Le grafie e le visioni in Oltremare di Umberto Di Segni

Between the end of 1993 and the beginning of 1994, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna held an extraordinary exhibition on Italian architecture in the overseas territories, accompanied by a catalogue which, through period drawings and photos, gave an insight into a very interesting moment in the history of Italian architecture. The “Quarta Sponda”, at that time thought of as the nineteenth region of the Homeland, was to be a true extension of Italy that would be inhabited, according to a well-defined colonisation programme, by one hundred thousand colonists.The role of architecture was central to the process of founding new agglomerations and representative buildings envisaged by the Fascist regime. Among the many architects who worked within this colonisation process, Umberto Di Segni assumed a significant role, even if his contribution has not been sufficiently explored. The archive research and the redesign have made it possible to reconstruct some of the design events of Overseas Architecture and, above all, to restore a piece of the history of colonial architecture through the visions and ideas of a militant architect.