mechanics; an approach to social problems based on scientific factors and not "art"--engineers are prone to an "artistic" interpretation of modern life that is far more authentic than that of individuals trained in "art."
(The original reads: "L'ingegnere per la sua formazione intellettuale [vale a dire: basi matematiche, basi tecniche, abitudine alla costruzione semplice, utile, coerente, derivante dalla meccanicità, considerazione dei problemi sociali secondo scienza e non secondo 'arte'] è portato ad una interpretazione 'artistica' della nostra vita assai più sincera . . . di chi è educato . . . con basi 'artistiche,'" in Pietro Maria Bardi, "Edilizia e ingegneri," L'Ambrosiano, 2 February 1933.) This was Bardi's response to a polemic unleashed by Alberto Calza Bini who, in the guise of representative of the Sindacato Nazionale Architetti, had quipped "Tutta l'edilizia agli architetti" ("Architecture is only for architects").
4. Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky, "Whom Does LEF Warn?" , in Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 200.
5. Joseph Stalin, quoted in Gary Browning, Boris Pilniak: Scythian at a Typewriter (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 65.
6. Emilio Segrè, quoted in Renzo de Felice, "Fascism and Culture in Italy: Outlines for Future Study," Stanford Italian Review 8.1-2 : 5.
7. Mussolini, quoted in Pietro Maria Bardi, "Opere e idee degli ingegneri," L'Ambrosiano, 3 June 1933.
8. The original reads: "il nostro ingegnere, per stare in continuo contatto con il popolo, si sente un fiduciario, un propagandista, un divulgatore della parola di Mussolini. La nostra posizione . . . è, oltre che una posizione tecnica, una posizione praticamente politica" (Bardi, "Opere e idee degli ingegneri"; emphasis added).
9. The original reads: "Russia e America sono oggi i due più genuini rappresentanti del 'capitalismo di classe'" (Gaetano Ciocca, "[Panorami] Russia Sovietica," Quadrante 2 [June 1933]: 25).
10. All references to archival documents are hereafter abbreviated as follows: AC=Fondo Gaetano Ciocca, Museo di Arte Moderna, Archivio del '900, Trento/Rovereto; ANL=Archivio Storio, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome; ACS=Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome; and ASCG=Archivio Storico Comunale, Garlasco.
11. The original reads: "Le affidiamo il carico di consulente per lo studio degli impianti dello stabilimento di Mosca per la fabbricazione di cuscinetti e successivamente per la sua costruzione e avviamento . . ." (Direzione, Officine di Villar Perosa to Gaetano Ciocca, 16 June 1930, AC, Corrisp. Fiat, p. 1).
12. The original reads: "tra gli episodi della contemporanea attività umana, il Piano Quinquennale, così com'è concepito, è il più interessante, forse il più grandioso" (quoted in Andrea Damiano, "Il piano quinquennale sovietico," L'Ambrosiano, 5 December 1931). On the Moscow/Rome debate see Giuseppe Carlo Marino, L'autarchia della cultura: Intellettuali e fascismo negli anni trenta (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983), 70-87; and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
13. For a study of Italian relations with the USSR which also concerns Ciocca's activities, see Luciano Zani, "I rapporti con l'URSS," in Comune di Roma, L'economia italiana tra le due guerre, 1919-1939 (Rome: IPSOA, 1984), 124-8.
14. The original reads: "Il progetto che Ella mi chiese in 48 ore è arrivato, intatto nella concezione generale, sino al fondo. La concezione generale ha salvato le debolezze tecnologiche" (Gaetano Ciocca to Giovanni Agnelli, 15 May 1932, AC, Corrisp. Fiat, p. 5). In his response to this letter, Agnelli would rebut Ciocca's claims:
Responding to the last part of your letter, I do recognize how much you have done for us. Yet to say that the project sprouted in forty-eight hours from your mind like Minerva from the brains of Jove, and that the project belongs to Ciocca the engineer and not the RIV, seems to me a bit too much: I have on my desk a substantial number of drafts that were done one after another, drafts that were discussed by all the engineers of the RIV and also by me. Each successive draft has been an improvement over its predecessor, until we have finally arrived, all of us together, at the version that has been accepted, happy that it has met with the approval of the Soviet government and the best specialists in the world.
(The original reads: "Rispondendo poi all'ultima parte della Sua lettera, io riconosco quanto Ella ha fatto per noi, ma il dire che il progetto è sgorgato in 48 dalla Sua mente quale Minerva del [sic] cervello di Giove, e che il progetto è dell'ing. Ciocca e non della RIV, mi pare sia un po' forte: ho sott'occhio il numero notevolissimo di schizzi che si sono fatti successivamente, schizzi che sono stati discussi da tutti gli Ingegneri della RIV ed anche da me. Il successivo rappresenta sempre un miglioramento sul precedente finché si è arrivati, tutti insieme, a quello che è stato accettato, ben lieto che esso abbia incontrato l'approvazione del Governo della URSS e dei migliori specialisti mondiali," in Giovanni Agnelli to Gaetano Ciocca, 29 May 1932, AC, Corrisp. Fiat, p. 4.)
