The debt that the Spanish architecture owes to the Italian one has often been a subject of discussion. From the fifties to the eighties, generations of Spanish architects trained themselves by examining the projects of architects such as Luigi Moretti, Ignazio Gardella, Franco Albini and Aldo Rossi and by reading Zevi and Tafuri, as well as magazines such as Casabella, Domus and Lotus. This fact has been reasserted repeatedly by Oriol Bohigas and especially by Rafael Moneo who wrote, "I remember that the Italian books were our gateway to modern architecture. The texts by Bruno Zevi and Giulio Carlo Argan, which we read thanks to some Argentinian translations, have to be mentioned, given the influence they had on us. Zevi made us dream of an architecture that reached the fullness of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, whereas Argan made us dream of the promised paradise of the avant- gardes. The panorama described by the Italian critics brought us into a world that was over our boundaries, and gave us an outlook on architecture considerably different from the one we had in our country which, given the situation, might have been considered as insular". These observations by Moneo should give us pause. After the Second World War, the Italian architecture, almost as in an attempt to distance itself from the fascist regime, entered an eclectic season, in which the language of the Modern Movement was manipulated, occasionally with some audacity. These manipulations produced some syncretic works, elitist and popular, simultaneously rigorous and eccentric, that consciously or unconsciously attempted to make peace with history, an attempt that characterized the postmodern season. An eclecticism and syncretism typical of a latecomer country, one that entered modernity late and that, because of it, organized its own resources in a heterodox manner by experimenting with new modes of expression, which resulted in considerable breaks from the canons of advanced modernity. Indeed, it is exactly this syncretic eclecticism, contradictory yet thriving, that attracted the Spanish architects of the generation of Moneo and of the previous one, as they perceived it as an alternative to the modernist orthodoxy that, until a short time before with GATEPAC and JosepLluis Sert, characterized the Spanish architecture. Hence, the renewed relation with history shown by the Italians attracted the Spanish during these years. With regard to that, Moneo noted that " The ambition to use history as the foundation for architectural knowledge was a revelation for me. It was an interesting time for studies on the history of architecture. an architecture that was aware of how its own evolution occurred and that, consequently, was respectful of the past, thus becoming a methodological alternative to the purist rigorism of the Modern Movement". So, history as a method, as an antidote to superficial professionalism and as an instrument to keep urban planning and architecture together, a message that came from Italy in different ways and with different implications: on the one hand the history of Bruno Zevi, practical, adaptable to the contemporary time and not self- congratulatory, on the other hand the history of Manfredo Tafuri, philological and focused on reconstructing the conditions in which a work was conceived and realized. What might be defined as the separation from Italy, or at least as a reduction of the Spanish dependence on Italy, began during the first years of the seventies. Starting from 1969, the political and social situation in Italy got progressively worse: the radicalism that, at the end of the sixties, was the expression of a desire to voice the needs of a profoundly changed society began transforming into political disputes, aimed at overthrowing the post- war political balances. Consequently, the image of Italy as perceived from Spain changed completely. Indeed, Moneo wrote " Italy stopped being the paradise that fascinated us and become a true ideological battleground". Pier Vittorio Aureli, reminiscing of these years, noted that two most successful expressions of the Italian architecture of that age, the radical Supertudio and Archizoom and Giorgio Grassi's and Aldo Rossi's Tendenza, were two alternatives of the diaspora of the Italian Left of these years which, after having conquered the hegemony on national culture, split between, on the one hand, laborusim and unionism and the orthodoxy still connected to the Communist Party on the other. The shared belief that architecture was to testify the commitment to overthrowing the system and to be a message against the bourgeois individualism was the glue that kept everything together. The case of Manfredo Tafuri, the most authoritative critic of that period, is paradigmatic. While Zevi had always operated in a reformist context, Tafuri, initially following Lukacs and then Barthes, radicalized his thought. The result is what will be called a critique of ideology, that is, an action that was to go beyond language to gather the political and social elements that, according to the Marxist Tafuri, stir society and above all class struggle from below. Ignasi de Sola-morales, one of the most attentive and acute commentators of Tafuri, understood the contribution of Tafuri's critique to opening new horizons