Il Palazzo delle poste di Bergamo tra continuità d’uso e adeguamento funzionale / The Bergamo Post Office Building: continued use vs. functional adaptation

Abstract

In the first decennial of the Fascist era, on October 31, 1932, the new Post and Telegraph building was inaugurated in Bergamo. It was built on land donated by the municipality, based on a design by architect Angiolo Mazzoni, who was commissioned at the end of the 1920s. The design process was very quick because, from the outset, the municipality of Bergamo stipulated that the building should be in harmony with the architecture of the nearby Piacentini-designed administrative and commercial centre. Mazzoni's architecture is sober, but also monumental in its choice to place a clock tower on the south-west corner - a vertical element that dialogues with Piacentini's Torre dei Caduti in Piazza Vittorio Veneto - and five celebratory columns on the main façade supporting five bronze statues. For almost a century, the building remained exempt from major maintenance or renovation work. In 2014, a complex restoration and redevelopment project was launched to upgrade the systems and services and clean up the façades. This paper aims to highlight how the work carried out on the building has respected the salient features of the architecture of the Ventennio period, while adapting it to current usage requirements, with high standards requests.