La storia di Roma attraverso le opere edilizie

The main access to Palazzo Uffici - also known as the "Ingresso del Commissario" ("Commissioner's Entrance"), from the title of the head of Ente EUR at the time - is decorated by a large bas-relief in slabs of travertine, the work of Publio Morbiducci. The chosen subject illustrates, using a close-packed view of the most representative buildings and the most significant moments, the history of Rome, from its mythical origins up to the works of the Fascist regime. The propaganda behind the work is obvious: to show the glories of the regime as the culmination to which the entire history of Rome prophetically leads.
 
DESCRIPTION OF THE WORK
The bas-relief reads like a book, from left to right and from the top down, following a narrative layout that, in some ways, recalls the model of Trajan's Column and other historic Roman relief carvings. The result is an extremely dense narrative, full of explicit historical references, in which the individual scenes tend to overlap each other, thus increasing the idea of unbroken historic continuity. The first section alone contains a sequence with the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, the eagles seen by the twins, the furrow cut by the plough to mark the first boundary of the city, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

The lower sections continue the story, telling, with the same intensity, of Republican (the praetor and the magisterial faces, the tabularium and Julius Caesar) and Imperial Rome (Augustus, the Flavian dynasty, the Colosseum and the Pantheon), the conversion of Constantine and transition to the mediaeval city (Church of St. Mary in Cosmedin), the Renaissance (new St. Peters with Michelangelo's dome) and the works of Pope Sixtus V (erection of the obelisk), the Risorgimento (Garibaldi on horseback) and Rome becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Savoy (monument to Victor Emanuel II), ending with Mussolini on horseback acclaimed by two youths.
In the summer of 1943, after the fall of the regime, the dictator's face was disfigured in sign of damnatio memoriae.