Rocco e Piero: la tipologia come "impegno sul reale"

What do a boxer from Lucania and a disoriented Milanese broker have in common? Perhaps nothing—except Alain Delon, who played them both, and the city of Milan, where their cinematic lives unfold: Rocco, the boxer, in Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960); Piero, the broker, in L’eclisse (1962). In these films, by Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni, the two directors offer two radically different visions of modernity: one melodramatic and cathartic, the other elliptical, alienated, unresolved. These are not simply stylistic oppositions but reflections of deeper tensions between narrative coherence and formal breakdown, between representation and its crisis. As Umberto Eco wrote in 1962, they embody two distinct ways of “forming as an engagement with the real.” This cinematic divergence becomes a lens for understanding two fundamental approaches to architectural typology in 1960s Italy. The theoretical framework derives from Edoardo Sanguineti's call to "make avant-garde into museum art" and Franco Fortini's interpretation of this as a consciously self-reflexive, "classicizing" neo-avant-garde. Aldo Rossi's 1968 adoption of the motto "I paint only for museums" – attributed to Cézanne but likely derived from Sanguineti – sheds light on his approach. The San Rocco quarter in Monza exemplifies this "Piero" method: an autonomous grid imposed on the existing fabric, indifferent to context, transforming alienation into avant-garde architecture. Conversely, Saverio Muratori's Roman "re-weaving" projects embody the "Rocco" method: a historical, dialogical typology that seeks to heal urban fractures through mimetic adherence to reality. Yet these seemingly irreducible positions unexpectedly reconcile in 1980s Berlin. Rossi's Kochstraße housing complex synthesizes both approaches: the volumes respect the urban palimpsest while the façades display recognizable Rossian characteristics. Here, Rocco dresses Piero, but "dressed anew" – abstract geometry becomes material, colored, and decorated, losing its hieratic quality for domestic proportions. This Berlin synthesis reveals a broader cultural transformation. The avant-garde discovers a new museum concept: no longer the "Cézannian" museum "dear to us," but the "precociously (and luxuriously) archival" one that Sanguineti had already identified in 1962. The iconicity of Delon-the-star ultimately prevails over the characters he portrays, just as in the 1980s, the architect's image eclipsed the project itself. The essay concludes by reflecting on our contemporary condition: we no longer know how to feel our time as "ours" as Eco, Sanguineti, Rossi, or Antonioni did. The very idea of "being of one's time" has had its time. We live in a posthumous present where the future promised by the avant-gardes has become an indifferent repertoire. Perhaps this is precisely the legacy of the avant-gardes: they gave us a freedom we no longer know what to do with.