Difficult Heritage. Mapping Rome’s 1930s Colonial Corridor and Its Afterlives.

[Summer School | 30.08.2026 – 05.09.2026 at Istituto Svizzero (Rome, Italy) | A collaboration between ETH Zurich and Sapienza Università di Roma] | 1. OVERVIEW | Rome is often encountered through a canonical image: a dense heritage landscape, a layered urban palimpsest, and – under the pressure of mass tourism – a city whose historical fabric is continuously consumed. What often remains less legible are the logics through which Rome was organised as a political urban project: displacement and resettlement, land reclamation, and regimes of historical legitimation modelling its territory. This summer school takes one such logic as its object. In the mid-1930s, fascist rule mobilised an intensive urban plan aimed at binding the capital to a Mediterranean and imperial horizon, both materially