page_title: Florestano Di Fausto
section_title: Final years
hierarchical_section_title: Florestano Di Fausto / Final years
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Vista esterna del Santuario di Montevergine
context_page_description: Florestano Di Fausto was an Italian architect, engineer and politician who is best known for his building designs in the Italian overseas territories around the Mediterranean. He is considered the most important colonial architect of the Fascist age in Italy and has been described as the "architect of the Mediterranean". Uncontested protagonist of the architectural scene first in the Italian Islands of the Aegean and then in Italian Libya, he was gifted with a remarkable preparation combined with consummate skills, which allowed him to master and to use indifferently and in any geographical context the most diverse architectural styles, swinging between eclecticism and rationalism. His legacy, long neglected, has been highlighted since the 1990s.
context_section_description: During the war years, Di Fausto abandoned his fascist position approaching the Azione Cattolica, until at the end of the war he was elected representative for the Democrazia Cristiana both in the Constituent Assembly and in the first Legislature. In 1953 he left his party for the Monarchist National Party. During these years, he lost touch with current architectural developments, turning disgruntled and embittered: in a speech in parliament about the Venice Biennale of Architecture he defined the new sparkling artistic climate born in Italy after the war "an insane desire of new things" and said that abstractism, existentialism and relativism were "manifestations of putrid matter". His most noteworthy works during those years were the plan for the post-war reconstruction of Subiaco, the restoration of the cathedral of Sant'Andrea Apostolo of the same town, the design of the General House of the Cistercians on the Aventine Hill in Rome, and the restructuring of the Sanctuary of Montevergine, built in an arid neo-Romanesque style, in concrete dressed with stone. Finished in 1966, the complex shows that his talent had dried up. Di Fausto died in Rome in 1965. He was member of the Accademia di San Luca and of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon.
caption: The Sanctuary of Montevergine, completed after Di Fausto's death
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