Made famous during the 1960 Rome Olympics, the Palazzetto is emblematic of Nervi's 'second life', that of the post-war period, centred on experimentation with ferrocement and structural prefabrication.
Conceived as a prototype of a medium-sized, inexpensive sports palace, to be offered identically in every city in Italy, it only later became part of the Olympic works, of which it soon became one of the best-known symbols.
In 1954, the Italian National Olympic Committee commissioned architect Annibale Vitellozzi with the project, who called Nervi for the roof structure. The concept is essential: a large circular dome 60 metres in diameter raised on inclined trestles set on an external circumference of 78 metres.
The minutely ribbed roof, which would have been too costly to construct on site using traditional techniques, will now use prefabricated ferroconcrete elements according to Nervi's patented system, for which the company Nervi e Bartoli is the exclusive concessionaire, and will therefore be entrusted with the construction.
Having abolished the wooden ribs, Nervi, as he had already done with the second series of aviorimittas, broke the canopy down into pieces to be fabricated on site, which were then assembled on a light, discontinuous scaffold; in the channels between the planks, the reinforcement was then placed and the completion cast. Costing a mere 200 million lire, it was built in just over a year.
Critical acclaim is controversial. The Italian architectural culture reacts without enthusiasm: only the critic Bruno Zevi publishes it immediately, but on the whole criticism prevails, questioning all public works hastily constructed for the Olympics. Instead, the world's specialist press, far from political polemics, competed for photos of the small masterpiece, decreeing Nervi's definitive recognition at the top of the international engineering scene.