in the evaluation of an architectural work, but he also understood - as Zevi before him-that through Tafuri, an exasperated critical deconstruction turned into an increasingly sterile aggressive nihilism. Indeed, Morales wrote that "with Tafuri, the separation between the practice of architecture and the practice of critique becomes an axiom: morality was to be guaranteed by independence from practice (...) but the disappearance of militant critique, replaced by radical critique and the specialization of branches such as history of architecture eventually led this culture to detach from the actual transformation phenomena". Although Moreno admired Tafuri, he spent some even harsher words as he wrote " therefore, the scornful judgments Tafuri reserved to the attempts of those architects who were fighting to achieve personal forms of expression are hardly surprising: they always fell for the traps laid for them by the power-that-be and consequently talking about architecture almost did not make any sense. The role of the critic was therefore that of unveiling that predicament, rather than singing the praises of the architects at the service of power. Architecture, as understood by the previous critics, was no longer of interest. That was tantamount to announcing its imminent disappearance". In less than ten years, the ideological conflict became so exacerbated a desire to find a diversion started spreading in the Italian society, a desire to exorcize the ideology of conflict and to replace it with an opposite one, that of losir, of the flaunted entertainment. Paolo Portoghesi, who cleverly understood the depth of the ongoing change, consecrated postmodern hedonism by curating a show aptly named " The presence of the past" in 1980. From that moment onward a generation of architects, that until recently had been busy implementing some more or less radical political intentions, began designing by increasingly exasperating an historicist formalism that finds its privileged place of expression in the practice of drawing, almost forgetting the practice of building, perceived the latter as inferior to the artistic one. " With the Tide Ebbing of its Success" is the title of an article wrote at the end of the eighties by Franco Purini, in which he briefly summarized the postmodern era, whose ebbing left national architecture exhausted, stunned by the fast metamorphosis of radical commitment into an equally radical hedonism. The prevailing feeling in Italy during these years -and not only with regard to matters related to architecture-was that of having gone too far, in an area in which ideological prejudices first and then narcissism undermined once and for all the blooming eclecticism, one that thrived on complexity and contradictions, which characterized the Italian architecture and that fascinated Bohigas and Moneo. The price paid for what, on reflection, appears to be a real case of cupio dissolvi, was twofold: on the one hand, the disappearance of that technical wisdom, that mastery that characterized the works of Gardella, Moretti, Albini, Valle and, on the other hand, the problems encountered in capitalizing the subsequent theoretical effort. At the turn of the eighties, some of the works made by Spanish architects started being published in Italy. The prologue can be found in the Biennale curated by Portoghesi, as among the many works that exalted the presence of the past in a somehow superficial manner, Tusquets's and Clotet's villa in Pantelleria (1975) -an isle in the extreme south of Italy-stood out. The villa is one of the most fascinating projects seen at a successful Biennale, which had very few valid projects, though. Tusquets and Clotet certainly evoke history with their naked columns towering toward the sky and actually, they even tell us how to look at it -with the eyes of romantic artists enamoured of ruins-, yet their villa is characterized by some soundness, some attention to tectonics that was far from the scenographic exhalations supported by Portoghesi. This tectonic soundness, which is proof of a desire to resist reducing architecture to an image is the element that, at the turn of eighties, characterized the works of Cruz, Viaplana and Pion, Lapea and Torres and Moneo: these are some moderately postmodern works, sober and linear, more attentive to finding their own place in their context than to exalting their own appearance. Works that, generally speaking, are characterized by a practical reasonableness that is able to intervene where the Italians seemed to have failed, namely in urban planning. The new Barcelona that was getting ready to host the 1992 Olympics was perceived by the Italian architects as a model to imitate. Bohigas and a large number of architects who followed him abandoned any radicalism and started working on a series of attentive minor interventions: their attention is often focused on external public spaces, the ones that were forgotten by the city architecture supported by the Italian architects. Not only did the results start to be appreciated, they were also envied as they showed a realism that was more frequently invoked than pursued by the Italian architects, and they were also proof of the capacity of modern language to communicate better that postmodern historicism. The fact that the Italian architects, from