WTI Magazine #30    2014 May, 15
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

There are artists in the history of Italian art and architecture that have never achieved a wide reputation, a status that crossed generations, names that people rarely knows and recognizes. Angiolo Mazzoni del Grande is one of those names, and this condition of obscurity is even more paradoxical considering that all Italians have seen at least one of his works in their lives, and they know it very well: he is the author of most of the railway stations and of the post offices of the Italian provinces.

Mazzoni was born in Bologna but when he was eleven he moved with his family to Rome where he studied set design in high school and then he graduated in Engineering with a degree and then teaching qualification in architecture. Although he is very interested in the architecture of the Vienna Secession, he will never embrace that style, but he will lead to incredible results the influence of monumental constructions typical of Marcello Piacentini, the study of which he attended for a year in the early 20's, when the rationalist movement was still little more than a sketch in the minds of its founders.

In 1921 he was hired by the Railways as a provisional engineer while he was still studying at the Institute of Fine Arts for a degree in architecture in Bologna, where thanks to his studies on urban regeneration of the areas adjacent to the station of Bologna, he will begin to lay the foundations for his future masterpieces.

In 1924 both the Italian railways and the Italian postal service came under the competence of the new Ministry of Communications: Mazzoni moved back to Rome and then began to design and build for two decades several post offices and railway stations across the country.

The rationalist style, typical of the fascist period, with Mazzoni comes to unexpected results for two major reasons. The first reason is that these are buildings of the public sector, then representative of the state, but also functional to purposes other than housing or simple clerical ministerial work. This leaves Mazzoni a wide range of action, where the pure and geometric forms of the Euclidean solids are extended, juxtaposed in their linearity. In the dozens of post offices that Mazzoni designed there is very little repetition, and a skilful and imaginative use of the material (mainly marble, little bricks and glass).

The second reason is its ancient study of the set; especially for the stations, but even in some cases for post offices, buildings interact with the planning around: sometimes they shape it, sometimes they follow it. The vertical planes are almost always in glass to recall the North European houses, while the horizontal structures play between full white brick walls and the voids of the shelters that set the glimpse of the station square. This is easily understandable from his preparatory drawings and his projects, which are magnificently children of those times, with a really fascinating sort of "Great Gatsby" taste.

The luck of Mazzoni, who never denied his membership to the Fascist Party, collapsed just after the war, together with the aversion to all that the regime had represented, reverberated also against the artists that were close to it. In 1963 Mazzoni returned to Italy after a self-imposed exile in Colombia, but not anymore as an architect. The buildings of the post offices in Ostia, Latina, Sabaudia and Grosseto and of the railway stations in Siena Trento, Messina and the wing of the Rome Termini station are still beautiful, full of eternal modernity and functionality even after almost a hundred years.