Guidonia the Flying City. Myth and Disenchantment of an Architectural Dream

Guidonia, a metaphysical construction of a dream of modernity. An aeronautical new town inaugurated in 1937, as a corporate city serving the Centro Studi ed Esperienze dell’Aviazione Italiana – an architectural realization of the myth of Icarus. Built in just over a year and based on the project by Giorgio Calza Bini, Giuseppe Nicolosi and Gino Cancellotti, with “realistic proportions into the limits of the theme” without any “rhetorical megalomania”. The city and its air force base, nestled in the fertile land of the Sabina countryside at the foot of the Lucretili Mountains, is only 30 kilometers from Rome. An urban translation of a political and ideological, military and scientific project. The urban layout of Guidonia is set on a cardo-decumanus system; centered on a pilotis-raised building and its black civic tower. The cardo symbolically binds the airport to the civic center; the decumanus ideally connects the city to the church, which is located at the highest point of the town-like a contemporary acropolis. Access to it is granted through a long monumental staircase, a solemn ascent leading to another dimension. This is the genesis of Guidonia: an architectural dream, a “city of air and science”, intensely modern and untouched by ruralist evocations or rhetorical excess. But what remains of that “dream”? Not so much. That highly centralized and ideological urban vision has, by a curious paradox, become one of the most emblematic instances of Italian-style urban sprawl. Today, the third-largest city in Lazio keeps on spreading in all its fascinating disorder, stretching from the first pre-Apennine hills to the Grande Raccordo Anulare. Guidonia, an “archipelago-city” whose fragmented development offers a compelling narrative of the complex history of Italian architecture and urban planning from the postwar period to the present day.