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NewsItaly • 2011-07-25

Select the country and object's type Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the foundation of Torviscosa – Part nine: famous authors in Friuli Venezia Giulia

In the 1930s in Italy many new cities were born, founded to accommodate the farmers who went to work the lands reclaimed in those years. They are called “foundation towns” and today they are considered town-planning gems of the Italian twentieth-century and in some cases masterpieces of rationalist architecture. In the Bassa Friulana area, too, there is one of these towns, which has an essential peculiarity: it features the synthesis of the Fascist economic model of autarky. Unlike the other towns, mainly agricultural, this was built around and by initiative of a big industry, SNIA, which at the time processed artificial fibres to produce a fabric called “viscosa” (viscose). The term “viscosa” became part of the name of the industry, SNIA Viscosa, and of the name of the town, which from Torre di Zuino became Torviscosa. For its production SNIA needed lands for the plants from which to draw the raw materials, factories where to process them and stables for producing manure. As a whole, the production cycle realized the model of economic self-sufficiency theorized by the Fascist ideology and Torviscosa was its town-planning concretization. The town still preserves its original structure, in which the factory was located at the town’s entrance and then, with functional rigour, around a “metaphysical” square in De Chirico’s style, all the other areas necessary for life and work: distinct residential areas for labourers, “white collar workers” and managers, the areas for sports and recreational activities, the green areas, the schools, the canteens, the theatre. All around, the countryside is outlined by long and straight reclamation canals, interrupted here and there by the large houses that accommodated the farm labourers.

With a view to the inauguration of the new town, in 1938 SNIA Viscosa contacted Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the father of futurism, the poet charmed by technological and industrial novelties, the author of the literary manifesto “La poesia dei tecnicismi”. Who better than him, in fact, could celebrate with a poem the foundation of a new industrial town? Marinetti visited the town that was being built and the surrounding countryside and wrote the “Poema di Torre Viscosa”, a hymn to the triumph of technology over nature, of machines over plants, of the “Geometry goddess” (the new town) over the cane thickets of the lagoon. This work has undoubted literary and historical value owing to its ideological support to the regime and to its symbols and owing to the use of art to express and spread this support, with modes that anticipate those of today’s mass media.

……

Divorare continuo di canneti della nascente città di Torre Viscosa o dea Geometria

Bisolfito di calcio

Piscine d'operai bambini d'operai campi di calcio e bocce

Viali Vittorio Veneto e Arnaldo Mussolini

Teatri e refettori per migliaia d'operai

Alto bosco di platani ed ippocastani per un popolo di biciclette

In alto viaggiare viaggiare senza fine la nuova costellazione le cui stelle formano la parola AUTARCHIA

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