By car and on foot, we searched the coastal strip from Rimini to Ravenna looking for abandoned colonie. The Italian seaside is simultaneously classy and crass, kitsch and couture. Whereas English seaside is all cheaply cheerful, fish and chips and candy floss, Italian seaside is well-heeled, neat and clean, but with Gucci gilt vulgarity. The Italians' love affair with the beach happened after 1945, the beaches having been made accessible by the regime's draining of the coastal marshes and building of the road infrastructure to serve the colonie.
Colonia Novarese (1934) was designed by Giuseppe Peverelli and built in the staggeringly short time of just 126 days. Peverelli was an engineer influential in the Fascist hierarchy, and became Minister of Communications in 1943. He was arrested and put on trial in 1945, but acquitted. An unrepentant Fascist, he subsequently emigrated to Argentina.
The functions of the Colonia Novarese were combined in a single structure like a miniature version of the Lingotto Fiat factory in Turin, but with the addition of strip windows. The tower, the principal feature of the front of the building, was entirely clad in glass and modeled as a gigantic illuminated fascio. The structure was coldly functional, intended as a demonstration of the resolution of the Fascist will. The building's streamlined silhouette lent it more than a passing resemblance to a warship; sufficiently so to encourage strafing attacks by Allied aircraft during the Second World War.
In dereliction, Colonia Novarese has become a focus for delinquent activity. The core of the building is burnt out. In the darkened void at its heart stands an empty plinth, inscribed Duce, which once carried Mussolini's statue. Now it is a focus for nihilistic neo-fascist graffiti.