From unification to the present
United Italy built monuments and arcades, the Rationalists between the wars combined modernism with classical order, and after the war Italy became a centre of design and theory.
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, built in 1865–1877, covered a street with glass and iron. In Como Giuseppe Terragni built the Casa del Fascio in 1932–1936, a Rationalist building of white marble and glass. At the same time Mussolini’s regime built in a monumental, simplified classicism, as in the EUR district of Rome.
After the war Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi gave Milan the Pirelli Tower, and Aldo Rossi wrote about the memory of the city. Renzo Piano from Genoa became one of the most sought-after architects in the world, and Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI in Rome, opened in 2010, is a museum for the art of the 21st century.