Sabaudia

In the early 1930s, Benito Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes, known as Agro Pontino, south of Rome. The Fascists accomplished what generations since antiquity had failed to achieve, and their reclamation of the land enabled the founding of five cities, including Sabaudia. Sabaudia was conceived as a model city intended to showcase Italy’s Rational Architecture, and it eventually solidified architecturally into a Fascist utopia wedged between Classicism and Modernism. Over the years, even left-wing intellectuals like Pier Paolo Pasolini came to admire Mussolini’s propagandistic structures, suggesting that this Fascist architecture did not violate Italy’s pristine landscape and people. Lotte Schreiber quotes Pasolini, who regularly stayed at a beach house with a view of Sabaudia: “There is nothing Fascist to be found in Sabaudia, aside from a few façades.” The filmmaker repeatedly tests the veracity of this statement as she attentively captures the faces of various Sabaudia residents who look directly into her camera, cinematically resembling still photographs.