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The Promontory

Emma Kaufmann LaDuc



Colle di Bastia with the Monumento a Michele Bianchi overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea.




Drive south between the rugged Calabrian mountains and the Tyrrhenian sea, so close you can see the clear water fold over smooth stones brought down by last season's torrent. There, on one of the many promontories—outcrops of darkened sandstone carved by centuries of river flows and breaking waves—, stands an austere white column above the remains of a Fascist. Behind the Mausoleo a Michele Bianchi is the village of Belmonte Calabro, the birthplace of the Fascist quadrumvir buried beneath the monument, one of the four party leaders that led Benito Mussolini's 1922 March on Rome. The iron cross above remains visible along the stretch of the road well until the next town.

        For many, it may have been surprising that such a high official came from such a remote village in South Italy, historically marginalised as it was. At the time of Italian unification, the uneven structural transformation between the northern states of Italy and the Mezzogiorno was significant: in 1861, about 75,500 kilometers of roads and 2,316 kilometers of railroads could be measured across the north; by contrast, in the former southern states, there were only 14,700 kilometers of roads and 184 kilometers of railroads, the latter only around Naples (Pescosolido, 2007). Still among the least developed regions to this day, Calabria is situated at the southernmost region of the mainland, a small peninsula off the bigger peninsula, the toe of that boot which is Italy. In its northern province of Cosenza, agricultural fields and settlements extend over the flat stretch of the coastal plain where, with almost perfect linearity, the road and railway run parallel to the shoreline.

        In the early decades of the last century, the Fascist regime pushed for significant territorial transformation through infrastructure, as with the construction of strada statale 18 “Tirrena Inferiore” (state road) and the electrification of the Ferrovia Tirrenica Meridionale (Salerno–Reggio Calabria railway). Further strade provinciali (provincial roads) allowed motorized vehicle access into the hinterlands. As scholar Massimo Moraglio (2017) argues, Fascist infrastructure did not just have a technical motive, but it had an aesthetic one too: roads and railways not only provided logistical networks from place to place, but were themselves places to visually exploit the Italian landscapes. Here, along the Tyrrhenian, infrastructures became spaces where the seascape could be consumed, greatly aestheticized to support Fascist propaganda.

        Beyond these corridors, much of the Calabrian territory was perceived as terra nullius, instrumentalised as spaces of undisputed national expansion but also political isolation. Between 1926 and 1943, the Fascist regime instated a legal system of confine (confinement), functioning as a de facto imprisonment (without trial or conviction) of political dissidents, i.e. partisans and anti-fascists, where the majority of around 10,000 political prisoners were sent to southern Italy. Islands were reserved for more “dangerous” political prisoners, whereas less “dangerous” prisoners were confined in small villages, with a great number sent to Calabria (Ebner, 2014).

        Contrasting this spatial rhetoric of Fascism, the village of Belmonte Calabro became an exceptional site of state symbolism and political presence in Calabria. When Michele Bianchi died of tuberculosis in 1930 while in office as Minister of Public Works, his burial in his hometown was marked with a massive monument—inspired by Trajan's Column—to become an event destination for the Fascist party in the immediate years following. The party secretariat commissioned the leading contemporary sculptor Ercole Drei, known for his monument to ​​Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome, for four high reliefs chiseled in travertine at its base, depicting four moments from the quadrumvir’s life.

        The construction of the column on the crest of the promontory, situated between the village and the sea, saw the demolition of the 16th-century Torre di Bastia on the same site—a coastal watchtower which had protected the settlement for centuries. Memory of the torre remains in the name of the hill (Colle di Bastia), and its architecture is depicted in the stemma (coat of arms) of Belmonte Calabro. With the new monument, in full and continuous sight from the new state road, the experience of the landscape was altered for the arrival of thousands of Fascist party members and supporters. In the historic center, streets of ancient silicate stone were repaved with slabs of serpentinite, where its local misnomer marmo verde (green marble) assumed opulence (the mausoleum’s sarcophagus to be of the same material).

        In propagandist footage archived by the Istituto Luce, crowds first are seen gathering in Belmonte on October 28, 1932—the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome—for the inauguration of the monument and translocation of Bianchi’s body (“L’inaugurazione del monumento al quadrumviro Michele Bianchi” or “La traslazione della salma del Quadrumviro Michele Bianchi alla cripta del suo glorioso riposo”); in 1933 for his third death anniversary (“Austeramente come egli visse Michele Bianchi è ricordato a Belmonte Calabro nel III anniversari”); on March 30, 1939 for the visit of Benito Mussolini along his tour of Calabria (“Il viaggio del duce in Calabria 30-31 marzo XVII”); and again in 1942 for the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome and his twelfth death anniversary, in the presence of the Secretary of the National Fascist Party, Roberto Farinacci (“La celebrazione del XII annuale della morte di Michele Bianchi, presente il Segretario del Partito”).

        Most notably, the short documentary of Mussolini’s travels in Calabria (“Il viaggio del duce in Calabria 30-31 marzo XVII”) opens with him disembarking the train at the Stazione di Belmonte Calabro, where lines of uniformed men greet him with the Roman salute. In a car, Mussolini is driven up the newly-paved strada provinciale, and upon his arrival to the Monumento Michele Bianchi surrounded by hordes of people, he climbs its wide steps lined with saluting uniformed men to the base of the column. There, close-ups of the monument are shown: the engraved epitaph “A MICHELE BIANCHI / IL P.N.F” (Partito Nazionale Fascista) above the crypt entrance, a carving of the quadrumvirs by Ercole Drei.

