Boasting that his forum would be grander than the Coliseum, Mussolini created the Stadium of Statues, for the 1944 Olympic games. Hauntingly erotic, each statue stands twelve feet tall, nude but for the occasional headband or sandals. So blatant was their sexual presence that the statues later provoked furtive attempts at “decency” involving fig leaves and loincloths. George Mott first glimpsed the statues in 1962 and photographed them twenty years later said, “The Foro Italico… sustains a guileless, perhaps unique, male eroticism which is at odds with the grandiloquent intentions of its planners and creators in Mussolini’s fascist regime.”
Read more at
Passport Magazine