15. The original reads: "Alla RIV non capirono che una sintesi chiara ordinata e sistematica dei procedimenti tecnologici in uso avrebbe giovato grandemente non solo al progetto ma anche alla RIV" (Gaetano Ciocca to Giovanni Agnelli, 15 May 1932, AC, Corrisp. Fiat, p. 1).
16. The original reads: "Non si è capito che per questo lavoro occorreva intervenisse una mente estranea alla pratica quotidiana di lavoro, abituata a chiarificare. Si preferì lasciare sfogo ai personalismi . . ." (Gaetano Ciocca to Agnelli, 15 May 1932, AC, Corrisp. Fiat, p. 1). Agnelli responded as follows:
I don't understand the charge about "questions of personality" within the environment of the RIV with respect to the technological planning: while I appreciate and value your wide-ranging intelligence, permit me to say, from long experience, that in questions pertaining to technical processes it really is necessary to have highly specialized competence, something that is obtained only with long years of work and through experience with specific applications.
(The original reads: "Non comprendo l'accusa di personalismi nell'ambiente della RIV a proposito dei procedimenti tecnologici: mentre appresso [sic] e valuto la Sua intelligenza nei più svariati campi, mi consenta di dirLe, per vecchia esperienza, che nei processi tecnologici bisogna avere una competenza tutt'affatto speciale, competenza che si ottiene soltanto con lunghi anni di lavoro e di applicazione specifica," in Giovanni Agnelli to Gaetano Ciocca, 29 May 1932, AC, Corrisp. Fiat, p. 1.)
17. The original reads: "Si deve arrivare al più presto a un nuovo sistema di trazione che sia decisamente più economico sia della trazione stradale sia della trazione ferroviaria e che quindi si sostituisca nella maggior parte dei casi all'una e all'altra, confinando la ferrovia nel campo a lei proprio dei trasporti intensi pesanti e lunghi e l'autoveicolo in quello dei trasporti leggeri isolati e brevi" ([Gaetano Ciocca], "Nuova sistemi di transporti terretri," AC, Russia file 2, p. 1).
18. The full description reads: "The new system is being studied everywhere and most especially in Germany, France, and England. All such efforts aim to carry out the transfer of automobiles onto railways. The present exposé puts forward a contrary solution which bears the name of the 'Ciocca roadway': an entirely new transportation system which its inventors, G. Ciocca and A. Piccin, have already patented in Russia and Italy ['Germany' is penciled in]. It consists not in motor vehicles suited to railways, but rather in a special roadway for automotive trains." (The original reads: "Ovunque, e specialmente in Germania, Francia e Inghilterra, si cerca questa nuova trazione. I tentativi sono tutti orientati nel senso di portare le automobili sulla ferrovia. Qui si vuole illustrare un nuovo sistema di trazione, portante il nome di autovia Ciocca, sistema che gli inventori G. Ciocca e A. Piccin hanno brevettato in Russia e in Italia ["Germania" is penciled in], il quale ricerca la soluzione del problema nel campo opposto a quello fin quì battuto. Non creare un autoveicolo per la ferrovia ma creare una strada per i treni automobilistici," in [Gaetano Ciocca], "Nuovi sistemi di trasporti terrestri," AC, Russia file 2, p. 1; italics in original.)
19. Archival records seem to suggest two possible explanations: a) that the test results belied Ciocca and Piccin's claims that construction costs for the guided street would be greatly inferior to those for highways and railways, so the Soviets simply abandoned the experiment; or b) that the initial results were promising enough to convince the Soviets of the guided street's military potential, which prompted them to demand exclusive control over Ciocca's patents. In his subsequent writings Ciocca would claim the latter:
One morning the carpenters didn't show up. I sped to Moscow to seek an explanation. After much hemming and hawing, I was led to a small office at the end of an endless hallway within the gray confines of the modern Veessencà building. There, a kind gentleman explained to me that if I wished to continue my work I would have to promise to observe total secracy. That was the end.
(The original reads: "Una mattina non trovai più sul lavoro i carpentieri. Corsi a Mosca a chiedere spiegazioni. Dopo molto tergiversare mi portarono in un piccolo ufficio in fondo a un interminabile corridoio del grigio e novecentesco palazzo della Veessencà. Ivi un signore molto cortese mi comunicò che per continuare bisognava che m'impegnassi a conservare il segreto. E tutto finì," in Gaetano Ciocca, La strada guidata [Milan: Bompiani, 1939], 21; hereafter abbreviated LSG.)
20. The original reads: "La data fissata da Orzenichitze per il primo cuscinetto è ai primi di Gennaio. Si tratta naturalmente di una data allegorica perchè tutti sono d'accordo con me che la prima produzione dovrà avere carattere scolastico. La produzione industriale verrà poi" (Ciocca to Debenedetti, 9 October 1931, AC, Corrisp. Fiat). The letter goes on to note that actual production is unlikely to begin even by September 1932.
21. The original reads: "Un anno fa, nel luogo ove ora sorge lo stabilimento con la casa degli operai, le linee tranviarie, le scuole professionali, non vi erano che paludi" ([typescript of contemporary press coverage], AC, Russia file 2).
22. On Ciocca and Italian anti-Americanism see Michela Nacci, L'antiamericanismo in Italia negli anni trenta (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989), 29-30, 109-10.
