An aeroplane approaching Pisa airport passes at about 1000 feet over Tirrenia. If you look down, you get a fleeting glimpse of the beach and, here and there, derelict buildings amongst the encroachment of holiday chalets and swimming pools that now form a continuous ribbon along the once deserted Tuscan coast.
Seen from above these buildings were designed to resemble giant aeroplanes, boats or huge machine parts; futurist symbols of aspiration towards modernity. But this isn't obvious today to the casual observer; instead there are collapsed roofs lost amongst the forest of umbrella pines. That Tirrenia was a proud achievement of the Fascist regime isn't apparent to the uninitiated.
The repainted orange walls of one half of the symmetrical Colonia Rosa Maltoni-Mussolini (1925-35) stand out. This is the architectural masterpiece of the futurist Angiolo Mazzoni, who became well known as the chief engineer of the Ferrovie dello Stato (Italian State Railways). In what was then remote from the dusty and often deprived conditions of the city, the sand, the modern architecture, the pines, and the mountains of Tuscany in the far distance would have seemed to the children who came here a vivid evocation of the new Italy the regime was creating. Today, the coastal strip is shorn of this meaning; in their own way the Emilia Romagna and Tuscan coasts are as suburban as Surbiton. The painted half of the Colonia has recently been converted to holiday apartments. The orange colour is a recreation of the building's original appearance; on the unpainted half, faded patches of the original paint are here and there apparent.
Amazingly, some of the furniture designed by Mazzoni is still in the unpainted part of the building. A label sewn into the underside of the upholstery of an armchair read Partito Nazionale Fascista, Firenze. The design of the furniture was reminiscent of the work of the Viennese secessionist Joseph Hoffman; a reminder perhaps of the cultural eclecticism of the early twentieth century in architecture and politics alike.