Purple Magazine
— S/S 2007 issue 7
Foro Italico
photography by JUERGEN TELLER
text by OLIVIER ZAHM
Special thanks to Emanuele Mascioni
FORO ITALICO : ROMA (Never Forget) Mussolini’s sports coliseum, designed by Enrico Del Debbio circa 1932, seen here in snippets 75 years later, in its partially abandoned state. Crumbling modernist mosaics echo Rome’s gladiatorial past. Michelangelesque marble sports heroes, hips cocked, embody the ideology of tyranny. Lurid contemporary graffiti conflates every age’s criminal expressionism. And every time an Italian footballer raises his arm in a fascist salute we can think back to Il Duce’s ill-fated dream of the future while witnessing here and now how heroic nationalism lives on in style and tragedy. Is it right to abandon this historic place to vandalism and natural decay, thereby simultaneously negating its beauty and its horror? It’s easier to forget it as shameful evidence of the past, than to face and really fight European fascism metastasizing in sports today.
