The Urban Museum of Predappio

The history of the founding of Predappio Nuova, which takes place between 1925 and 1942, contains the main themes of reflection on Italian architecture in the first decades of the twentieth century: infrastructure planning, national architectural competitions, the traditionalist-rationalist polemic and monumentality.

Buildings designed by some of the most important architects in Italy at the time, such as Gustavo Giovannoni, Cesare Bazzani, Florestano di Fausto and Cesare Valle, as well as by no less brilliant architects such as Arnaldo Fuzzi and Enrico De Angeli, make up the “planned city” of Predappio, the testimony of a true urban museum.

Predappio Nuova, with its own peculiarities, belongs to the group of founding towns that saw the light of day during the Fascist twenty-year period, but unlike the others, it was founded several years earlier and its buildings were constructed along a much wider time frame than those of towns such as Sabaudia, Littoria and Carbonia.

The Municipal Museum of Predappio has the characteristics of an “open-air museum” and aims to be a guide to visit the most important testimonies of the architecture of the Fascist period, which have come down to us almost unchanged, through a route marked out by explanatory panels with texts and images.

In this way, it becomes possible to know the country by recovering the historical memory and the symbolic value that it assumed at the time, with the aim of contributing to the enhancement and preservation of a common historical, artistic and cultural heritage.

Structured on the relationship between the simplicity of the Duce’s birthplace and the founding of the city, the invention of Mussolini’s city aimed to trace and weld the link between the popular origins of the head of government and the modernity imprinted by the regime through public works.

The project to create the Civic Museum of Predappio, a first important step in the revaluation and recovery of this urban and architectural heritage, is part of a larger project developed by the Municipal Administration in collaboration with institutions and the university world, whose main objective is to create in Predappio a space for reflection and discussion on contemporary history and the memory of the twentieth century.