Florestano Di Fausto

Florestano Di Fausto
Florestano Di Fausto (c. 1930)
Born	(1890-07-16)16 July 1890 Rocca Canterano, Rome, Italy
Died	11 January 1965(1965-01-11) (aged 74) Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Alma mater	Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome; Sapienza University of Rome, Rome
Occupation	Architect

Florestano Di Fausto (16 July 1890 – 11 January 1965) was an Italian architect, engineer and politician who is best known for his building designs in the Italian overseas territories around the Mediterranean. He is considered the most important colonial architect of the Fascist age in Italy and has been described as the "architect of the Mediterranean". Uncontested protagonist of the architectural scene first in the Italian Islands of the Aegean and then in Italian Libya, he was gifted with a remarkable preparation combined with consummate skills, which allowed him to master and to use indifferently and in any geographical context the most diverse architectural styles, swinging between eclecticism and rationalism. His legacy, long neglected, has been highlighted since the 1990s.

Born in Rocca Canterano, a town near Rome, Florestano Di Fausto studied in Rome, first getting the Laurea in Architecture at the Accademia di belle Arti, and then (1922) in civil Engineering. His first work, from 1916 to 1923, was the architectural part of the tomb of Pope Pius X in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, a work correct but cold. It was followed by the design of the Calvary and of the chapel of relics of Passover in the Roman basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, inaugurated in 1930 but finished only in 1952. From 1924 until 1932 he was a technical consultant of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), erecting, modifying or restructuring a great number of Italian embassies, legations, consulates, culture institutes and schools in Europe, Africa and the Americas. His most important works in this respect are the Italian embassies in Belgrade and Ankara, and the legation in Cairo, where he collaborated with Melchiorre Bega, one of the most important Italian interior architects of the 20th century. At the same time, he became known for proposing several projects for the center of Rome, as those for the Piazze Colonna and del Parlamento, for the Lungotevere Marzio and for the new seat of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Via Veneto, but all of them remained on paper. Between 1926–28 Di Fausto, who had good connections with Benito Mussolini, designed the city plan and the main buildings of Predappio Nuova. The Italian dictator had decided to move his hometown, Predappio, after a landslide that was menacing its survival. The idea behind the work of Di Fausto here was the creation of an idealized country village, through an "urban design of devotional kind", in accordance with the many pilgrims visiting each day the birthplace of the "Duce", but in harmony with Mussolini's ideal of a rural Italy and his will to show his modest and simple roots. The affordable houses for the inhabitants displaced by the landslide, the renovation of Palazzo Varano, the post office building, the Food Market, the Santa Rosa primary school and kindergarten, the doctors' house, the expansion of the cemetery of San Cassiano and the homonymous church and the tomb of the Mussolini family constitute the stages of his work in Predappio.