Colonia Torino, Former children's holiday camp in Marina di Massa, Italy.
Colonia Torino is a former children's holiday camp on the Tuscan coast consisting of six rectangular pavilions connected by porticoes and arranged around garden areas. The complex stretches more than 200 meters in length with four floors of accommodation spaces and sits along the seafront promenade.
In the mid-1930s the Turin Fascist federation commissioned a seaside camp for 800 children and 200 girls on the Marina di Massa beach; the competition was won by architects Ettore Sottsass senior and Alfio Guaitoli, who also won a large camp at Riccione in the same years. Work began in 1936 and the Colonia Marina XXVIII Ottobre was inaugurated on 10 July 1938. After the fall of the regime it served as a summer camp for about a decade, then became a school; abandonment began in the late 1960s.
The camp was run by the Turin Fascist federation and named Colonia Marina XXVIII Ottobre, after the date of the March on Rome. It housed 800 children and 200 girls from Turin. After the war it served about a decade as a summer camp, then became a school.
The complex occupies a quadrangular lot bounded by Via Bondano a Mare to the south, the garden of the neighbouring Colonia Olivetti to the east and the Lungomare to the west, with the beach beyond it. The six pavilions stand parallel or perpendicular to the shoreline around inner courtyards, once planted with pines and now partly turned into vegetable plots. The site is abandoned and in a state of decay, so the interiors and the marble-tiled porticoes, largely demolished, are not visitable; the volumes and facades are best observed from the public street and the promenade.
The main seafront block runs over 200 metres, its window grid broken by four groups of nine windows separated by axes of portholes aligned with the ramp bays behind. The entrance pavilion, shifted south of the main axis, is in exposed brick with a wide portal and two portholes; the original inscription once ran across the whole front.
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