Il Palazzo delle Poste di Augusta di Francesco Fichera

In the first half of the 20th century, after the catastrophes of the First World War, there was an intensification of building activity throughout Europe. In Italy, during the Fascist period, Architecture was loaded with rhetorical significance. The formation of a national identity was the key role reserved for Architecture. It had to produce processes of self-recognition in the Italian population, or, as Nicoloso states, to ‘satisfy the people's need to believe they had roots on which to erect their identity scaffolding’. Many architects, attracted by the promises of the regime's propaganda, tried their hand at a personal search for a language capable of communicating the new architecture, sharing a common starting point: the architecture of the past. In this essay, an attempt is made to analyse the Post Office project realised by Francesco Fichera for the city of Augusta, placing it in a broader context involving other projects by the same author on the same theme.