23. The original reads: "In America manca il coraggio della dittatura, rimedio eroico per riscaldare la volontà collettiva alla fiamma della volontà di uno solo" (Gaetano Ciocca, Economia di massa [Verona: Bompiani, 1936], 249).
24. The original reads: "Nasce così la necessità di un nuovo ordinamento dello Stato in cui la libertà economica sia regolata e l'attività preordinata. Ormai tutti i governi lo riconoscono, dall'America liberalista alla Russia collettivista. Ma tanto in Russia quanto in America vediamo lo Stato preoccuparsi esclusivamente del problema materiale della produzione come se riconoscesse all'individuo il diritto di stabilire i propri bisogni economici e gli negasse l'attitudine a soddisfarli da solo. Ciò è esattamente il rovescio della realtà. . . . Spetta allo Stato creare l'ambiente in cui gli individui debbono operare e spetta agli individui di operarvi. Nè l'individuo deve invadere il campo dell'azione dello Stato, nè lo Stato il campo dell'azione dell'individuo; ciò equivarrebbe al rinnegare il principio economico fondamentale della divisione del lavoro. Quindi nè Stati di capitalisti nè capitalismi di Stato, ma iniziativa di Stato e iniziativa privata che si integrano e si assommano, quella diretta a creare le possibilità di potenza, questa a tradurle in realta" (Ciocca, Economia di massa, 253-4).
25. The original reads: "La conoscenza delle condizioni economiche sovietiche ha uno specialissimo interesse per gli Italiani" (Gaetano Ciocca, Giudizio sul bolscevismo [Milan: Bompiani, 1933], 33; hereafter abbreviated GSB.)
26. The original reads: "Russia e America sono oggi le due più genuine rappresentanti del capitalismo di classe, sbocciato nel secolo scorso a sostituire il tradizionale capitalismo di casta. Ambedue svolgono un medesimo programma: concentrare e meccanizzare fino all'eccesso la produzione, facendo della questione economica e sociale una questione di contabilità industriale" (italics in original).
27. The original reads: "La Russia da un lato e le grandi nazioni plutocratiche dall'altro, partendo, per opposte vie, dalla medesima concezione materialistica della vita, soggiacciono alla medesima illusione miracolista, quella che fa credere alla possibilità di progredire indefinitamente, quasi per inerzia, lungo un'orbita aperta di prosperità. Non vi sono in natura orbite aperte, traiettorie diritte, princìpi assoluti, formule di felicità. La forza delle cose piega tutte le traiettorie e ciò che sembra lanciato verso l'infinito rientra fatalmente nel circolo della combattuta realtà."
28. The original reads: "Essa [la strada da percorrere] è quella della collaborazione, dentro l'orbita dello stato, di tutte le forze attive della società, forze individuali e collettive, del braccio e della mente, allo scopo di raggiungere il massimo rendimento delle energie produttive e distribuire i frutti della produzione nel modo più equo e più rispondente al vantaggio collettivo, che non è solo materiale ma specialmente morale e che deve avere come ultima manifestazione l'elevazione spirituale e la potenza della nazione."
29. The original reads: "Essa deve agitare le grandi passioni collettive, essere ispirata ad un senso di viva e profonda umanità, portare sulla scena quel che veramente conta nella vita dello spirito e nelle vicende degli uomini" (Benito Mussolini, "Discorso per il cinquantenario della Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori," Rome, 28 April 1933 in Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, eds., Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini vol. 44 [Rome: Volpe, 1978], 51).
30. The original reads: "Bisogna preparare il teatro di masse, il teatro che possa contenere quindici o ventimila persone. La Scala rispondeva allo scopo quando un secolo fa la popolazione di Milano contava centottantamila abitanti. Non risponde più oggi che la popolazione è di un milione. La limitazione dei posti crea la necessità degli alti prezzi e questi allontanano le folle. Invece il teatro, che, a mio avviso, ha più efficacia educativa del cinematografo, deve essere destinato al popolo, così come l'opera teatrale deve avere il largo respiro che il popolo le chiede" (Susmel, Opera Omnia, 50).
31. In addition to Bontempelli and Bardi, Quadrante's contributors would include Giuseppe Terragni, Carlo Belli, Pier Luigi Nervi, Le Corbusier, Luigi ni, Alberto Sartoris, Giuseppe Bottai, Ernesto Rogers, and Adriano Olivetti.
32. In part because of its surprising outcome, the competition received extensive coverage in the Italian architectural press, as for instance in Marcello Piacentini, "Un grande avvenimento architettonico in Russia," Architettura 13 (March 1934): 129-40.
33. The original reads: "Fra i mille contrasti sovietici il più caratteristico è quello esistente fra la tetra monotonia che opprime il cittadino nella intimità familiare e la giocosa vivacità delle manifestazioni collettive. Nei cinematografi e nei teatri, il pubblico, sempre stipato sino all'inverosimile, è spettacolo a se medesimo. Esso trascina gli artisti e gli artisti lo trascinano."
