Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II

While it’s quite the architectural masterpiece this building is extremely ostentatious. Although, it was a good landmark to help me find my way around. You could see the statues on top of the building from very far away.

“The Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele II (National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II) or Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland) or “Il Vittoriano” is a monument to honor Victor Emmanuel the first king of a unified Italy. It occupies a site between the Piazza Venezia and the Capitoline Hill. The monument was designed by Giuseppe Sacconi in 1895; sculpture for it was parceled out to established sculptors all over Italy. It was inaugurated in 1911 and completed in 1935.

The monument, “chopped with terrible brutality into the immensely complicated fabric of the hill”, is built of pure white marble from Botticino, Brescia and features majestic stairways, tall Corinthian columns, fountains, a huge equestrian sculpture of Victor Emmanuel and two statues of the goddess Victoria riding on quadrigas. The structure is 135 m (443 ft) wide and 70 m (230 ft) high. If the quadrigae and winged victories are included, the height is to 81 m (266 ft). The base of the structure houses the museum of Italian Reunification.

The monument was controversial since its construction destroyed a large area of the Capitoline Hill with a Medieval neighborhood for its sake. The monument itself is often regarded as pompous and too large. It is clearly visible to most of the city of Rome despite being boxy in general shape and lacking a dome or a tower. The monument is also glaringly white, making it highly conspicuous amidst the generally brownish buildings surrounding it, and its stacked, crowded nature has lent it several derogatory nicknames. Romans sometimes refer to the structure by a variety of irreverent slang expressions, such as “Zuppa Inglese”, “the wedding cake”, and “the false teeth”, while Americans liberating Rome in 1944 labeled it “the typewriter”, a nickname also adopted by the locals. Despite all this criticism, the monument still attracts a large number of visitors. Former President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi fostered the opening of the Vittoriano as a public forum and viewpoint over the City core. This new accessibility allowed visitors to become familiar with the landmark, enabling it to grow in popular, if not critical, reputation.”

reference: Wikipedia