This text by Pietro Maria Bardi (1900-1999), originally titled “Cronaca di viaggio” (“Chronicle of a Journey”), was published in the Italian magazine Quadrante in September 1933. Bardi describes the activities and generally narrates the Greek experience of the members of the 4th International Congress of Modern Architecture (Congrès internationaux d’ architecture moderne – CIAM) held in Athens in 1933.

A prominent journalist and intellectual, an important collector of art, art critic, and cultural activist, Bardi was organically linked to Italian fascism while simultaneously connected to modern Italian architecture. He and his team at Quadrante aspired to showcase “a new architecture of the fascist era,” thus provoking a kind of cultural renewal in architecture, yet “within the fascist revolution.”

The Italian delegation to the 4th International Congress of Modern Architecture participated in the approximately hundred-member group of architects boarding the “Patris II” of Leonidas Empeirikos from Marseille, attended the proceedings on the ship and in Athens, and subsequently participated in the travels of early August to the Cyclades and the Peloponnese.

Bardi’s text regarding the Greek 4th Congress carries the immediacy of a journalistic report. As Andreas Giakoumakatos notes in the introduction, “this is a text that is revealing and reliable, with accurate information and vivid, charming descriptions of places and people, a genuine ‘travelogue’ about Greece in 1933.”

The writer’s obsession with classical Greece is naturally revealed with vividness, while for the modern era, he presents a light-hearted perspective of an anthropologist with rare sensitivity and insight. One could say that the publication of this text in Quadrante finally released the feelings of emotion, admiration, and devotion for the ancient Greek world that had somehow been stifled at the congress, as it was considered “off-topic” in relation to rationality, the atmosphere, and the objectives pursued.

Especially for Italians, the journey is a kind of “return to roots,” cultural and ontological roots, of the deepest and most authentic Mediterranean. Additionally, the projection of CIAM in Athens and Bardi’s “hymn to Greece” serve as a confirmation of the dual essence of Italian Modernism (and generally modern architecture), an essence that is both classical and Mediterranean.

The experience of Athens in 1933 represents for Italians the affirmation of the fact that, according to the Corbusian vision, the Parthenon must undoubtedly serve as the measure of every search and every determination of the classical origins of modern architecture.