34. The original reads: "Il palcoscenico è stabile ai lati e nella parte più centrale è mobile, nel senso che il piano dell'impalcatura può scorrere orizzontalmente su guide e rotelle e quindi essere ritirato nel retroscena per una larghezza di quaranta metri e una profondità di trenta. Nel retroscena è installata una piattaforma girevole di circa settanta metri di diametro, sulla quale la scena ritraendosi si alloga. La piattaforma girando porta avanti una nuova scena pronta, in sostituzione di quella ritirata. . . . Il retroscena è a due piani: il piano di palcoscenico, ove si allestisce la nuova scena, e il piano di carico, più alto, ove si preparano gli scenari i quali vengono calati sul piano di allestimento da una grue a braccio girevole. Si hanno così contemporaneamente tre scene a disposizione, una in esercizio, una in allestimento e una in formazione" (Gaetano Ciocca, "[Servizi a Mussolini] Il teatro di masse," Quadrante 3 [July 1933]: 8; hereafter abbreviated "ITM").
35. The original reads: "Non occorre più appiattire la realtà su due dimensioni, come un fiore secco fra i fogli di un libro."
36. The original reads: "Tutto è lasciato come deve essere, nello spazio a tre dimensioni, alberi per gli alberi, case per le case. Lo scenografo deve preoccuparsi solo di disporre sulla scena più visibilmente che sia possibile, le immagini reali delle cose."
37. Nervi, the architect for Florence's Stadio Berta (now Campo di Marte), began his proposal: "The study of a grand Stadium is one of the most beautiful themes available to any builder." (The original reads: "Lo studio di un grande Stadio è uno dei più bei temi che possano presentarsi a un costruttore," in Pier Luigi Nervi, "Idee sulla costruzione di uno stadio per 120,000," Quadrante 4 [August 1933]: 36.)
38. On Italian mass theater debates during the 1930s see my "Border Crossings: Italian/German Peregrinations of the Theater of Totality," Critical Inquiry 21 (summer 1994): 80-123; and my forthcoming Staging Fascism.
39. In a letter to Antonio Bruers, the vice-chancellor of the Academy, D'Amico communicated the president's intentions: "Pirandello himself, having noted a certain weakness in the Italian contributions to the conference, has had the idea of inviting the engineer Gaetano Ciocca to give a lecture on the theme 'Theatrical Architecture: Mass Theaters and Smaller Theaters.' Ciocca is very close to il Duce and was praised by him in a note in the Popolo d'Italia, and with great competence has concerned himself with these matters." (The original reads: "Lo stesso Pirandello, anche perchè nota una certa fiacchezza nelle relazioni di italiani al Convegno, ha avuto l'idea di invitare a farvi una relazione sul tema 'Architettura teatrale: teatri di masse e teatrini' quell'Ing. Gaetano Ciocca che, personalmente caro al Duce e da Lui personalmente lodato in un corsivo del Popolo d'Italia, si è una occupato con grande competenza della questione," in D'Amico to Antonio Bruers, 1 September 1934, ANL, Convegno Volta 1934, D'Amico file.)
40. A case in point was Silvio d'Amico:
Gaetano Ciocca's project is a marvel not only from the standpoint of its practicality but also--at least to judge by the model--as an architectural monument. Yet I am troubled, let this rest among us, by the strange circumstance that, as is typical of our era, architects and set designers have stepped forward to solve the dramatic theater's problems before authors could do so. What I mean to say is that these architects, however great a genius Gropius might be and however great maybe my personal admiration for Ciocca, sometimes give the impression of having placed the cart before the horse.
(The original reads: "Il progetto di Gaetano Ciocca è una meraviglia, non solo dal punto di vista della praticità ma anche--per quanto si può giudicare dal plastico--come monumento architettonico. Senonchè, diciamolo fra noi, è alquanto strano questo fenomeno, tutto proprio del tempo nostro, per cui a risolvere i problemi del Teatro drammatico vediamo offrirsi, prima degli autori, gli architetti e gli scenotecnici. Voglio dire che questi architetti, anche geniale come il Gropius qui presente o come l'amiratissimo Ciocca, hanno un poco l'aria di mettere il carro davanti ai buoi," in Reale Accademia d'Italia, Atti--Convegno di Lettere: Tema--Il teatro drammatico [Rome: Reale Accademia, 1935], 206.) Ashley Dukes, an English participant in the Congress, was equally favorable: "But from a technical point of view marvels were accomplished, and I have not the least doubt that in the playhouse shown as model by Signor Ciocca, with its tiers of balconies and moveable proscenium and stage, the multitude would see and hear the play" (Ashley Dukes, "The Scene in Europe," Theatre Arts Monthly [December 1934]: 908).
41. The original reads: "Nel caso del teatro, invece di discutere sulle precedenze, noi dobbiamo domandarci che cosa avverrebbe se le grandi città possedessero una sala di spettacolo, attrezzata per ogni genere di rappresentazione, capace di ventimila spettatori" (Gaetano Ciocca, "Ancora il teatro di massa," Corriere della Sera, 7 November 1934).
