Fascist Health Policies and Propaganda, from Tuberculosis to Holiday Camps (1928–1937)

The 1928 International Exhibition for the Fight against Tuberculosis, held in Rome in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale, and the 1937 Exhibition of Summer Camps and Childcare, also in Rome but in the Circus Maximus area, constitute two important chronological milestones of a research that connects architects and engineers on the theme of architecture for holiday camps for children. They are two stages of a ten-year journey that from an original purely sanitary-assistance purpose acquired that of nationalistic-ideological formation in which the Fascist regime transformed the buildings intended for tuberculosis treatment into actual gyms for the physical and spiritual training of young Italians, which can be considered as formidable propaganda machines. During the 1928 exhibition the role of the holiday camps for both the recovery and prevention of children from tuberculosis began to emerge and the commitment of the Roman engineer-architect Cesare Valle, who had been tackling the problem of the hospitalization of TBC patients in Rome since the 1920s, was underlined by the exhibition's wide resonance in newspapers and journals. Less than a decade later, in the exhibition dedicated to holiday camps, the technical-sanitary solutions had already taken on a supporting role, and in the designs of the citadel and the pavilions of the institutions for the care and education of children by various protagonists of the Italian architectural scene, it was above all architecture and propaganda that found an effective combination.