TIn the two decades during which Angiolo Mazzoni del Grande (Bologna 1894 – Rome 1979)
worked as an architect-engineer, and therefore as a technical manager, of the Ministry of
Communications of the Kingdom of Italy, starting from 1921 and up to the Second World
War, draws up projects and builds buildings relating to a large number of institutional assignments;
his architectures for post office buildings, railway stations, social housing, and
technical or service buildings (but also for free time) cover a significant share in the category
of public buildings identified as a witness to the institutional mystique of the Fascist
period. Mazzoni vigorously interprets the ethos based on the principle of robustness as
a metaphor for virtue and reliability; but at the same time his position as an integral designer,
and therefore also oriented to the (often planned) insertion of works of art both as
endowments and as an integral part of the architectural context, is almost an updated
re-proposition of the ideal of design culture of the modernist period, albeit with aesthetic
decks of very different sign. His will and the actual achievements for his architectures of
iconic accessories, whose cultural possibilism reveals a versatile profile even in consideration
of the declared preference for the Futurists (even if limited in time), have contributed
in a decisive way to that movement. of ideas and opinions which, within a few years, would
lead to the formulation of the Law of 11 May 1942, n. 839, with which the then Minister of
National Education Giuseppe Bottai established the principles to regulate and encourage
the creation or introduction of works of art in public buildings; Republican Italy, in 1949,
would have relaunched these proposals with very different political and cultural purposes
but, nevertheless, similarly indebted to the direction indicated by Mazzoni’s work.