PALACE OF THE POPULAR TRADITIONS - NATIONAL MUSEUM OF POPULAR ARTS AND TRADITIONS

PALAZZO DELLE TRADIZIONI POPOLARI

Piazza Marconi 8

1939/42 Massimo Castellazzi (1901/77), Pietro Morresi (1898/1982) e Annibale Vitellozzi (1902/90)

Built in the same period of the other three buildings arranged symmetrically around the square

Museo Nazionale delle Arti e delle Tradizioni Popolari

National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions

The museum was founded from the Italian Ethnography Exhibition, held in Rome in 1911 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Unification of Italy

The exhibition was coordinated by the ethnologist LAMBERTO LORIA, who in 1906 had founded the Ethnographic Museum in Florence

He collected over 30,000 objects for the exhibition in 1911, with the help of assistants, teachers and local scholars, who were active in the various regions. The collections of objects were locked in crates, were deposited during those years in the basements of various museums and finally ended up at Villa d'Este in Tivoli

Only April 20, 1956 the museum was inaugurated in this building

The walls of the main hall are decorated with frescoes painted by different artists (Varagnolo, Colao, Bertoletti, Cavalli, Cascella, Guberti, Amato, Barillà and others), representing scenes of family life, seafaring and farming, festivals, games and ceremonies

It is the only state museum in Italy with specific expertise in the field of ANTHROPOLOGY

It contains over 100,000 documents related to the world of popular culture: a unique collection, unrepeatable today

Most objects date back to the period between the late 1800s and early 1900s, but some wooden artifacts date back to the eighteenth or the first half of the nineteenth century

ELEVEN ROOMS each dedicated to a particular aspect of popular culture:

Transport systems

Peasant labor

Work of shepherds

Hunting and fishing communities

Signs of trades

Housing and domestic space

Rituals and family life

Rituals and feasts

Musical Instruments

Shows and games on the road

Puppetry

Popular clothing and jewelry

In addition, historical photographic archive and photo library for the material collected before and after 1956, tape library for sound documents, archive of visual anthropology with visual and multimedia material, office inventory, library with about 12,000 volumes, restoration workshop, photographic laboratory and audiovisual laboratory

SMALL ARENA FOR SPORT

PALAZZETTO DELLO SPORT

Piazza Apollodoro 10

1956/58 Pier Luigi Nervi (1891/1979) and Annibale Vitellozzi (1902/90) for basketball and lifting weights tournaments of the 1960 Rome Olympics

It was built on the site of the old Rondinella Stadium of S.S. Lazio and of the Tennis Club Parioli

The original capacity of about 5,000 spectators was reduced to about 3,500 in 2011 after renovations

Now it hosts the home games of the volleyball team M. Roma Volley and of the basketball team Pallacanestro Virtus Roma

“Pier Luigi Nervi is one of the greatest structural architects of the twentieth century. His extraordinary success in combining the art and the science of building produced some of contemporary architecture’s finest works. Together with other engineers who had a natural inclination to synthesise static and spatial ideas (above all, Eduardo Torroja), Nervi contributed, in the middle decades of the last century, to a break with the formal concepts of rationalism. His constructions based, like those of Torroja, on bold technical-structural solutions achieved an extraordinary elegance and have become icons of a new kind of architecture which enjoy world-wide admiration and esteem. His creations, scattered across Italy, Europe, America and Australia, made those years a glorious period for Italian architecture” (Mario Alberto Chiorino - Pier Luigi Nervi Project Web Site - pierluiginervi.org)

CENTRAL NATIONAL LIBRARY VICTOR EMMANUEL II

BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE CENTRALE VITTORIO EMANUELE II

Viale Castro Pretorio 105

1965/75 Massimo Castellazzi (1901/77), Tullio Dell'Anese and Annibale Vitellozzi (1902/90). They won the competition held in 1959 and followed the so-called international style for this project

It was restored in 2003 by the Studio Passarelli

It is also known as BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE CENTRALE DI ROMA

Area of 56,000 sqm (14 acres) largely corresponding to the CASTRA PRAETORIA, the barracks built by Tiberius (14/37) in the years 21/23 for the permanent guard of the emperor

It was established in 1875 on the basis of the library of the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano and other sixty-nine libraries of religious congregations

There are about 4,500,000 books including a copy of the first book printed in Rome in 1468 and a copy of the Vaticinia by Nostradamus with eighty mysterious images painted in watercolor

Also about 100,000 ancient documents, including 8,000 manuscripts and 2,000 incunabula

It is the second library in Italy for number of books, the first being the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence