Rome/Kabul/Rome: Elective Affinities and An Embassy Project

As symbols of the State, as well as places devoted to the representation of sovereignty, embassies represent one aspect of that “conspicuous visibility” of Italians abroad that still deserves some overall attention. Although the Italian unification undoubtedly marked a new departure in the way national governments shaped their foreign policy also by means of architectural projects abroad, it is especially during the Fascist regime that the national propaganda found its spatial materialization through the promotion of new embassy buildings, of which the one at Ankara is only one example. This paper proposes to explore the overlooked case of the Italian embassy at Kabul whose beginnings and subsequent history are necessarily intertwined with the historic phases of the Italian politics, from the end of the Great War, through the rise of Fascism until the post WWII years, marked by a new aspiration towards a moral and physical reconstruction of the country. The embassy’s origins can be traced back to 1922, when Carlo Sforza, the Italian plenipotentiary diplomat at Istanbul, signed an agreement with the Afghan king Amanullah Khan, thus ensuring the Italian financial support to the Third Afghan War. The design for the present embassy building was commissioned to the architect Andrea Bruno who since the early 1960s had participated in the restoration works of the Buddhas of Bamlyan, later to be declared part of the World Heritage.