• 1 The term is borrowed from Carla De Tona, “The Conspicuous Visibility of Italianness and the Invisi (...)
• 2 Ron Theodore Robin, Enclaves of America: The Rhetoric of American Political Architecture Abroad, 1 (...)
• 3 Mariapia Fanfani, Ambasciate italiane nel mondo, Milan: Unedi; Silvana, 1969‒1989, 8 vols. Compile (...)
• 4 Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti and Stefano Zagnoni (eds.), Architettura italiana d’olt (...)
• 5 Girolamo Nisio (ed.), L’Ambasciata d'Italia a Vienna, Rome: De Luca, 1987; Pasquale Baldocci, La R (...)

1As both symbols of the State and places devoted to the representation of sovereignty, embassies are an aspect of the “conspicuous visibility” of Italians abroad that still deserves some critical attention.1 In fact, a cursory overview of the recent historiography on this subject shows the episodic nature of the literature on Italian embassies compared to those of other Western countries.2 Apart from the extensive visual survey provided by the eight volumes published between 1969 and 1989 by Mariapia Fanfani,3 we still lack a comprehensive historical account of the architecture of Italian diplomacy outside the peninsula. Instead, the architectural history of Italian embassies, consulates, Case d’Italia, and Italian Institutes of Culture is often addressed from lateral perspectives, either as the built environment of diplomacy, whose history is narrated by its very protagonists, or as a chapter in the history of the Italian architects, engineers, and builders active outside their homeland.4 The majority of the literature published on the subject includes in fact a number of photographic surveys accompanied by short texts, issued in a limited number of copies. The authors of these surveys are neither professional architectural historians, nor political historians, but diplomats, who gained their knowledge of the matter from personal experience, while posted to the host country. This is the case of the brochures written by Antonio Zanardi Landi on Belgrade, Massimo Spinetti on Vienna, Ferdinando Salleo on Villa Berg in Moscow, Stefano Ronca on Buenos Aires, Pasquale Baldocci on Dar es Salaam, Gaetano Cortese on Brussels, Tadeusz Jaroszewski and Luca Daniele Biolato on the Szlenkier palace in Warsaw, Gianpaolo Cantini on Villa Hesperia in Algiers, Gaetano Cortese on Piero Sartogo’s recent proposal for the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C., and Silvio Fagiolo on Berlin.5

• 6 Wolfgang Schäche and Maria Selene Sconci (eds.), Un palazzo italiano in Germania. L’ambasciata a B (...)
• 7 Sergio Poretti and Tulia Iori, L’ambasciata d’Italia a Brasilia, Milan: Electa, 2007 (Architetti e (...)

2Certain twentieth-century embassies, like the ones in Berlin (reopened in 1991 after restoration on the design by Vittorio De Feo),6 Canberra (by Enrico Taglietti, in 1967), and Brasilia (by Pier Luigi Nervi, 1973‒1977),7 or the more recent buildings in Washington, D.C. by Piero Sartogo (1996‒2000), have attracted the attention of the architectural historians thanks to the quality of their design or the notoriety of their designers. However, less attention has been devoted to the far more numerous cases of already existing buildings subsequently converted into embassies or consulates. In fact, these repurposed buildings account for the vast majority of the sites of Italian diplomacy abroad.

• 8 Jane C. Loeffler, “The Architecture of Diplomacy: Heyday of the United States Embassy-Building Pro (...)
• 9 On Palazzo Venezia see Tommaso Bertelè, Il Palazzo degli ambasciatori di Venezia a Costantinopoli (...)
• 10 On the summer embassies of Istanbul, see Paolo Girardelli, “Power or leisure? Remarks on the archi (...)