42. The original reads: "Il teatro di massa è prima di tutto un'arma politica, sociale e culturale di grandissima efficienza. . . . Servirebbe per le parate, per le grandi riunioni corporative e di popolo per i discorsi di propaganda, per il cinematografo apportatore di luce culturale, per le grandi esecuzioni liriche e musicali, eterna fonte di gioia e di elevazione spirituale per le folle. Non servirebbe per il dramma di repertorio? Io penso che tutto ciò che vi è di più duraturo e grande nel teatro drammatico, sia per le masse[,] da Sofocle a Shakespeare. Ma senza entrare in discussione su questo campo, che con la geometria nulla ha a fare, sono certo che al teatro drammatico è riserbato in Italia, un luminoso avvenire. Come bene auspicava Marinetti, nel teatro Italiano, non ci sarà più posto per i drammi erotici e per i drammi gialli. Esaltando l'energia, la lotta, la velocità, il progresso, il teatro di massa risveglierà la fede e desterà la coscienza corporativa" (Gaetano Ciocca, "Aspetti tecnici del teatro di massa," Quadrante 18 [October 1934]: 38).
43. Ciocca writes: "It will be, therefore, a return to the Greek theater, insofar as in the Greek theater as well the true protagonist was not one of the characters in the drama, but Fate, and it was necessary to have gigantic stages and scenes for such a gigantic actor. In the new theater the new protagonist will no longer be called Fate, but Humanity." (The original reads: "Sarà quindi un ritorno al teatro greco, in quanto che anche nel teatro greco il vero protagonista non era nessuna delle persone del dramma, ma il Fato e occorrevano platee e scene gigantesche per così gigantesco attore. Nel nuovo teatro il nuovo protagonista non si chiamerà più Fato ma Umanità," in his "Aspetti tecnici del teatro di massa," Quadrante 14-15 [June-July 1934]: 47.)
44. The original reads: "La parata è la sintesi dell'opera della collettività, la glorificazione delle fatiche del popolo, l'espressione delle passioni della nazione."
45. The original reads: "Nel teatro di massa le possibilità di parate sono fantasmagoriche, mentre nella sala si accalcano ventimila spettatori ammirati e plaudenti, trentamila persone, raccolte sotto le scalinate e nel retroscena sfilano ininterrottamente sul palco fra i risalti delle luci e lo sfolgorare degli schermi, premio ai volonterosi, incitamento ai tiepidi, monito ai dubbiosi."
46. The original reads: "Quando la geometria si applica all'architettura, essa prende il nome di razionalismo. Il Colosseo e gli acquedotti romani, essendo ancora oggi i più belli esempi di architettura razionale, sono avanti tutto geometria. I falsi razionalismi che spesso ci affliggono, non sono che falsa geometria, teoremi sbagliati, recipienti logici pieni di fori. Io mi propongo di illustrare un metodo strettamente geometrico per risolvere, attraverso una unica norma semplice e chiara, tutti i problemi che la costruzione del teatro di massa coinvolge. Trovare un metodo non significa trovare il metodo. Se ne troveranno domani forse altri migliori" (Gaetano Ciocca, "La tecnica del teatro di massa," in Reale Accademia D'Italia, Atti--Convegno di Lettere: Tema--Il teatro drammatico, 179).
47. Compare Nervi in his Roman stadium project:
Let's take as an example the building of a large stadium in Rome. Its first essential feature would be Romanity which, as I see it, can be synthesized by means of the highly vigorous uniformity and symmetry of the whole and by the powerful effect of a single rhythm shaped from structural events, repeated with force.
(The original reads: "Prendiamo ad esempio la costruzione di un grande Stadio a Roma. Prima idea fondamentale il carattere di Romanità che, a mio modo di vedere, si può sintetizzare nella uniformità e simmetria più rigorose dell'insieme e nell'imponenza di un unico ritmo di elementi strutturali decisamente esposti," in Nervi, "Idee sulla costruzione di uno stadio per 120,000," 36.)
48. The quality of these calculations was challenged by Guido Fiorini, the noted designer of theaters and auditoriums, in an open letter to Ciocca published as "Lettere a Quadrante," Quadrante 4 (August 1933): 46-7. The letter was followed by Ciocca's response.
49. The original reads: "Potremmo applicare al moto degli spettatori che sfollano le leggi del moto dei fluidi nelle tubazioni ed arrivare a manterene in tutti i corridoi una velocità constante di efflusso. Così, sapendo per esperienza quale è la massima velocità delle folle nei corridoi, arriveremmo al minimo assoluto del tempo di uscita dal teatro" (Ciocca, "Aspetti tecnici del teatro di masse," 38).
50. The original reads: "Anche il retroscena può così, su tre fronti, avere luce e aria a dovizia, e diventare ciò che realmente deve essere, una officina di spettacoli, pulita, ordinata, chiara come una officina moderna, e non l'antro di Caco dei teatri tradizionali."
51. The original reads: "Ora le devo dire confidenzialmente, pregandoLa di farne cenno anche a Bontempelli, che, a quanto mi riferisce persona degna di fede, un ricchissimo industriale di Milano potrebbe indursi a predere su di sè la spesa del teatro. Sempre a detta della stessa persona, se così fosse, il Comune darebbe l'area. . . . Pare anche che, perchè la cosa fiorisca, sarebbe necessario porre in relazione diretta l'industriale col Capo del Governo, affinchè l'iniziativa sorgesse da un colloquio con Mussolini" (Ciocca to Bardi, 10 January 1935, AC, Corrisp. Bardi, p.1).
