Danteum: Giuseppe Terragni

Abstract Known only through a small number of drawings and photographs as well as a single model, the Danteum is arguably one of the most enigmatic architectural projects by a renowned architect of the twentieth century. Commissioned in the late 1930s as a center for the study of the poet Dante Alighieri, the Danteum was also conceived by its architects Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni as a monument to the poet's particular vision for a renewed imperial Italy, which seemed finally to have been realized by Mussolini's fascist order. To that end, the architects developed a design that fused symbolic structures extracted from Dante's work directly with the interior organization and architectural form of the building. Rejecting figurative ornament almost entirely, Lingeri and Terragni deployed the stripped surfaces, abstract forms, and orderly but irregular arrangement of spaces typical of architectural modernism to design a building that would embody the journey told in The Divine Comedy , from hell to paradise and beyond. In this synthesis of form and content, the Danteum proposed a modernist monumentality of unprecedented – and unequalled – integrity and power.