        Mussolini descends again, and to either side a young cypress plantation can be seen in an otherwise shrubby landscape. He departs amidst the enormous crowd of waving people, standing up in and saluting out of the open-hooded car, returning to the road (in an erroneously spliced chronology, as the footage shows the cars driving in the direction towards the village as opposed to the station). Finally, Mussolini arrives at the station to embark upon the train, the station’s lettering of “BELMONTE CALABRO” visible in the reflection of the window as the scene fades out.

        Found in written archives, Mussolini’s thoughts were already with Belmonte Calabro in 1932 as he called his camicia nera (“blackshirts”, as called after their uniforms, were a voluntary militia of the Kingdom of Italy under Fascist rule, originally a paramilitary organisation) to the inauguration of the monument in his speech:


“Camicie Nere di tutta Italia! Il primo decennio della Rivoluzione si conclude tra il commosso entusiasmo di tutto il popolo. Mentre le grandi opere pubbliche attesteranno nei secoli la nostra volontà costruttiva, la Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista è la documentazione sacra, suggestiva e solenne del vostro sacrificio. A Belmonte Calabro l’Italia Fascista onorerà la memoria purissima di Michele Bianchi, Quadrumviro e politico della Rivoluzione. Su la terra, sui mari, nei cieli sono ovunque i segni della nostra potenza e della nostra volontà.”

(“Blackshirts from all over Italy! The first decade of the Revolution comes to an end amid the moved enthusiasm of all the people. While the great public works will attest to our constructive will over the centuries, the Fascist Revolution Exhibition is the sacred, evocative and solemn record of your sacrifice. In Belmonte Calabro, Fascist Italy will honor the most pure memory of Michele Bianchi, Quadrumvir and politician of the Revolution. On the land, on the seas, in the skies are everywhere the signs of our power and will.”)


Revisiting the landscape and, in particular, the cypress plantation introduced alongside the construction of the monument, the promontory can be read as exceptional not only politico-symbolically, but also ecologically. The promontories nearby, reiterated along the coastline, exhibit a natural macchia landscape: low Mediterranean shrublands characterized by figs, capers, and the like. Over the centuries during which the watchtower stood, the Colle di Bastia likely had such an ecosystem—low-lying vegetation—before the introduction of the cypresses. Planted in a grid spread regularly over the irregular topography of the hill, the fastigiate trees bear some semblance to the monument in their form and symbolism. The monoculture is a type of stand with a single species of tree or plant, typically grown in a large-scale, uniform manner; it differs from a diverse and naturally occurring ecosystem which typically consists of a variety of tree species, understory vegetation, and associated wildlife, and lacks the resilience inherent in such systems. The design and implementation of a monoculture exemplifies the persistent logic of the Fascist state: understood through political scientist James C. Scott (1996) as a state simplification, the monoculture can be read as an administrative effort to simplify and standardize complex social and natural phenomena, in order to make them easier to control and manipulate.

        After the fall of Fascism, the post-war government scheme, the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, saw to the planting of a pine monoculture surrounding the cypress monoculture, fifty years after the initial afforestation. The Cassa funding, addressing the persistent underdevelopment of southern Italy, intended to stimulate economic growth through work on infrastructure, including afforestation, often claimed to be a measure for mitigating erosion. Yet it remains unclear as to why this site around the monument was chosen, as one of the only coastal hills to undergo such afforestation measures under the Cassa. But as with the cypresses under the Fascists, the post-war state executed a perfectly legible forest planted with same age, single species, uniform trees growing in straight lines in a rectangular flat space cleared of all underbrush (Scott, 1996). In the decades since, the pines have propagated across the northern slopes of the hill to colonize the valleys and adjacent territories.

        Despite the repetitive species and regular pattern of the trees, the plantation as it stands is often mistakenly read as a natural forest. With the fast growth and propagation of the pines, its reading is anachronistic at best, and natural at worst. For its species uniformity, the irregular conditions of soil, slope and exposition have led to the trees growing at an uneven rate, with many fallen or missing from the grid completely. To the south, forest fires have damaged some larger patches. The monument, on the other hand, is maintained off the record: where capers and other climbing plants emerge from the holes of the travertine cladding, they are continually removed through informal preservation practices. The resting place of the Fascist continues to be a site of pilgrimage for some. For most, however, the monument assumes the role of a depoliticized aesthetic object in the landscape, hiding in plain sight above the coastline as residents and visitors alike drive on by.



Emma Kaufmann LaDuc (US/AT) is an architect and landscape architect based in Zurich. She currently works as researcher at the Chair of Affective Architectures, ETH Zurich, and is founder of studio PASS, a Zurich-based landscape practice thinking through resilient systems and acting through collaborative interventions. She is a LINA fellow, with recent contributions to the Trienal de Lisboa (in collaboration with Alfonse Chiu) and the Venice Biennale (in collaboration with Orizzontale and La Rivoluzione delle Seppie).