52. The original reads: "chiedo a Lei e a Bontempelli consiglio sulla strada da tenere per l'attuazione del teatro a Milano, come già Le scrissi. Sarebbe necessario sapere se la costruzione del teatro mediante oblazioni a fondo perduto di un numero ristretto di grandi industriali lombardi è accetta al Capo del Governo. Come si può saperlo? Il meglio sarebbe avere direttamente un colloquio, ma chi gli dovrebbe parlare? Bontempelli o Lei o io?" (Ciocca to Bardi, 18 January 1935, AC, Corrisp. Bardi, p. 1).
53. The original reads: "Sono stato saccheggiato di quelle [copie] che portai meco ed ora me ne vengono richieste da persone di buona volontà che parlano di realizzazione. Se ne occupano anche in Giappone!" (Ciocca to A. Bruers, 11 April 1935, ANL, Convegno Volta 1934, Ciocca file, p. 1).
54. The original reads: "Occorrono in Italia venti teatri per ventimila; uno ogni due milioni di abitanti: totale 400,000 posti" (Ciocca to V. Mussolini, 19 April 1935, AC, Corrisp. Mussolini, p. 1.) Mussolini's son was the editor of Anno Tredicesimo, a monthly youth journal that had just published a special issue on the mass theater.
55. The archival holdings at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome contain surprisingly few traces of Ciocca's contacts with Mussolini. The only records that I have been able to track down suggest that intermediaries may have done most of Ciocca's bidding. In any event, there is no Ciocca file to be found in either section of Mussolini's secretariat (the "Carteggio Ordinario" or the "Carteggio Segreto" of the Segreteria Particolare del Duce).
56. Ciocca was undiscouraged. In January 1936 he was commissioned by Luciano De Feo, director of the Istituto Internazionale per la Cinematografia Educativa, to assist in the development of low-cost solutions to bringing cinemas to remote locations. He authorized Meridiano di Roma to reprint his mass theater writings (in the 19 September, 26 September, and 3 October 1937 issues), and went on to author "Il teatro milanese di massa," Circoli 8 (March 1939): 279-85, an essay in which he analyzes the deficiencies of Milan's Castello Sforzesco as a solution to Mussolini's theater for twenty thousand. In the postwar period he published several studies of auditoriums and continued to list himself as a theater and cinema designer.
57. See Gaetano Ciocca, "Per la risoluzione della crisi edilizia," July 1921, AC, Scritti file 1. I have been unable to determine whether this sixteen-page document was ever published.
58. Ciocca had played a direct role in the reclamation projects in the area, as attested to by records found in ASCG, Cartella 232 (Cat. 11, classe 1-4, Anni 1930-50).
59. The original reads: "I mezzi termini costano, e non risolvono nulla, e compromettono le risoluzioni integrali dei problemi" (Gaetano Ciocca, "[Servizi a Mussolini] Progretto di casa rurale," Quadrante 26 [June 1935]: 27; hereafter abbreviated "SCR").
60. The original reads: "Dovete capire che, se andasse in porto questa questione della casa rurale, tutti gli architetti di Quadrante avrebbero da fare" (Bardi to Banfi, 21 June 1935; quoted in Francesco Tentori, P. M. Bardi [Milan: Mazzotta, 1990], 135).
61. This work, originally published in 1923, was based upon writings dating from 1920-21 and printed in the review L'Esprit Nouveau.
62. The original reads: "Se io riescirò a dimostrare la possibilità di costruire una casa coi metodi medesimi con cui si costruisce una macchina, avrò implicitamente dimostrato la possibilità di estendere al campo edilizio i benefici del progresso meccanico e di rendere la casa altrettanto perfetta e popolare come l'automobile."
63. The original reads: "In questa casa rurale, ho cercato di prevedere la forma e la disposizione precisa di ogni pezzo, approntando il maggior numero possibile di pezzi in cantiere. Dove occorre un foro, il pezzo è approntato col foro, dove una mensola, è approntato con la mensola."
64. The original reads: "Ma i massimi vantaggi della costruzione razionale si hanno, come ognuno sa, nel risparmio di tempo di lavoro. Per le macchine, si sono raggiunti risultati fantastici: per le case si può fare altrettanto. Nella casa di modello che ho costruito, ho rilevato col cronometro che molte operazioni che durano cinque minuti, si possono ridurre al tempo di un minuto: altre da un'ora a due minuti. Basta saper prevedere e ordinare."
65. The original reads: "Questo solaio è estremamente economico e risparmia il ferro di armatura, materiale che dobbiamo economizzare in ogni possibile maniera."
66. The original reads: "Io li vernicio con l'olio bruciato dei motori, che non costa nulla, e serve ottimamente."
67. The original reads: "Lavorando in serie, si può scendere a centocinquanta e forse a cento giornate [lavorative]. Calcolo una spesa per i salari e per gli oneri di carattere generale di lire 3500 e così un totale per casa di L. 7000. Ora se io costruisco in campagna cinque locali, di mq. 17 ciascuno, . . . io non spendo meno di trentacinquemila lire. Ed ho, quasi sempre una brutta casa."
68. The phrases "aesthetic of uniformity" and "aesthetic of discipline" are used interchangeably by Ciocca in "[Servizi a Mussolini] La casa rurale," 27, to describe the new corporative order.