the beginning of the nineties, turned their back to iconic postmodernism, is also due to the lesson that comes from Spain and it is no accident that the competition for the new Palazzo del Cinema of Venice in 1991 was won by Rafael Moneo, who prevailed over Carlo Aymonino, Aldo Rossi and Mario Botta, who suddenly appeared to have grown old, thus becoming memories of a waning era. Two Spanish works of the second half of the eighties and an architect of the following decade struck the imagination of an otherwise stalling Italian architecture. The first one is Rafael Moneo's Merida Museum, in which the principle of repeating large Roman masonry infrastructures is adopted with a certain veracity, without any scenographic pretense. The lateral fronts, together with a sequence of masonry bastions, configure an almost anonymous faoade, devoid of any scenographic pretense and the internal fair-face concrete floors made sure this work would not slip into historicist redundancy, by proposing a wise mediation between ancient and modern construction. The second one is Juan Navarro Baldeweg's Palace of Congresses and Exhibitions of Castilla y Leon in Salamanca (1985-1992), a work that, at first sight, might be considered entirely " Italian". Indeed, in Salamanca we find again the attention to the pre-existing environmental elements theorized by Ernesto Nathan Rogers, as well as the notion of establishing a dialogue with the historical context through the sober minimalism of Giorgio Grassi; by examining both the arrangement of the two volumes and the manner in which they define the calibrated internal square contained between them, we can find evidence of that attention in the manner in which these buildings blend their presence with the orography and the open spaces, theorized by Vittorio Gregotti with a precision that is inversely proportional to the capacity of achieving it. These two works by Moneo and Baldeweg are indebted to the Italian architecture, but they might also be understood as subtle critique to it, with regard to two key matters. The first one is inherent in the character of Italians, namely their tendency to spectacularize everything, to elevate theatre as the ideal set for their actions. During the fifties, with the irreverent causticity the distinguished him, Leo Longanesi stated that " our stations are only useful to those who are not departing and to those who wish to see them in a postcard: [those stations] are great sceneries, great civic trophies for our State. Our post offices, our government buildings, our banks, our hotels are merely theatrical scenes. Styles are fading away: baroque in concrete, then floral, then rational: embellishments are changing, columns and capitals are disappearing, the windows are first contracting then expanding; concrete and glass are appearing, ornate is disappearing and the polished marble of rational logic is shining, but the reign of theatrical scenes nonetheless survives". Let us consider, for instance, two works such as Aldo Rossi's Il Palazzo in Fukoka and Giorgio Grassi's Theatre of Sagunto: these two works perfectly exemplify the aforementioned statement by Longanesi, according to which everything is sacrificed in order to configure some theatrical scenes that, by the way, are very fascinating. A sacrifice that reaches a paradoxical peak in Rossi's building, whose main faoade is devoid of any opening, in order to make it as monumental as possible. The second characteristic of the Italian architecture -especially the one of the seventies-that the Spanish architects studiously avoided importing is its didactic -if not didascalic-character, almost an ideology according to which any work has to be a paradigmatic, materialized expression of its underlying theoretical concepts. Let us consider, for instance, Vittorio Gregotti, one of the most paradigmatic and pedagogic Italian architects, and let us compare one of his works, such as the Bicocca in Milan, with a Spanish building that was built just a few years later and that owes a lot to his urban theories, namely Rafael Moneo's and Manuel de Sola-Morales's building in the Avenida Diagonal. While Gregotti's work is more similar to a model of architecture than to a true architecture -a choice that necessarily makes it look schematic-Moneo and Sola-Morales did not wish their work in the Diagonal to become a paradigmatic building, but if anything, an emblematic one. Although its urban impact is not lesser than the one of the Bicocca, the block in the Diagonal is definitely not a diagram transposed into a building: indeed, the rear side of that block seems to articulate its presence by toning down the iconic impact of its main front through an organicism that seems inspired by Alvar Aalto, an architect that -as it is well knownconsiderably influenced the Spanish architecture. The quality of construction is also evidently different in these two buildings, a difference that deeply embarrassed the Italian architects of the nineties, so much so that the generations that came after the nineties attempted to remediate that embarrassment by focusing on construction and, in an attempt to do that, they took inspiration from the works of some Spanish architects such as Abalos and Herreros, Carlos Ferrater, Vopzquez Consuegra, Francisco Mangado, Mansilla and Tupn.
