Dalla salute all’istruzione della “meglio gioventù”, dalla Colonia Montana IX maggio a Monteluco di Roio alla Facoltà d’Ingegneria dell’Università dell’Aquila

The “Colonia IX maggio”, built in 1937 as part of the Fascist regime’s systematic strategy of the care and training of young people, is situated on Monte Luco di Roio, a hill about ten kilometers away from the city of L’Aquila. A relationship with the environment and the rationalist principles guided the architect Ettore Rossi in the design of the building, which displays an elegant, double-inflected architecture, but is also a “health machine”, the result of Rossi’s experience in the construction of modern monoblock hospitals. Used briefly at the outbreak of the Second World War, in the late Sixties the former holiday camp was converted for use by the University of L’Aquila’s Faculty of Engineering and subjected to significant alterations to adapt it to university education. In the Nineties it the faculty? or the former holiday camp? was transferred to a new complex nearby. Today (2020), the original building, with all its visible alterations, functional adaptions and the scars of the 2009 earthquake, faces the faculty’s three buildings. Strengthened and reactivated, it awaits solutions for restoration and reuse, as well as ways to re-stitch the small campus together.