69.The original reads: "Io sono certo che quando la nostra economia sarà tutta regolata corporativamente . . . noi daremo a tutte le nuove case dei contadini l'aria e la luce e la cubatura sufficiente e i pavimenti lucidi e la cucina pulita e il riscaldamento e la ventilazione e l'acqua fredda e calda, la doccia, la latrina idraulica e gli armadi nei muri, senza uscire dalla spesa che oggi si incontra per non dare tutto ciò. E a ogni raggruppamento di case coloniche daremo la radio e i giornali e i libri e forse l'automobile e così la possibilità di frequentare ogni domenica . . . il più puro, appassionato e immaginoso dei teatri, quello dei ventimila contadini" (Gaetano Ciocca, "La casa rurale," Quadrante 22 [February 1935]: 40).
70. The most thoroughgoing critique was that put forth in Dino Zucchini's Nuove costruzioni rurali in Italia--Lombardia (Rome: Instituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria, 1940), 41-47, 174-175; hereafter abbreviated NCR. Zucchini's objections were answered in Amos Vali, review of Nuove costruzioni rurali in Italy--Lombardia, by Dino Zucchini, Rivista Italiana di Scienze Economiche 12 (December 1940): 1658-62.
71. Zucchini is not unambiguous in his praise: "At last we see a house for peasants that at first sight can be called revolutionary." (The original reads: "Vediamo ora una casa per contadini che a primo aspetto si potrebbe qualificare rivoluzionaria" [NCR, 41]). In the book's conclusion he admits: "In the course of our review we found only one type of house that was designed with an improvement of construction techniques in mind: the house erected by the engineer Gaetano Ciocca." (The original reads: "Nel corso della nostra rassegna non abbiamo trovato che un solo tipo di casa ispirato ad un miglioramento della tecnica costruttiva: la casa eretta dall'Ing. Gaetano Ciocca" [NCR, 174].)
72. The original reads: "[Ciocca] era riuscito finalmente a tradurre in realtà il suo grande progetto: un Grand-Hôtel per porci. Si era battuto a lungo per questa idea, inviando a Mussolini rapporti violenti contro i commercianti di carni suine, le quali, secondo certe sue indagini, erano tutte inquinate. E perchè? Perchè ai porci si dava da mangiare tutto, in qualunque momento e in qualunque modo; mentre si sarebbe dovuto nutrirli razionalmente. Il porco attuale--così diceva--è un'architettura di Piacentini; bisogna farlo diventare un'architettura di Le Corbusier. Per questo, aveva costruito certi ambienti pulitissimi e bene aerati, specie di stanzette linde e giustamente arredate; c'era un letto di paglia, un cesso, e il trogolo era fatto in modo tale che il cibo . . . vi scorreva fino a un certo punto, poi tac!, si chiudeva lo sportellino. Ciò per regolare la nutrizione, la quale doveve essere sostanziosa, pulita, e non più che sufficente. C'era poi una vaschetta: il porco spingeva con una zampa un dischetto in terra e l'acqua scaturiva finchè la zampa premeva il disco. In questo modo non si aveva liquame, sporcizia, ecc. Ciocca dimostrò di essere riuscito a educare il porco fino a fargli fare la cacca e il pipì al cesso . . . . Appena finito di mangiare e di bere, in principio gli dava una bacchettata dolorosa avviandolo verso il gabinetto. Dopo alcuni giorni il porco, ci andava senza alcun stimolo. Ciocca ebbe in tal modo risultati strabilanti: carni pulite, batteriologicamente pure; porci non appesantiti da grasso malsano, ma asciutti ed eleganti. . . . Ma il progetto non ebbe seguito perchè i porci nutriti al Grand-Hôtel pesavano al massimo sessanta chili e quelli nutriti di immondizia pesavano oltre i cento" (Silvia Danesi, "Aporie dell'architettura italiana in periodo fascista" in Il razionalismo e l'architettura in Italia durante il fascismo [Venice: Biennale di Venezia, 1976], 25; italics in original).
73 For an example of such a document, see "Annuario del Maiale," AC, Scritti, file 2.
74. "If you were founding a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this would you provide?" asks Glaucus. The response involves an inquiry into the "origins of a luxurious city" to be compared with a city dedicated to austere justice (Plato, The Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961], 619). On the pig and the Western political imaginary see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
75. The original reads "La strada guidata annulla l'antagonismo fra il pneumatico e la rotaia," and was the title of the final chapter of La strada guidata. Earlier, he had invoked the notion of an epic battle: "An epic battle, enormous, without precedent. . . . They are two forces of good who struggle against one another like angels against angels, light against light. One has to go back to Homer and the Trojan war to find anything like this battle of heroes vs. heroes, gods against gods." (The original reads: "Lotta epica, immane, senza precedenti . . . . Sono due beni, che lottano tra di loro, angeli contro angeli, luce contro luce. Per trovare qualcosa di simile, bisogna risalire a Omero e alla guerra di Troia, gli eroi contro gli eroi, gli dei contro gli dei" [LSG, 67-8].)