3Unlike other Western states, in the post-war years the Italian government did not promote a systematic embassy building program comparable to the one carried on by the US government, for example. The US embassy building program peaked at the beginning of the Cold War.8 This is particularly true if we focus on countries outside Europe: here, already since the nineteenth century the Italian institutional sites are predominantly consulates and legations. Only in few exceptional cases were they embassies. Consulates were mainly housed in suites located in pre-existing buildings, often patrician dwellings that were leased or purchased by the Italian State. The sites of the present Italian embassies, by contrast, belong to the legacy of Savoy-monarchy foreign policy (1861‒1946): the Italian embassy in Mexico City is one example. Some embassies date back even earlier, to the Venetian Republic. For example, since before 1550, the Palazzo Venezia had been the Venetian embassy in Istanbul; it later became the property of the Habsburgs. The Palazzo was returned to Italy after World War I, and ceased to be an embassy with the transfer of the capital to Ankara.9 While the documentation regarding the years prior to the Italian unification is sparse, since 1861 the Italian foreign policy is mainly focused on the European countries (Greece, the Balkans, France, and Austria), South America, and Japan. In Istanbul, before the Palazzo Venezia was restored, the Italian minister or ambassador resided in the building now used as Italian Institute of Culture in the Tepebaşı District of Beyoğlu. The ambassador’s summer residence in Tarabya on the spectacular shores of the Bosphorus10 was also Italian state property. It was re-built in 1906 to the design of Raimondo D’Aronco, an architect whose prolific work in Turkey has already been the subject of a number of studies.

• 11 Outside the scope of this survey are the buildings constructed for the governors in the Italian co (...)

4When dealing with diplomatic architecture of recent periods, a distinction should be made between the “embassy,” the ambassador’s residence, and the “chancery,” the embassy office building and staff workplace. Although the residence is a separate structure from the chancery it is often integrated and designed in conjunction with it.11 While embassies are usually in capital cities and handle all foreign-affairs business, including military, economic, and scientific matters, consulates, usually emanating from embassies, are opened in smaller urban centers and handle minor international paperwork, commercial and administrative rather than political.

• 12 Stefano Pretelli, “Il fascismo e l’immagine dell’Italia all’estero,” Contemporanea, vol. 11, no. 2 (...)
• 13 See in this issue of ABE Journal, Cristina Pallini and Armando Scaramuzzi “Paolo Caccia Dominioni’ (...)
• 14 Among Di Fausto’s works are the Italian legations in Belgrade (1924‒1926) and Cairo (1928‒1930), t (...)

5Italian unification was a turning point in the way national governments shaped their foreign policy, in part by means of architectural projects abroad. However, it was especially after World War I and later, during the fascist regime, that national propaganda was materialized spatially through the promotion of new embassy construction.12 One of the most remarkable examples in this respect is the Italian embassy in Ankara (1938‒1940) designed by the engineer Paolo Caccia Dominioni.13 These interwar years were also the period when  the embassy in Cairo, by Florestano Di Fausto (1929) was constructed. Di Fausto designed many other Italian government buildings.14

• 15 URL: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kabul-iii-history. Accessed August 2017.

8As part of his dream of modernization, Amanullah also launched a monumental program to build a new capital, in the Čārdeh plain southwest of Kabul. To be named Dār al-Amān for Amanullah, the project was designed by German architects and the French architect and archeologist André Godard, with German engineers in charge of construction. Regulations recommended abandoning mud constructions, and encouraged European architecture with detached houses visible from the street.15

• 16 Luciano Monzali, Un re afghano in esilio a Roma. Amanullah e l’Afghanistan nella politica estera i (...)

9Meanwhile, Italy’s presence in the still highly strategic area of Central Asia had become a constant in the years following the Great War. The region was still fluctuating, destabilized by the end of the Ottoman Empire, the persistence of controversial relations between the winners of the war, and the hegemony exercised by the two major world powers, Russia and the British Empire. In 1929, when Amanullah Khan was forced to abdicate after the civil war, he chose a home in the Prati district of Rome (at via Orazio 14-18, the present site of the Nigerian Embassy). Together with his numerous family and servants, he established it as his residence-in-exile.16

• 17 Andrea Vento, In silenzio gioite e soffrite. Storia dei servizi segreti italiani dal Risorgimento (...)
• 18 Fabio Grassi Orsini, “La diplomazia italiana dagli ‘anni del consenso’ al crollo del regime,” Anna (...)
• 19 On the Turkish nation-building process following the proclamation of the Turkish Republic see Sibe (...)
• 20 In this regard, the telegram dated 1 March 1930, from the Italian official in Ankara, Ottaviano Ar (...)

