A Church Covered Up Its Own Mussolini Fresco — Then Left the Nail Holes Showing

The Church of the Madonna della Difesa wasn't Guido Nincheri's idea to paint Mussolini into its frescoes — the clergy asked him to fit the Duce in among the saints, and in 1931 Nincheri obliged with a mounted portrait commemorating the signing of the Lateran Accords. It hung in plain view through most of the decade, but once Canada went to war against Italy, the parish nailed a covering over the painting rather than risk what a fascist portrait meant to display inside a church. Attempts to have it removed permanently kept surfacing for decades afterward and never succeeded, and when the church underwent restoration work, the parish made a deliberate choice: they left the nail holes from the wartime covering visible in the plaster, a small physical record of the moment the fresco went dark.

Across the river, Habitat 67 started life as a school assignment. Moshe Safdie was in his final year at McGill, working on a thesis called "A Case for City Living" that proposed stacking modular housing units to give every apartment a private terrace, and it earned him his degree — nothing more was expected of it. Two years later his former thesis advisor, working on Expo 67's planning committee, remembered the design and invited Safdie to develop it into a real pavilion. A twenty-something with no completed buildings to his name ended up delivering one of the most influential housing projects of the 20th century, built from an assignment he'd already turned in and forgotten about.