The Fascist regime was preoccupied, not with reality, but with an imagined future dictated by il Duce and unfettered by the inconvenience of worldly matters. Tirrenia was reclaimed from the coastal wilderness, north of Livorno and a new town of colonie established on Mussolini's orders, with roads and tramways, medical facilities, laundries and the administrative structure to service them.
In 2000 the disparate owners of this vast tract of coastal real estate came together and set up a development company to regenerate this Futurist linear city which lay in ruins. A masterplan was drawn up by architect Beniamino Cristofani of Pisa.
In 2000 the disparate owners of this vast tract of coastal real estate came together and set up a development company to regenerate this futurist linear city in ruins Pisa architect Beniamino Cristofani has been masterplanning the redevelopment. The abandoned colonie are being converted into holiday apartments. A huge open-air cinema is hidden beneath the undergrowth, and nearby are the film studios established by Mussolini's friend Giovacchino Forzano in nearby Pisorno. It was here that Sophia Loren later lived in a Fascist-era modernist villa, and where spaghetti westerns were filmed. By the 1970s the Forzano studios had been abandoned, and in the 1980s the architect Aldo Rossi proposed the site's redevelopment as a holiday complex. His architectural approach drew on the compositional techniques of the Futurists, but gone were the engine symbols and the towering fasces; Rossi's historicising architectural language of domes towers and arches was entirely different. In the end though, only the golf club that Rossi designed for Pisorno was realised.