Town Plan and Structure

Two main roads lead in to the town center—one from Rome, the other from Terracina—like the decumanus and cardo of an antique Roman city or military camp. Dominating the region of Sabaudia the impressive Monte Circeo (Circe’s mountain) rises to the southwest—a breathtaking vista of the mountain from the ceremonial square southside of the Town Hall. The integration of the town with the surrounding landscape is well considered, harmonizing ocean and wilderness and fields and parks with the town. From the town all these varied environments seem to border on its outskirts, as if the urban little sprawl was a gem set inside a necklace of shifting sites. The town seems healthy and vital as it is accompanied by the verdant nature and opalescent light—both greenery, light, and air were important issues in modernist architectural theory.

The town centre is easily accessible from the outside with the major road Corso Vittorio Emanuele II (the decumanus) taking off 90 degrees from Via Appia (from Littoria and Rome) and leading straight to the Town Hall tower on the main square, which is discernible at a great distance.[1] The other axis, Corso Vittorio Emanuele III (the cardo heading towards Terracina) intersects with the decumanus in the civil part of the main square, the Piazza della Rivoluzione (plate 17). The civil part of this L-shaped square is surrounded clockwise from southeast by an apartment house, the hotel, Town Hall, Party Headquarters, and Cinema/Restaurant complex with a portico completing the “circle”. The ceremonial part is situated between the Town Hall to the northwest and the Militia to the southeast. Running along the northeast side is the hotel again and an apartment house (type C), both facing the public garden on the opposite side of the square. The second major square, with the religious complex, is tucked away from the civic center, but in the extension of Via Oddone which becomes Largo Giulio Cesare before it leads out to the Piazza Regina Margherita and the church. This axis presents the most impressive view through town with the three towers (of Town Hall, Party Headquarters, and Church) lining the short boulevard. The streets and buildings in Sabaudia are laid out in a grid around these two main squares. However, the town plan has been given an asymmetrical, rhomboidal shape, extended by a rectangular core in the east. This lines the periphery of the grid system with curved, organic roads tying in the landscape. The town plan was rather easy to expand, if necessary. In the many euforic reportages about Sabaudia, the town’s measures are often reported: “Sabaudia covers a surface of 60 hectares (148.2 acres). There are 51,600 m² of green zones; 13,400 m² of squares; 5,000 m² of avenues.”[2]

Whereever one looks in the direction of the center, either the Town Hall tower or the tower of the SS. Annunziata, seem to crown the building(s) in sight, in such a manner as to make it seem like tower and building(s) fuse into one and the same building mass. The architects were very concerned with the aesthetic aspects of Sabaudia: Many streets end or make a bend in front of some landmark building, such as is the case with the town hall, the church, or the Balilla building, to mention some. The different vistas through porticoes, of walls and pilasters in red brick, dark and lighter travertine, peperino stone, red and yellow stucco bordering on each other, in different geometric constellations, always with the blue sky right over your head, green treas and lawns and maybe a glimpse of glittering sea, make for a very pleasant environment.

Streets[3] are important architectonic features in any cityscape. Kostof sees the street as an institution: “Beyond its architectural identity, every street has an economic function and social significance.” He continues, quoting Joseph Rykwert, writing that the street “is human movement institutionalized—and human intercourse institutionalized.” Thus, “the history of the street is about both container and content.”[4] The urban street is a complex, civic institution—always having to cater to contradictory functions and activities depending on what is to be contained and when to be the backdrop of a controlled content, as well as to be the context for the civic life’s unpredictable unfoldments of moving cars and carts, human interaction, shopping, etc. Walking about in Sabaudia it quickly becomes apparent that great consideration was given to the public spaces occuring in the streets, on the corners and the spaces opening to major piazzas the architecture always includes perforations of the structures in the form of sidewalks receded under the upper storys with pillars and shaded areas. Looking from these colonnades into bright sunlight and across the street into another shaded area opening again into a regular street lined with trees, makes spending time in Sabaudia a varied visual experience. However, one cannot help noticing the political intentions in the way this arrangement also makes it easily able to survey movements of people as all these public spaces, including coffee bars, cinema and other leisure activities, are mixed with ever present Fascist institutional buildings. As Richard Burdett observes: “The dominant position of the Fascist institutions and the provision of a piazza for political rallies clearly reflect the Fascist spatial rhetoric.” But in all fairness to Sabaudia and its architects these spaces do not feature the “cold and calculated stage-like scenarios of grandiose Fascist schemes, such as the E.42 (eur) project in Rome.”[5] It makes for a strange blend this concoction of contemporary notions of garden cities and the looming weight of a monumental political intention, probably unlike any other building development done by the Fascist regime.

The town plan’s capacity to distribute people and traffic are immanently present upon visiting. No traffic need to go through the center if no business there is intended, because the town is lined in by a ring road which can distribute the traffic from any direction past the town and beyond.