The Danteum

I was looking around for Dante related stuff on the internet, and I found some abandoned architectural plans for a building called the Danteum. The Danteum, whose blueprint can be viewed in an animated form here, was mainly designed by Giuseppe Terragni in 1938. Terragni was an Italian architect who helped pioneer the Italian modernist movement, which makes it somewhat ironic that he was asked to design a monument for the ultimate medieval work of literature: Dante's Divine Comedy. However, the year being 1938, it was Mussolini's Fascist government commissioning the work, so Terragni didn't have much of a choice.

One of Mussolini's main goals, nationalistically speaking, was to put Italy back on the map as a country of great power and nobility, worthy of the world's respect and the Third Reich's partnership. In order to accomplish this, Mussolini dug back into Italy's history for the majesty of Rome, and the literary masterpiece that is Dante's Divine Comedy. The Danteum was supposed to stand as a testament of Italian greatness, but sadly the building never progressed beyond the stage of blueprints.

As Terragni and his collaborators imagined it, the Danteum would have been a building that architecturally incorporated Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. As this wonderful site shows and describes, the building was largely non-functional, but in passing through the various rooms you would have been recreating Dante's journey, from the Dark Woods all the way to the Hall of Paradise. The Hall of Paradise was actually suspended above the Purgatory Room, which is awesome because it literally gives those in Purgatory a glimpse of Heaven/hope while everyone in Hell was relegated to a dark, nearly lightless room.

I think it's pretty sad that this building never was built, given that the Divine Comedy really IS a testament to Italy's talent...or maybe I just want to walk through the Inferno. Whatever the case, one would hope that someday the Fascist stigma will fade away and someone will resurrect the potential beauty of the Danteum.