EUR, Rome

Where it sits. EUR is a planned quarter roughly five kilometres south of the historic centre of Rome, on rising ground between the Ostiense district and the road to the sea at Ostia. It is laid out on a grid of wide, straight avenues with a monumental north–south axis, Via Cristoforo Colombo, running through it, and it feels nothing like the rest of Rome: no medieval lanes, no crooked piazzas, no accretion. Everything is faced in pale travertine or marble, the blocks are set well back from the street, and the sightlines are long enough that individual buildings read as objects in space rather than as walls along a road.

The story behind it. The letters stand for Esposizione Universale Roma, a world's fair planned for 1942 to mark twenty years of Fascist rule and intended to leave behind a permanent new city quarter. Marcello Piacentini led the master plan from 1936 with a team that included Giuseppe Pagano, Luigi Piccinato, Ettore Rossi and Luigi Vietti. The exhibition never took place — the war stopped construction in 1942 with much of the district half-built — and the site sat as a monumental ruin until the 1950s, when the Italian state finished it as an office and government district. That two-stage history is legible on the ground: severe pre-war stone monuments stand among glassy post-war ministries, and the artificial lake, the cherry-lined promenade and the sports buildings all belong to the second phase, several of them built for the 1960 Olympic Games.

The buildings that define it. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, built between 1938 and 1943 by Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula and Mario Romano, is the emblem: a hollow travertine cube pierced by six rows of nine arches on each face, universally nicknamed the Square Colosseum, with twenty-eight allegorical statues around its base and an inscription about a people of poets, artists and heroes running under the cornice. Fendi has leased it as its global headquarters since 2015 and keeps free exhibitions on the ground floor. Nearby stand Adalberto Libera's Palazzo dei Congressi with its great vaulted hall, the domed basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at the top of a long flight of steps, Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzo dello Sport from the Olympic works, and the 45-metre Obelisco di Marconi assembled from carved marble panels in 1959.

On screen. EUR has been used repeatedly by Italian directors who needed a place that looked like the future and felt empty. Michelangelo Antonioni ended L'Eclisse (1962) with a seven-minute sequence of the district's streets after the characters fail to meet — a zebra crossing, a water barrel, a half-built corner site, a bus disgorging strangers, the streetlamp coming on at dusk — one of the most analysed closing passages in European cinema, and it is all recognisably here. Bernardo Bertolucci used Adalberto Libera's Palazzo dei Congressi here as Fascist state architecture in The Conformist (1970), where the scale of the halls does the work that dialogue does not. The quarter has since served as a stand-in for a cold, bureaucratic modernity in dozens of Italian features and television series, and its emptiness on a Sunday morning is exactly the quality that keeps location scouts coming back.

What you actually see today. EUR is a working office district, busiest on weekday mornings and eerily quiet at weekends. The artificial lake at its lower end is ringed by a path, rowing boats and cherry trees given by Japan, and the walk from the lake up to the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana takes about twenty minutes and covers most of the significant architecture. The Museo delle Civiltà brings together the state ethnographic and prehistoric collections in the pre-war exhibition buildings. There is little street life of the kind found in Trastevere or Monti, and restaurant options are geared to office lunches, so this is a half-day architectural visit rather than an evening destination. The nearby Luneur amusement park, reopened in 2016 on a site first laid out for the 1953 agricultural fair, gives families a reason to stay longer.

Getting there and timing. Metro Line B serves the district at EUR Magliana, EUR Palasport and EUR Fermi, roughly fifteen minutes from the Colosseum. Late afternoon light is best on the travertine, and the Square Colosseum's arcades photograph strongly when the sun is low enough to throw deep shadows into them. Sunday mornings deliver the empty streets that Antonioni filmed. Combining EUR with the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, one stop north on the same line, makes an efficient southern-Rome half day.