The project by Paolo Caccia Dominioni for the Italian Embassy in Ankara

The paper focuses on building of the Italian Embassy in Ankara (1938-1940), involving Paolo Vietti Violi, Florestano di Fausto and Paolo Caccia Dominioni. In those years Ankara was itself a huge building site: the new capital of Republican Turkey was then rising at the feet of the ancient citadel. According to the plan by the German architect Hermann Jansen (1928) an “embassy district” was to develop at the southern edge of Gazi Boulevard, just where the Italian Embassy had been planned. Paolo Caccia Dominioni (1896-1992), son of a diplomat from a noble family and an officer in the Italian army, has settled as an engineer in Cairo in 1924, where had directed the building of the Italian Embassy designed by Di Fausto (1928-30). Based on research carried out at the family archive this paper attempts to reconstruct the history of the project and its implementation, clarifying the role of Caccia Dominioni in the architectural configuration of the embassy complex. Caccia Dominioni reinterpreted Di Fausto’s project, developing a new layout: the embassy - a complex of ten buildings - could feature a sort of “village”, where each functional unit could acquire an autonomous architectural character