Casa del Fascio

This guide to the Casa del Fascio in Como opens with the strange, unsettled death of its architect, Giuseppe Terragni, sent home from the war with six months to live and dying at thirty-nine of causes his own doctors never agreed on. It follows him back to the late nineteen twenties, a true believer barely thirty commissioned to give Mussolini's line about fascism being a house of glass a literal form in stone and steel and glass panels on the Piazza del Popolo. From there it tracks Terragni east through the Balkans and into the collapse outside Stalingrad, sketching the wreckage as his mind gave out. Look through the glass panels at the finance police officers now working behind them.