Rome: The G20 leaders will meet this weekend in the historic Rome environment, a neighborhood created by Benito Mussolini to glorify his fascist regime and his relationship with ancient Rome.
The world’s main economic summit will be held from the center of Rome, home to the Colosseum and Pantheon, where tourists, historic buildings and small streets cause nightmares for security and access.
Instead, leaders will gather in the futuristic convention center known as “Nuvola” (Cloud) (Cloud), featuring a structure suspended in a glass and steel box, in the southern suburbs with the form of a better polished bulevard and its own unique charm.
EUR, which stands for Esposizione Universale Romana, or Rome World Expo, was conceived in the 1930s as showing off for modernist architecture and as a home of the 1942 edition of the World Expo.
The event, which will coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Fascist regime, never happened because of World War II.
The conflict also forced Mussolini’s architect to leave EUR half-finished.
Located in the southern outskirts of Rome, between the historic center and the outskirts of Ostia Beach, EUR is marked by monumental buildings in white marble and travertine stone, typical of the fascist era.
The most famous landmark is the so-called Colosseum square, a white cube with arches which was originally intended to host Italian civilization, and now the Italian Fashion Fashion House headquarters.
On his four sides, this building has writing taken from Mussolini speech 1935 celebrating Italy as “poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, navigators, and transmigrants”.
Fascist propaganda is also on display at Palazzo Uffici, which offers a giant entrance to the giant History of Rome which starts with Romulus and Remus and ends with Mussolini by riding a horse, his right arm grew up with salute fascists.
At present, EUR is a residential area and business that hosts the ENI Energy Group headquarters and from several other public and private institutions, plus museums, concert halls and artificial lakes that are popular in the summer.
But in the post-wars of direct war, it resembles a ghost city, with the abandoned buildings occupied by refugees.
They were completed in the 1950s and 1960s after the Roman authority decided to play the area to the city edge business district which became a model for Docklands and London Defense in Paris.
Nuvola, who was recently used as a coronavirus vaccination center, added a sense of contemporary architecture to its modernist environment when inaugurated in 2016, after years of delay and cost overruns.
It was designed by the Italian architect of Massimiliano and Doriana Fukas.
The first is one of the giants of contemporary Italian architecture, with projects including Bao’an Shenzhen airport in China and Ultra-Modern Ferrari headquarters.