The plans and scale-model were ready by January of the next year and the foundation stone was laid three months later. The building, which took only 335 days to erect, was completed on 20 January 1938 and officially opened on 27 March of the same year. The complex was designed to host the School of Aeronautical Application, a specialist training school for 300 pilot officers. A superb example of rationalist architecture and one of the absolute architectural masterpieces of the era, the School is still largely unchanged today in terms both of the buildings themselves and of their splendid setting. The complex, situated in the Cascine Park, has always been held to embody the very image of the Italian Air Force and has thus never been seriously altered. In fact it still contains most of its original furnishings and decoration by Bruno Catarzi, Mario Moschi and Giovanni Colacicchi. Colacicchi frescoed a trompe-l'oeil terrace with an ideal view of the cities founded under the regime-Arsia, Littoria, Sabaudia, Aprilia and Guidonia-in the "Chandelier Room" in 1937. The altarpiece in the chapel depicting the Madonna of Loreto is by Maria Biseo, a woman painter who worked throughout Italy in the Fascist era.