Luigi Moretti e la residenza all’antica in Porta San Sebastiano per Ettore Muti, “L’Africano”

In 1940, Ettore Muti, the secretary of the National Fascist Party, commissioned the architect Luigi Moretti a very special residence, able to harmonize the trophies of his military campaigns with the relics of the Roman Empire. Despite what was believed, the apartment involved two different sites: Porta Ostiense-San Paolo and Porta Appia-San Sebastiano. The first embodiment of this all’antica apartment was staged in the rooms of Porta Ostiense, as evidenced by a few photographs and a single sketch. Half-way between a cinematic stage and an archeological site, Moretti’s project gathers and develops the suggestions that come from the brave biography of Muti and, through the mediation of the architect Vittorio Cafiero and his associates, from the rhetoric of political power that serves of archaeological discoveries and propaganda cinema to convey the new incarnation of the Empire. Within a year, the apartment is moved to the Porta Appia, a site that offers better environmental and spatial conditions and the opportunity of further developing the former prototype. In this case, only the drawings by Moretti and Achille Capizzano remain to testify to the existence of a residence that has left few traces in the building. However, the reasons for these peculiar choices could be more complex and sophisticated than it appears. After a historical synthesis of the figures of Muti and Moretti at the end of the 1930s, of the political role of the Roman archaeological tradition and of the nascent mass cinema, the authors investigate the possible reasons behind the project, in the archaeological, media and propaganda context of those years; reconstruct the organization of the two apartments by comparing the visual documents, appropriately rearranged in relation to the two sites, and the current state of the two monuments; finally, they propose some hypotheses on the reasons for the move within the framework of an association between Muti, Publio Cornelio Scipione known as the African and Carlo V, winner over the Turks by the ancient Carthage.