10During the Fascist regime, the successful campaigns led by Italo Balbo and the military equipment displayed by the Italian army during the wars of Ethiopia and Spain continued to fuel the political and military aspirations of the Afghan sovereigns. However, diplomatic relations between Rome and Kabul were rocky at times, despite the fact that Italy had been the first Western country to recognize Afghan independence.17 The reasons for this must be sought, on the one hand, in the new course Benito Mussolini gave to foreign policy at the very start of his rise to power in the Autumn of 1922,18 and, on the other hand, in Amanullah’s acceleration of his country’s modernization. The Anglophile orientation that had characterized fascist foreign policy in Africa and Asia Minor since Mussolini’s debut as Minister of Foreign Affairs was in conflict with the radical reforms introduced by Amanullah. These reforms were in fact inspired by the cultural revolution led since 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in nearby Turkey, to which London was firmly opposed. In both Afghanistan and Turkey, characterized by majority-Muslim populations, the processes of modernization and nation building implied the westernization of customs and politics. Consequently, the political and intellectual elites in both countries placed a high priority on architecture and urbanism, which served as both visible symbols and effective instruments of their modernizing agendas.19 Moreover, since Amanullah’s rise to the throne, Turkish-Afghan relations had been further strengthened by the signature of a mutual agreement in Moscow in 1921, and later by the “Afghan-Turkish Agreement of Perennial Friendship” signed in Ankara on 25 May 1928. Amanullah’s visit to Turkey in 1930 did not come as a surprise, then, as it only reconfirmed the strategic role played by Afghanistan on the international diplomatic scene.20

• 21 The Italian delegation in Kabul re-opened on 21 March 1931. Two reference works on Italo-Afghan di (...)

11Following Amanullah’s exile, in 1929, the Italian delegation in Kabul was closed, and Gino Cecchi, the outgoing Italian plenipotentiary, was not replaced. Although the new king, Nadir, had on several occasions asked Italy to reopen the embassy, Mussolini did not consent until 1931. He appointed the Minister Vincenzo Galanti, whose extensive experience in Asia, acquired while posted in Shanghai, was well known.21 The plans to renovate and add to the first Italian delegation, established in 1922, probably date back to this period, as we shall later see.

• 22 URL: http://www.affarinternazionali.it/articolo.asp?ID=2564#sthash.YMQ0786O.dpuf. Accessed Novembe (...)
• 23 URL: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kabul-iv-urban-politics-since-zaher-shah. Accessed Augu (...)

12The four-decade reign of Mohammed Zahir Shah, from 1933 to 1973, was an era of political and social peace.22 During this period, the first master plan (1964) marked an important attempt to reorganize Kabul’s spatial structure. In 1971, the first revision to this plan was approved, in order to do justice to unanticipated and rapid growth. Its provisions included increasing residential density through large-scale construction of housing units. However, this vision of urban life in Kabul was at odds with local preferences for secluded private spaces, allowing for a separation between the public arena and the private, personal sphere of the family. The housing program could be considered as one of the catalysts for the rising political tensions within the capital city. In 1975 alone, no less than 6 000 applications were filed with the municipality for individual property, an eloquent expression of the implied public criticism of the new plan.23

• 24 URL: http://www.outlookindia.com/printarticle.aspx?213340. Accessed March 2014.

13Like his predecessor Amanullah, Mohammed Zahir Shah chose Rome for his residence-in-exile. He lived in the suburb of Olgiata after being ousted by a coup in 1973. In 2002, following the defeat of the Taliban, he returned to his homeland.24

• 25 These pictures, which are part of Andrea Bruno’s professional archive in Turin, have to be compare (...)

15Nevertheless, from a series of pictures dating back to the 1950s, it is possible to reconstruct the hypothetical image of a two-story, split-level building resting on a stone plinth and covered with a flat roof.25 The complex composition of volumes suggests a series of different construction phases, additions and modifications to the original project. The search for an effect of formal variety, meant to overcome the rigidity of the L-shaped main wing and the absence of any form of ornamentation on the façades, seems to emerge as the feature characterizing the project. This is especially visible on some of the projecting volumes and in the studied rhythm of the window spacing, but above all, in the semi-circular colonnade supporting the terrace and facing the garden.

• 26 On the work of Bruno see: Mario Mastropietro (ed.), Oltre il restauro. Architettura tra conservazi (...)
• 27 The idea of creating an institute to handle Italy’s cultural - and also economic - relations with (...)
• 28 Bruno’s vast fieldwork in Afghanistan includes the Mausoleum of Abdur-Razaq at Ghaznì (1961‒1965), (...)
• 29 Although no relevant documentation regarding the commission for the new embassy is to be found in (...)

