Il Ducioville

Where we are staying, Camping Baia Blu Laguna, is about 5kms north of Alghero city centre within sight of Fertilia, a small harbourside village at the seaward end of the Stagno di Calich inlet. The area has been inhabited for millenia. The remains of a Roman bridge is clearly visible at the lagoon's mouth.

However Fertilia itself is barely a century old but looks dilapidated and unloved, a grim grid of utilitarian blocks built  a little less than century ago.

Most people would not give the place a second glance. However, I have a bit of a thing about twentieth century municipal architecture. The crumbling concrete may look a tad dystopian now but it masks an ill-concieved utopian ambition.

Fertilia is a product the 'reign' of  'Il Ducio'. It's as good a 'concrete' example as you might find of his fascist regime's radical nationalist project to impose a singular Italian identity on a country that merely a half century previously had been a hotchpotch of different kingdoms and duchys with diverse traditions, cultures, dialects and languages.

Fertilia was built as a new, overtly Italian fishing port to rival Alghero - a Sardinian one just across the bay. People from northern Italy, Veneto and Fruilia mainly, were relocated here in the hope it would strengthen a singular Italian speaking culture.

The arcaded rectilinear streets ape Roman architecture, its stern macho style much loved by Europe's fascist regimes.

The public building are remarkable examples of this classicised version of modernism that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s; it's  a more austere variant of Art Deco. 

An enormous church dominates the northern edge of the village.

In Italy, Spain and Portugal conservative Roman Catholicism was very much part of the cultural mix that propped up southern Europe's fascist governments.

The town hall at the opposite end of the main street exudes equally monumental tendencies. Its aesthetic is stern and idealistic, chillingly authoritarian.

 It is these qualities that have led to the style being 'written out' of the mainstream history of twentieth century architecture - as are the buildings of Soviet Russia and the post war 'Eastern bloc'.

Attempts at social engineering did not stop with the collapse of Mussolini's government in the mid 1940s. A plaque near the town hall commemorates a second wave of mainland Italian immigrants in 1947.

The second wave of incomers originated from Istria. Control of the peninsula alternated between the Austrian Empire and Italy from the mid Nineteenth century onwards. Finally in the years after WW2 Yugoslavia annexed most of it. Many of the Italian speaking residents chose to leave and some of them were re-housed in Fertilia.

For anyone with a nerdy interest in the more obscure corners of  Twentieth century architecture and design, Fertilia is a crumbling treasure trove. Not just the big buildings, but smaller details - like a concrete fence...

Or the corrugated decoration on the facade of the old telecommunications building...

Or this odd figurine...

I hope Fertilia's twentieth century architecture doesn't get bulldosed, even if is in a perilous state. I am not the only one to have this thought, judging by a sign attached to a wire fence placed around a particularly dilapidated house.