A Modern Oddity: The Danteum and Terragni’s Meaningful Abstraction

The Danteum, an unbuilt “temple” meant to celebrate Dante Alighieri and the Fascist regime on the occasion of the 1942 Esposizione Universale in Rome, is one of the most widely discussed architectural pieces of its age due to its uncommon intention of being an architectural translation of a literary work: Dante’s Divine Comedy. This paper will analyse how Giuseppe Terragni’s appeal for a symbolic and expressive architecture devoid of rhetoric and decoration led to an atypical design that challenges two key tenets of architectural modernism—abstraction and technical rationality—and how this generated contradictions with his stated goals. The paper will also point out how this uncommon scheme undermined wider and more lasting architectural conventions by putting forward a certain dissolution of architecture.