Quadreria
2029 Palazzi storici delle Poste Italiane
Texts by Giuseppe Strappa, Giorgio di Giorgio, Manuela Del Bufalo, Maria Grazia Flaccomio, Bruno Principe and Antonella Riccardi
1996 / 216 PAGES
This book catalogues and illustrates, for the first time, an immense artistic heritage hitherto ignored: the Italian post office buildings designed by great architects. They range from those built in the Umbertine era to the 1930s, and house numerous works by the greatest artists of the day.
While the communications that overlap and intersect in an increasingly complex structure of relationships represent the symbolic and functional node around which most of the changes in the European city revolved on the threshold of modernity, the post office structures built from the end of the 19th century to post-WWII are some of the most significant testimonials to the troubled shift towards becoming the contemporary metropolis. Hidden behind the grand and measuredly monumental facades of the post offices is the dynamism of the modern city, the incessant whirlwind of incoming and outgoing correspondence. The book explores the great modern post office buildings, which, in unprecedented forms, presented designers with the ancient problem of the relationship between innovation in the type of building and the permanence of the historical fabric.