EUR — the Esposizione Universale Roma — was conceived by Mussolini as a utopian showcase for a 1942 World's Fair that never happened. Italy entered the war instead, the fair was cancelled, and the half-built district sat largely dormant until after the war. EUR was eventually completed and hosted events for the 1960 Rome Olympics. It now functions as both a working business district and one of the most coherent surviving ensembles of rationalist architecture anywhere.
The aesthetic is unmistakable: white travertine, vast colonnades, wide symmetrical boulevards, and monumental scale calibrated to make the individual feel very small. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana — nicknamed the Square Colosseum — is EUR's defining image, its 216 identical arched windows arranged across six storeys. Fendi uses it as its world headquarters. The artificial lake (Lago dell'EUR), completed for the Olympics, provides a human-scale antidote to all that marble.
Metro Line B (EUR Fermi or EUR Palasport) reaches EUR in about 25 minutes from Termini. The circuit of the main monuments takes two to three hours on foot.