Piazzale Aldo Moro 5
Plan of the campus 1932/35 Marcello Piacentini (1881/1960) almost completely changed by subsequent interventions
“The idea that guides Piacentini and other architects is to achieve a unit of language, starting from the use of common materials, such as travertine and brick, of windows of predetermined size, of recurring details. It is in the end a compromise between more modern rationalist instances and monumental language purged of any decorative connotation. In this complex we find a style which will be diminished with the various terms lictorial, fascist, mussolinian” (Carlo Bertelli, Giuliano Briganti, Antonio Giuliano)
“Demonstrating those consumed capacity of mediator that earned him in those years a position of absolute primacy in the professional world and, more generally, in the vicissitudes of Italian architecture, Piacentini called to collaborate on the project a number of young architects carefully chosen partly among rationalists (Giuseppe Pagano, Giuseppe Capponi, Giovanni Michelucci), partly among academics (Gaetano Rapisardi, Arnaldo Foschini) and partly between those taking intermediate and more nuanced positions (Pietro Aschieri, Gio Ponti). (...) The results, however contradictory, were in some cases very significant. The buildings of Gio Ponti, Capponi and Pagano still remain works of great architectural interest” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)
With about 145,000 students it is the largest university in Europe and the third in the world, after the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City and the University of Cairo
It includes as many as TWENTY-ONE MUSEUMS:
Herbarium and Museum of Botany - Laboratory of Contemporary Art - Museum of Art and Mining Deposits - Museum of the Near East - Museum of Classical Art - Museum of Etruscan and Italic Antiquities - Museum of the Origins - Museum of Comparative Anatomy - Museum of Pathological Anatomy - Museum of Anthropology - Museum of Chemistry - Museum of Physics - Museum of Geology - Museum of Hydraulics - Museum of Mathematics - Museum of Marketable Goods - Museum of Mineralogy - Museum of Paleontology - Museum of the History of Medicine - Museum of Zoology - Botanical Garden
Bronze statue “Athena warrior” 1935 by Arturo Martini (1889/1947)
MONUMENTAL ENTRANCE
Arnaldo Foschini (1884/1968)
On the left after the entrance
INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS
1932/35 Giuseppe Pagano (1896/1945)
He also designed the EUR district and the Bocconi University in Milan
“Always stressing the prevailing importance of urban aspects over architectural ones, he argued the necessity of 'surrendering' each maddeningly individual search in favor of the construction of an overall quality of the environment that would be the result of collective adherence to the canons of a rigorous formal simplicity. In this view should be read the Institute of Physics that is perhaps the least flashy and, in a sense, the more 'unassuming' buildings of the campus” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)
On the right after the entrance
INSTITUTE OF CHEMISTRY
1932/35 Pietro Aschieri (1889/1952)
In the years 1938/39 it was modified and in the years 1955/60 elevations were built that radically changed Aschieri’s original project
It was also damaged by the bombing of St. Lawrence in July 1943
“The back façade which projects outside the curved shape of the large hall for 500 people is perhaps the only part of the building where it is possible to detect somehow the 'manner' of Aschieri. (...) Pietro Aschieri was prominent in a generation of architects still closely linked to the academic method. (...) In his projects took shape, albeit in different ways, a language internally consistent in which the elements of tradition are combined with expressionist echoes and with that particular attention to the Baroque geometries that characterized in those same years the work of Giuseppe Capponi and other Roman architects” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)
RECTORATE
1932/35 by Marcello Piacentini (1881/1960)
The fresco in the main hall was painted in 1935 by Mario Sironi (1885/1961)
To the left and to the right of the Rectorate
FACULTY OF LIBERAL ARTS AND JURISPRUDENCE
1933/35 Gaetano Rapisardi (1893/1988)
Twin buildings on either side of the Rectorate connected to it with skyways
“The colossal outside stairs are a solution extraordinarily figurative, able to hold its own against the porch of Piacentini. Inside the rational articulation of the distribution has in the generously dimensioned stairwells its expressive apex” (Giorgio Muratore)
To the right of the Rectorate, opposite to the Institute of Mineralogy and Geology
INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS
1934/35 Gio Ponti (1891/1979)
Various modifications have altered the original appearance
“Contrast between the main front, openly twentieth century and metaphysical, and the rear façade, characterized by plastic and dynamic forms” (Giorgio Muratore)
“Gio Ponti was very close to the themes of 'Twentieth Century', an art movement which proposed a line of moderate renewal on the basis of an abstract purism with a taste of Classicism. And it is this type of research that you can read in the solution of the front body that overlooks the Piazzale della Minerva” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)
To the left of the Rectorate opposite to the Institute of Mathematics
INSTITUTES OF MINERALOGY AND GEOLOGY including museums
1933/35 Giovanni Michelucci (1891/1990)
He also designed the train station of S. Maria Novella in Florence
“Set on a plan and with a volume rather traditional, defined by a main façade with classical proportions, (...) it is a building in which one could only barely recognize the hand of Giovanni Michelucci. Probably the theme ended up being ambiguous for the planimetric position of the building (...) delimiting the great Piazzale della Minerva and for which it is logical to assume that it was necessary to provide architectural solutions in a more dignified and representative way” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)
Behind the Rectorate
INSTITUTES OF GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
1933/35 Giovanni Michelucci
Behind the Rectorate on the right
INSTITUTE OF BOTANY AND PHARMACOLOGY
1933/35 Giuseppe Capponi (1893/1936)
“It represents the most avant-garde experiment of this University City, distinguishing itself from the rest for a declared adherence to European expressionist Rationalism” (Giorgio Muratore)
“An architecture of 'industrial' taste which is certainly an element of novelty in the Roman architectural scene” (Piero Ostilio Rossi)
NEW INSTITUTE OF PHARMACOLOGY
1955/61 Claudio Dall'Olio (1920) and Alfredo Lambertucci (1928/96)
RECREATIONAL FACILITY OF THE UNIVERSITY
1932/35 Gaetano Minnucci (1896/1980)
It was later transformed into the UNIVERSITY THEATRE
Outside the perimeter of the campus
STUDENTS’ HOUSE
1932/35 Giorgio Calza Bini (1908/99), Francesco Fariello (1910) and Saverio Muratori (1910/73)
