Want to discover the alternative Rome? Take a five-minute metro ride from the Colosseum and emerge into the parallel universe of Eur, Mussolini's dream city. As excessive as anything ancient Rome has to offer, Eur was planned as an exhibition centre that would later house Italy's new race of superheroes - a sort of Nietzschean Milton Keynes.
In fact the Eternal City, with Eur to the south, ersatz "Roman" bridges built by the Fascists sprinkled along the Tiber and its vainglorious Olympic stadium to the north, is merely the jewel in the crown of an alternative tour of Italy - "The Fascist Route" or what the guide books won't tell you.
The country is peppered with the architectural relics of its unsavoury fascist years, many of them coldly - and brutally - beautiful. Most of them are home to Mussolini's lasting legacy to the Italians - the country's overblown and unaccountable bureaucracy. Anyone who has had to try and pay a traffic fine or local rates, buy a rail ticket or even send a parcel, will be familiar with the architecture: a massive marble block-house whose interminable corridors echo with the steps of civil servants heading off for a morning espresso. I have a memory of jostling for hours in the atrium of just such a post office in the Naples suburbs. As I regressed steadily in the melee - newcomers pushing forward far more effectively than me - my eye fell on a chipped and worn inscription above the counter bearing one of the Fascists' favourite slogans: Il Duce ha sempre ragione - "The Leader is always right". Given the chaos of that particular post office, it wasn't surprising that, in 50 years, no one had bothered to get rid of it.
But why bother with modern aberration when the glories of the eternal city are at hand? Well, two reasons. Anyone wanting to understand the Italians in any depth has to consider fascism and all its works. Aberration it may have been. But it was an aberration that captured the national psyche - the need, for an only recently-unified nation, to remember glories of the ancient past and to believe in using them to forge a vibrant future.
The second, I have to admit, is a personal one. After several days surrounded by the soft focus of crumbling dusty stonework and the clamour and pollution of Rome's choked streets, I find myself yearning for space and clean, straight lines. Eur has them aplenty.
When you emerge from the darkness of the Eur Fermi underground station, you blink at the great, empty vistas over the lake and park of the Palazzo dello Sport and the ascetic white cubes of the office buildings around, and wonder whether you've somehow been beamed to conference land, a mediterranean Geneva.
In Rome, cars career over twisty cobbled streets designed for horses and pile up at improbable angles on tiny parking spots. Here the streets are wide, straight and Tarmaced. Oh, and don't bother to eat here. Whereas in Rome you can be assured of excellent food, Eur is, fittingly, the land of lo sneckand its home, lo sneck-bar.
But what's that? A Roman temple? Except it's not. It's Mussolini's Museum of Roman Civilization. Reinforced concrete columns rather than stone, blank severity rather than joyous bacchanalia. Remember that Mussolini's architects loved using volume and mass to keep the little people in their place, reminding the visitor at all times of the power of the state. The irony is that the result - Romanità or "Romanness" as Mussolini called it - is so un-Italian in its coldness.
The temples of ancient Rome are lofty but lightened by elegant proportions. Finely-carved mythical scenes or exquisitely reproduced foliage seduce the observer. Like the artwork of the Soviet Union, Mussolini's dour monuments aim only to emphasize how irrelevant individual humanity is. But they do it magnificently. Past the Museum of Roman Civilization, turn sharp left into Piazza delle Nazioni. Facing you is Eur's masterpiece, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. It is an extraordinary building, standing in splendid isolation at the end of the square, completely naked against the skyline. Merely viewing it is an unnerving experience. The building's arches, piled row upon relentless row up to the sky, play strange shadow games in the bright morning light and you feel as if you've stumbled into a surrealist painting by Giorgio de Chirico. As you eye the massive marble statues wrestling with plunging steeds that flank the building, you get more of a feeling for the horror and seductiveness that fascism held for Italians than any history book can convey. Used first by German troops during the second world war, then by the Allies and lastly as a holding centre for refugees, the palazzo was neglected for years until a recent restoration project to turn it into a museum for the audio-visual arts - a stroke of genius for one of Rome's most cinematic buildings.
In fact the Palazzo is only one example of how Rome's city authority is coming to terms with its modern history. North-east of Eur, bordering the "African District" on the Via Nomentana, lies Mussolini's own villa - not a fascist monstrosity but an elegantly proportioned early 19th-century palazzo. Rented by the dictator as his family home for the princely sum of one lira a year, the Villa Torlonia was allowed after his downfall to lie derelict for decades. But a three-year restoration project has just been completed and it has opened to the public as an art gallery and museum.
Cross the city again, this time due east, and you will find that Mussolini's Olympic Stadium never fell into such neglect, playing its part, somewhat belatedly, in the 1960 Olympics. To get to the Foro Italico, you may use the bridge over the Tiber dedicated to the Duca d'Aosta. It looks for all the world like a feat of ancient Roman engineering but was actually inaugurated in 1942 to honour one of Mussolini's key backers, who was also a commander of crack troops in Italy's colonial campaigns. Or you may take the bridge now known as the Ponte Matteotti. It, too, appears ancient - down to the flat red bricks with which it is faced. But a clue is given by the central limestone plaque bearing the fasci, or bundle of rods and axe that Mussolini usurped from ancient Rome as his totem. This bridge was actually built when the Duce was at the height of his powers and it was painstakingly copied - right down to its core of volcanic Tufa stone - from Roman designs. The bridge was renamed after the fall of the regime to honour Giacomo Matteotti, a Socialist MP and fierce critic of Mussolini, whose mutilated body was dumped on the river bank here after his murder by fascist thugs in 1924.
Defiant mosaics in black and white still declaim Duce, Duce along the approach to the Foro Italico as if the dictator were about to stride up to the gates at any moment in the tight sports vest and shorts he sometimes favoured to show off his physique to an adoring press. But grass and weeds poke up through the paths around the sports centre and Mediterranean pines buckle the Tarmac on abandoned access roads. Closer up, a few impressively-kitted young professionals jog around the outer perimeter, loftily ignored by the hulking marble athletes that ring the track. Here Mussolini's sculptors had a problem. Their statues of fascist musclemen strike Greek poses, as tradition demanded. But because fascist art prided itself on its realism, they clutch incongruously modern kit and wear shoes. And it's hard to look like an ancient hero while clutching a basketball in such a way as to shield your modesty.
This is fascism lite. It is at the Foro Italico that you realise just how ridiculous Mussolini was.
ALTERNATIVE PAST
■Villa Torlonia, via Nomentana 70. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 6.15pm. Take bus 62 or 60 and get off at “Via Nomentana/Villa Torlonia”. For visits to Eur, take Metro Line B, getting off at Eur Fermi station, or bus 714 to Piazza G.Marconi. Museum of Roman Civilization, Piazza G. Agnelli. Opening times Tuesday to Saturday 9am to 18.45, Sunday 9am to 13.30. Monday closed. In the case of Palazzo della Civilta’ Italiana, the main interest lies in viewing Rome’s “square Colosseum” from outside. To view the Olympic stadium and the fascist mosaics, go to Piazza L.de Bosis and walk up to Piazzale del Foro Italico.
