Like a David Caspar Friedrich painting, this monument stands atop the mountain at Ještěd, near Liberec, North Bohemia, the former Sudetenland and centre of Bohemian crystal manufacturing.

Searching for snowscapes we travelled up the mountain to Ještěd  at the summit of which stands a futuristic tower designed by the architect Hubáček during the Communist era in 1963 and opened in 1973. It looks like the sort of building one might find on Mars, or at this frozen time of year, perhaps Uranus.

The hyperboloid Ještěd tower designed in 1963, is a futuristic structure within and without, like something out of Kubrik’s 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968). Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, made his Vostok mission into space in 1961, the first ever.

A Cosmonaut sat at our table,

while outside sat a lost, freezing, weeping Martian.

The central staircase column is studded with solid Bohemian crystal glass lamps designed by Libensky and Brychtová to look like meteorites zooming through the cosmos. This was designed in the late sixties, at the height of Soviet-American competition in space. The tower boasts a hotel and restaurant, a giant pendulum, as well as TV transmitter.

If you would like to do a Bohemian Winter Workshop please get in touch.

The post Winter Photo Workshop in Bohemia Part 2, Ještěd Tower appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

The most notable building is the edifice commonly known as The Colosseo Quadrato (Square Colosseum) designed as part of the EUR project in 1938. It is officially called The Palace of Italian Civilisation and was designed for the 1942 World’s Fair that was cancelled in 1941 following Mussolini’s declaration of war on Britain and France in 1940. It was not completed till 1953. The frame is reinforced concrete clad with Travertine limestone. Atop the building incised in giant letters are the words from a speech Mussolini made in 1935, ” A people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, thinkers, scientists, navigators, migrants.” No one could take issue with this list.

One of the Dioscuri statues, either Castor or Pollux

The statuary, in Carrara marble, was added from 1942 on. The statues in the arches on the ground floor, represent trades, arts and sciences, while the four equines represent the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. Although the building has featured in numerous films to illustrate solid Italian clerical-conservatism, I find it an extraordinary radical style of architecture rooted in the classical past. It is also most photogenic in any season or light.

The Flaminia Bridge,  Ponte Flaminio

The Flaminia Bridge was started in 1938, damaged in WW II and not completed till 1951. It features in the 1993 film Dear Diary, and the left-wing director Nanni Moretti is vociferous in his love for the architecture – despite its Fascist origins. The architect, Armando Brasini was popular with the fascist regime and would have demolished large swathes of central Rome as part of a Le Corbusier-style planning revolution in the late 1920s if he had had his way. He was responsible for the architecture and urban planning in various parts of Mussolini’s empire such as Tripoli and Tirana, Albania. He designed many remarkable buildings, but worked little after the war. His grandson lives in Orvieto.

The Fascist Eagle on the Flaminia Bridge

I will publish more posts shortly about Rome’s architecture.

The post Rome’s Fascist Era appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.