Roma Termini

Roma Termini stands beside the Baths of Diocletian in central Rome, the city's principal railway station, whose current building resulted from a design competition held in 1947 and won jointly by the architects Leo Calini and Eugenio Montuori together with a second team of Massimo Castellazzi, Vasco Fadigati, Achille Pintonello and Annibale Vitellozzi. Construction had begun a decade earlier as part of preparations for a 1942 world's fair that never took place because of the Second World War, and the rebuilt station finally opened in 1950. Its defining feature is a vast glass-walled entrance hall roofed by an undulating, cantilevered concrete canopy, a modernist reinterpretation of the great vaulted halls of ancient Roman baths, decorated inside with aluminum relief panels by the sculptor Amerigo Tot depicting the rhythm and speed of trains. With 32 platforms it ranks, together with Paris's Gare du Nord and Munich's Hauptbahnhof, among the largest railway stations in Europe.