Roman Leviathan: Architecture and Capitalism in Postwar Italy

A powerful revision of the architectural history of postwar Italy that shows how a secretive Vatican-backed developer reshaped the skyline of Rome.

A bold, visually rich study that reveals how architecture is produced through the infrastructures of real estate, construction, and mass media.

In the decades after the Second World War, the Società Generale Immobiliare (SGI), a Vatican-backed real estate and construction giant, reshaped the urban development of Rome and other cities across postwar Italy. In Roman Leviathan, Davide Spina details how this secretive company, with strong links to American capital, changed both the skyline of the Eternal City and the profile of Italian architectural practice by putting modern design and construction in the service of profit-making. The book exposes SGI as a decisive political and economic force, operating at the intersection of architecture, real estate, and Cold War geopolitics, while remaining essentially unregulated and unexplored.

Roman Leviathan reconstructs three decades of SGI’s activities (1945–1975), spanning apartment blocks, suburban estates, and luxury hotels. Focusing in turn on politics, professionalism, labor, technology, Americanization, and historiography, Spina shows how the company’s design decisions were not simply aesthetic choices but responses to market forces, and traces how SGI’s projects entered the cultural imagination through cinema, print media, and popular taste. The book integrates political history, economic analysis, and urban studies with close readings of buildings, revealing architecture as the product of complex negotiations between capital and labor and as a vessel for ideology.