Italian photographer Roberto Cavazzuti takes the Palazzo dellà Civilta Italiana, an icon of twentieth-century architecture, as the subject of this photobook. Designed and built for the 1942 World Fair by Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula, and Mario Romano in the Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR) district of Rome, the Palazzo is an integral part of Italy’s cultural and political, particularly its fascist, history.
In the book’s introduction, critic and curator Luca Panaro argues that the focus of Cavazzuti’s work is singular in its representation of the Palazzo, an oft photographed building. Cavazzuti captures the tactile quality of the structure as much as its monumentality, focusing his lens on the materiality of the Palazzo—a building clad entirely in travertine marble—and engaging with the details of the structure that amount to its position within the canon of modernist architecture.