16Andrea Bruno, born in Turin in 1931,26 obtained his degree in architecture from the Turin Polytechnic in the summer of 1956. For him, the commission to design the Italian embassy buildings in Kabul was only one aspect of an intense and long-lasting career in Afghanistan. Since 1961, in view of the listing and preservation of the Afghan architectural heritage, Bruno had been the architect in charge of vast campaigns of archeological and architectural inventory and restoration, jointly commissioned by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Afghan Government, unesco, and ismeo (Istituto per gli Studi sul Medio e l’Estremo Oriente),27 the agency founded in 1933 and directed by the archeologist Giuseppe Tucci.28 The project to design a new embassy came only at the beginning of the 1970s. In fact, a proposal to rehabilitate the existing building (fig. 2) had been put forward by Bruno a decade earlier, when Folco Trabalza was the Italian plenipotentiary in Kabul. However, after the disastrous earthquake of 1965, the idea of restoration was definitively abandoned. Two technical surveys carried out by experts had made it clear that no rehabilitation effort could guarantee the building’s structural stability. Thus, what remained of the old building was demolished and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched a restricted architectural competition for the design of a new diplomatic quarters.29

• 30 Stefano Bajetti, “Ambasciate d’Italia. Afghanistan: residenza e cancelleria a Kabul,” L’Industria (...)
• 31 Cf. the company’s historic archive online at http://holzmann.fh-potsdam.de. Accessed on 20 Novembe (...)

20The decision to build a new reinforced concrete structure required a Western contractor able to deal with the challenges posed by local construction methods and an unskilled labor force. The candidate also had to be familiar with construction practices in a geographical and climatic environment almost completely new to the application of modern building techniques.30 Although at the date of this commission, the Frankfurt-based contractor Philipp Holzmann AG had not yet been involved in the management of large building sites on Afghan territory, it had been active in infrastructural works and office buildings for public institutions since 1911 in countries such as Turkey and Persia, friendly with Afghanistan. Between 1911 and 1918, Holzmann had been one of the most prominent companies engaged in the construction of the new Baghdad Railway (Bagdadbahn in German) connecting Berlin to Bagdad (via Istanbul). In 1924, it was involved in Suez Canal harbor construction; from 1929 to 1931, it was in charge of completing a number of railway stations and bridges in Iran; in 1934, it was building roads near Pillau (Russia); it returned to Iran in 1935‒1936 for the construction of a railway terminal in Tehran, and again in 1938‒1940 to pour the concrete structure for Tehran University.31 For Holzmann, the commission in Kabul not only represented an expansion of its possible markets on a wider international scale, but also offered a privileged position for training the local labor force in new building techniques imported from Europe (fig. 3). The training service was frequently requested by countries outside Europe when signing economic agreements with the Western powers.

• 32 From the author’s interview with Andrea Bruno, Turin, via Asti 17, February 2014.

21For the architect Andrea Bruno, the Kabul building site presented a double challenge: first of all the project offered the opportunity to introduce an updated architectural culture in a territory that was still characterized by the permanence of archaic building techniques and practices.32

• 33 The topic has been explored by Bruno in Andrea Bruno, “Caseforti in Afghanistan,” Castellum, no. 1 (...)

22Instead, while addressing the demands typical of an embassy project, particularly in a context characterized by precarious security conditions, like the Afghan one, he drew upon the “qal‛a,” a toponym commonly used in many Arab countries to signify “stronghold,” “fort,” “fortress,” or “citadel.” This was a reference to the traditional structures typical of the local built environment.33

• 34 URL: http://razistan.tumblr.com/post/22030991718/in-the-wazir-akbar-khan-enclave-impoverished. Acc (...)
• 35 Now DLR Group. URL: http://www.dlrgroup.com/work/us-embassy-afghanistan/. Accessed 12 January 2018

23The headquarters of the Italian delegation in Kabul are located in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, named after the Afghan prince and emir active in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839‒1842.34 This is a wealthy enclave of Kabul, built on a grid urban structure hosting other relevant national and international institutional buildings. For example, Afghanistan’s national government institutions, including the Presidential Palace, the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force, the German-Afghan Amani High School, and the reconstructed fifteen-building US embassy campus, designed by the American architectural firm Sorg Associates,35 are all located in this district. The Italian embassy’s structures are built on a rectangular lot measuring 9,000 square meters (70.7 m x 128.8 m), adjacent to a central artery of the city, the Great Massoud Road, connecting downtown Kabul to the Khwaja Rawash airport. In addition to a series of service structures, the entrance porter’s lodge, a security unit, and a parking garage, the new project encompassed the design of three main buildings: the residence, the chancery and the chapel.

