photon game At Lake Como, Monuments to a Brutal Regime Draw Tourists and Defenders

The Lake Como Design Festival is a cultural spree held every fall among the toothy hills of northern Italy. For the latest edition, the theme was lightnessphoton game, and the stars of the show were fragile glassware, wispy textiles, swaying mobiles and spidery chairs. The program also included tours of some of the area’s treasured 20th-century architecture, buildings so free of monumentality and ornament that they almost seemed to float.

Yet there was nothing light about their origins. Much of Como’s rationalist architecture, as the Italian modernist style is known, was by young, experimental practitioners in the service of Mussolini. Chief among this group was Giuseppe Terragni (1904-1943), celebrated for his widely acknowledged masterpiece: the Casa del Fascio, or House of Fascism, the national party’s offices in Como.

These days, Mussolini is back in the spotlight. “M: Son of the Century,” an eight-part television series directed by Joe Wright, was screened in September at the Venice Film Festival and will be aired on Sky Italy starting Friday. Like the popular 2018 novel on which it is based, the series graphically anatomizes the fascist leader’s brutality as well as the charisma that catapulted him to power.

In an email, referring to the rise of authoritarian regimes, Wright described “M” as “a very political series with a great deal of pertinence for what’s going on today, not just in America, but across countries all over the world.” He added: “Making ‘M’ seemed a way, for me personally, of addressing the roots of this movement and learning about where it came from in order to face it now with much more consciousness.”

ImageThe Casa del Fascio was the seat of Como’s branch of the National Fascist Party.Credit...C. Balossini/De Agostini Picture Library, via Getty ImagesImageBenito Mussolini, 1935, Rome.Credit...Bettmann, via Getty Images

And what of the monuments that formed a backdrop to Mussolini’s regime and continue to provoke fascination? (Today, Italian travel companies regularly offer expeditions with names like the “Mussolini Imperial Architecture Tour,” taking in rationalist developments like the EUR neighborhood in Rome that was conceived in the 1930s as a celebration of fascism.)

“This decision is my own and reflects my ruminations about how best to be of service,” he said in the message.

An Adams aide messaged the general manager of Turkish Airlines in New York, Cenk Öcal, to book flights for Mr. Adams to Istanbul. The staff member fits the description of Rana Abbasova, then Mr. Adams’s liaison to Turkey.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.photon game