Cesare Bazzani
(b Rome, 5 March 1873; d Rome, 30 March 1939).
Italian architect. His father, Luigi Bazzani, was a painter and
stage designer. Bazzani graduated in civil engineering from the
university in Rome in 1896. In 1899 he won the competition for the
international art scholarship with a plan for a cathedral in an
Italian Gothic Revival style. His first significant building was the
Alterocca printing company building (1907) at Terni, in Stile
Liberty. He was joint winner with Raimondo D’Aronco and Ernesto
Pivovano of the architectural prize at the Esposizione de Sempione,
Milan (1906). A number of important competition-winning schemes
followed. In 1905 Bazzani won the competition for the façade of S
Lorenzo (unexecuted) in Florence, which stood him in good stead for
his entry for the Biblioteca Nazionale (won 1907; completed 1935) at
Santa Croce. An eclectic Renaissance building, its structure picked
out in grey against white, it already suggests a putative
monumentalism and sits awkwardly in its Florentine context. In 1908
he won the commission for the Palazzo delle Belle Arti (opened in
1911; now Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna), Rome, with a scheme
whose horizontality is reminiscent of Pio Piacentini and has a hint
of neo-Hellenism, perhaps inspired by Giuseppe Sacconi’s monument to
Victor Emanuel II (also completed in 1911). Having by this time
espoused academic momumentalism, in the Ministero della Pubblica
Istruzione (1913–28), Rome, Bazzani restates in heavy Baroque the
grim prospect of Guglielmo Calderini’s Palazzo di Giustizia, which
inspired it. In the 1920s and 1930s he was in demand for public and
private buildings, his style, favoured by Fascism, moving towards
the simplified classicism of the Novecento. During this period his
work ranged through government buildings of many kinds, for example
offices in Foggia (1929) and Terni (1930–35), barracks (1932–5) in
Bari, the Stazione Marittima (1934–6) at Naples and post offices, as
well as churches and commercial buildings. He was made a member of
the Accademia d’Italia in 1929.
