Take the Metro B to EUR — fifteen minutes south of the city centre — and you step into a different Rome entirely.
Wide, empty boulevards.
Marble colonnades.
Monumental buildings scaled for a crowd of 100,000.
This is the Rome Mussolini was building: not a restoration of antiquity but a claim to have surpassed it.
EUR — Esposizione Universale Roma — was designed for a World's Fair planned for 1942, to celebrate twenty years of Fascism.
The war cancelled the exhibition.
The buildings were finished anyway.
The most striking is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana — six stories of repeated arches, no windows, no ornament.
Locals call it the Square Colosseum.
Valentino and Fendi now have their headquarters there.
Back in the city centre, Mussolini left his mark more violently.
The Via dei Fori Imperiali — the wide road that runs between the Colosseum and Piazza Venezia — was bulldozed through the ancient forums in 1932.
Entire medieval and Renaissance neighbourhoods were demolished.
Mussolini wanted a straight line from his balcony to the Colosseum.
He got it.
From that balcony in Piazza Venezia, he gave his most famous speeches — including the declaration of war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940.
The balcony is still there.
Fun fact: Mussolini also uncovered and restored large areas of the ancient forums — partly for propaganda, partly out of genuine obsession with Rome's imperial past.
He saw himself as a new Augustus.
He died hanging upside down from a petrol station in Milan in 1945.
