Un professionista al servizio dell'Eni. L'opera di Mario Bacciocchi (1902-1974)

In the early Fifties Enrico Mattei asked Mario Bacciocchi to realize “Metanopoli”, a company town for the Agip-Snam (later Eni), following the principles of the “rational” design solutions. In order to understand the project motivations, it is necessary to retrace the biographies of its protagonists and the background within which certain choices matured. But, if the life of the founder of the energy corporation and its links with the Catholic world have been the subject of a copious bibliography, the intense “professional journey” of Bacciocchi, a leading architect of the past century, is still to be investigated, also considering the dispersion of a large part of his private archive and the absence of primary sources and personal writings. Bacciocchi was not only Enrico Mattei's architect. Since 1925 he starts an intense activity characterized by the creation of architectures that reflect significantly the climate of the Italian professional culture of the Twentieth Century. Thanks to the study of the few unpublished materials from the archive held by the heirs, the contribution focuses on the figure of Bacciocchi, framing it in the historical context and trying to explain the genesis of some of his projects, developed before, during and after the war, in other words, before, during and after Mattei. This article is the first attempt to articulate a critical reconstruction of the biography of Mario Bacciocchi (1902-1974).