Giovanni Michelucci

The station behind you is the most modern structure in our Florentine collection and the only one whose author lived almost to our days. Giovanni Michelucci was born in 1891 and died in 1991. The station was commissioned in 1932. It was designed by a team of architects led by Michelucci, and it was built during the fascist years under Mussolini, who promised Italians buildings and cities no worse than those of ancient Rome. Herein lies the main peculiarity of this structure, which is worth keeping in mind as you look at it. Dictatorships usually love columns. But unlike Hitler, Mussolini was not wedded to neoclassicism, and Michelucci's rationalism was accepted by him. That is, a building without an architectural order, without arches, and without a single reference to ancient Rome appeared not in spite of the regime, but with its consent. Jonathan Glancey describes the result thus: the stone-clad interior relies on correct proportions, on the fall of light and shadow, and on direct utility-and by this wins the case for a style that was neither modern nor classical. Now for something not mentioned in the station's card. In those exact same years, from 1932 to 1935, Michelucci was among the architects who built the University City in Rome. The chief architect there was Marcello Piacentini-a man whose card we have on the Rome map, the chief master builder of the regime. That is, the same person in the exact same years was creating the station in Florence, which is considered a triumph of Italian rationalism, and working in Rome on a construction project that served as a showcase for the state. This is not an exposé, but an accurate sign of the era: in 1930s Italy, there was no clear boundary between "the architecture of the regime" and "good architecture under the regime," and the exact same people found themselves on both sides of this imaginary line. And then Michelucci lived for another forty-six years after the war-longer than the entire era in which he started. During this time, Florence managed to survive a flood, rebuild half the city, and grow so accustomed to its station that it stopped noticing it. It is worth noticing: this building has been working for ninety years and is still comfortable.