• 36 Stefano Bajetti, “Ambasciate d’Italia. Afghanistan: residenza e cancelleria a Kabul,” op. cit. (no (...)

24All three buildings are structures built in reinforced and fair-faced concrete: their volumes are located on the periphery of the plot, leaving the central area for a newly designed garden (fig. 5). The choice of reinforced concrete was primarily dictated by the need to ensure seismic safety in an area characterized by a high earthquake hazard. The buildings of the Italian embassy in Kabul are outstanding in that they are the first Afghan buildings with a supporting structure in reinforced concrete constructed according to international seismic codes.36

• 37 See in particular Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato, Chandigarh and Casablanca. A report on mo (...)

30Some recent essays in architectural historiography have shown how urbanism and architecture have both played a crucial part in the modernization strategies of recently decolonized non-Western countries. At the same time, the historians pointed out that these programs were not imposed as monumental, authoritarian plans. Instead, they were often the results of a negotiated consensus between local elites and an international class of design professionals. Studies on Chandigarh and Casablanca, for instance, have shown how the construction and physical transformation of these two urban realities implied a continuous dialogue between issues of modernization and the need to incorporate features of local history and tradition into the new urban and architectural schemes. In this respect, neither Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in India nor Michel Écochard in Morocco ever regarded the architect’s terrain as a “tabula rasa.”37 The question of architectural expression becomes a fertile field for experimentation in projects where an imported culture (modern architecture and urbanism) confronts the specificity of the local history and culture.

• 38 Tobia Sette Fanti, “Aula consiliare del Municipio di Rivoli,” L’Industria delle costruzioni, vol.  (...)

31The language of textured concrete was frequently explored and exploited by Bruno in a number of almost coeval commissions. Besides the embassy in Kabul, four other executed projects provide examples of this form of architectural expression: an office building and a City Council Hall (1973‒1975), both in Rivoli near Turin; a gymnasium in Vignale Monferrato; an artist’s residence and studio (fig. 11a) in the foothills around Turin (1976, with Biagio Garzena); and the Italian Institute for Archeology and Restoration in Baghdad. Although they vary, these examples all share an exquisitely crafted treatment of the concrete surface (fig. 12).38

• 39 See the testimony of the architect Leonardo Mosso in Leonardo Mosso, “Maggio 1961: a Torino con Le (...)

32The undeniable fascination exercised on Bruno by such modernist works as Le Corbusier’s béton brut post-war projects, though evident even in the embassy project, should be considered within the broader context of his generation and their background. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier visited Turin in the spring of 1961,39 when Bruno was an emerging professional. Perhaps the visit strengthened his admiration for the already aged master. However, Bruno makes no explicit direct references to Le Corbusier in all that he has written and said about his own practice. Moreover, the sophisticated treatment of the concrete surfaces in the ambassador’s residence, as well as in Bruno’s other contemporary works, is hardly reducible to the cliché of the béton brut formula. Although the exposed concrete shows the imprint of the formwork, it does not appear rough or unfinished. While only partly distancing himself from the idea of structural sincerity that informed the works of the early twentieth-century pioneers of exposed reinforced concrete construction (through a language that intentionally addresses the senses and promises to be immediately comprehensible to the viewer), Bruno seems to express the need to re-establish a communicative ground for architecture in the late twentieth century. The architect winks at the average observer through a syntax that is not only committed to direct, immediate understanding, but is also playful and entertaining. His concrete surfaces are enlivened by bright colors, bas reliefs (fig. 11b) (the so-called “logogriphs” designed by the sculptor Ezio Gribaudo), and autobiographical (and ironical) allusions to the craft of the architect (fig. 13a, 13b). Thus, a restrained, subdued reflection of traditional Afghan building practices appears, almost unnoticeably, on the concrete surface of the entrance canopy soffit in the ambassador’s residence: the special surface finish is provided by the delicate pattern of a woven straw mat. This element, a common feature of local earth constructions, was positioned at the bottom of the timber formworks before the concrete was poured, thereby leaving a faint mark on the ceiling’s intrados.