When Marcello Piacentini was asked to direct the planning and building stages of the New University City in Rome (1932-1935), he was not given a blank piece of paper, but a series of restrictions that would condition how it looked. This work focuses
on the period between Gustavo Giovannoni’s preliminary plan (1930) and the work coordinated by Piacentini, which was
further developed right up until the 1960s.
A design for the Faculty of Architecture by Gaetano Minnucci - never realised - is
testimony to the professionalism of those who worked with Piacentini. Between the end of the war and the 1960s, the sharp
rise in the student population and the need for new spaces and equipment for teaching and research purposes, led to an intense
period of authorised planning, and the 1950s saw the return of Piacentini, as an interior designer, Minnucci and Eugene Montuori, who respectively designed the Teatro Ateneo and the Tumminelli building. Later, Giulio Pediconi and Mario Paniconi
would produce an original design, also never realised, for the new buildings of the Institute of Mathematics and Palazzo delle
Segreterie. However, most of the work was carried out by the University’s Technical Department, headed by Francesco Guidi,
who, following the inauguration in 1935 and right up to the 1960s, would oversee the completion of the buildings that had
been started and also add a series of extensions to the older buildings in University City.