76. The original reads: "Ora le ferrovie sono in decadenza, è vero, ma la perfezione che esse hanno raggiunta è tale, che il superarle con un sistema nuovo è ben difficile, e occorrono dure esperienze, tentativi, studi e sacrifici. E d'altra parte bisogna decidersi ad affrontare e a superare ogni difficoltà, bruciando le tappe, perchè il problema di coordinare i trasporti terrestri, introducendo qualche cosa di nuovo e di conciliante fra i due irriducibili antagonisti, la strada e la rotaia, è assilante. Io scrissi che la nazione che per la prima risolverà a fondo questo problema avrà in premio quell'egemonia economica che già ebbe nel secolo diciannovesimo l'Inghilterra, per aver creduto a Stephenson e alla navigazione a vapore."
77. The statement is repeated and ritually praised at numerous junctures of La strada guidata: "Il Capo del governo diede un suo giudizio lapidario: questa non è una strada, è una ferrovia, nel quale è veramente l'essenza della strada guidata" (34; italics in original).
78. The original reads: "Si è mostrato seccato della mancata realizzazione e dopo una interessante conversazione . . . mi ha chiesto se avevo un programma. Gli risposi che il programma era di costruire una società per la costruzione e l'esercizio di strade guidate di emanazione della IRI e con intervento anche di capitali privati. Alla sua domanda, quale ministero doveva occuparsene risposi, naturalmente, quello delle communicazioni. Seduta stante il Duce telefonò al ministro Benni per un convegno l'indomani mattina con il comm. Menichella della IRI" (Ciocca to Count Piero Fogaccia, 8 January 1938, AC, Corrisp. SIAC).
79. The original reads: "le bozze sono arrivate . . . Il Ministero ha accordato il nulla osta 'pur facendo rilevare che il Ministero delle Comunicazioni fa delle riserve sulle teorie esposte nel volume.' Non mi parrebbe il caso di scrivere a Sebastiani [Mussolini's secretary]" (Valentino Bompiani to Gaetano Ciocca, 27 July 1939, AC, Corrisp. Bompiani).
80. These points are detailed in an IRI report, "Possibilità di applicazione della strada guidata = Sistema Ing. Ciocca," 11 October 1939, ACS, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri 1937-39, box 7-1-2.545; and in a report by the CNR's Commissione Centrale per l'Esame delle Invenzioni ("Parere #5695"), 13 September 1939, AC, Brevetti file 1.
81. The original reads: "Questa strada guidata è stata per me una odissea, non nei mari azzurri delle sirene, ma negli uffici, nelle anticamere, fra gli scogli degli interessi privati."
82. The original reads: "Quando Stephenson costruì la prima locomotiva, lenta, debole e imperfetta, egli non poteva immaginare quali miglioramenti essa avrebbe in seguito ricevuto nè quali benefici avrebbe apportato all'umanità. La sicurezza nell'avvenire della ferrovia, che lo muoveva, gli derivava non dagli argomenti concreti, ma dalla fede. La fede è appunto l'argomento delle cose che non appariscono e che ancora non sono concrete, pur essendo certe. Tutto il progresso è derivato, non dai freddi calcoli, ma dalla fede nell'avvenire dell'umanità."
83. Given Ciocca's tendency to pepper all his writings with quotations from Dante, his version may have been filtered through the Commedia: "fede è sustanza di cose sperate / e argomento de le non parventi" (Dante, La Divina Commedia. Paradiso, eds. Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio [Florence: Le Monnier, 1979], 402).
84. The original reads: "La storia dei trasporti si confonde con la storia della civiltà."
85. The original reads: "Vi è dunque, alla base dell'antagonismo fra la strada e la ferrovia, il contrasto fra una libertà e un vincolo, una libertà ingenita nella strada e un vincolo ingenito nella ferrovia. Non occorre essere filosofi, per conoscere che, in ogni azione naturale od umana, il contrasto è sempre fra una libertà e un vincolo. Ma anche l'equilibrio è sempre fra una libertà e un vincolo. Di conseguenza, se vogliamo conciliare l'autocarro con la locomotiva, dobbiamo raggiungere l'equilibrio là ove è il contrasto, conciliando la guida volontaria del primo con la guida obbligata dell'altra" (quoted in Gaetano Ciocca, "Prove in Roma di strada guidata," Industria Italiana del Cemento 9 [October 1937]: 287).
86. The original reads: "L'unità di direzione sarà quindi assoluta. Essa farà sentire, in caso di guerra, la sua infinita forza."
87. The original reads: "Le autostrade tedesche . . . appartengono a quell'ordine di iniziative ardite e lungimiranti che soltanto la genialità e l'intuito di un capo eccezionale come Hitler, sostenuto dalla volontà di azione di un popolo unito e senza discordie, è in grado di prendere." Ciocca's contribution to the Resistance is documented in a ministry of war certificate (signed "U. Turrini"), 15 October 1945, AC, Documenti Personali, Cimeli file; and in "Attestazione di Benemerenza" (signed "Alfredo Verani Masin") issued by the Corpo Volontari della Libertà, AC, Documenti Personali, Cimeli file .
88. I am indebted to Massimo Martignoni for this insight.
89. The original reads: "Sistemazione dell'attuale zona sportiva per spettacoli di massa . . ." (Gaetano Ciocca et al., Linee di massima per il nuovo piano regolatore di Milano [Milan: Edizioni Framar, 1946], 21).