Villas of the 1920s and 1930s in Lugo
A walk through the center of Lugo admiring buildings that still today tell us about the Art Nouveau style of the early twentieth century.
Discover the itinerary by consulting this map
The “gardens” of San Domenico
The current area of Viale Bertacchi and Miraglia was once property of the Church of San Domenico, of which the cloister, bell tower and former convent survive, currently used as a healthcare residence. The Dominicans had settled in Lugo since 1490: distinguished Lugo natives were Dominicans, such as Giuseppe Compagnoni, father of the tricolor flag, or Cardinals Francesco Bertazzoli and Tomaso Emaldi. With the French occupation of 1796 and the expulsion of religious orders, the structure and related lands were requisitioned by civil authorities; in 1862 the properties became owned by the Municipality, which transformed the church into a warehouse and the convent into a barracks, and later – given the great need for housing – into public housing. In 1914, a new urban plan was completed which, set aside during the Great War, would only be approved in 1923. Fortunately, some provisions of that project were never implemented, such as the demolition of the Rossini theater, considered dilapidated and no longer adequate for modern needs, or the demolition of the entire block of Vicolo Canattieri (near Via Cento). The significant post-war demographic increase exacerbated the problem of finding new housing, which is why the plan provided for new areas of urban expansion. Some were intended for public housing, such as the blocks between Via Passamonti and Circondario Sud, while the “gardens” of San Domenico (current Viale Bertacchi and Miraglia) were reserved for a higher class: an orthogonal grid of new streets divided the land into large lots intended for bourgeois residences.
Opinions on this choice were conflicting: for some, the juxtaposition of pretentious villas with modest nearby houses was considered inappropriate, while for others they enhanced the neighborhood with modern architecture. In 1927, the creation of Via Biancoli between Corso Garibaldi and Via Emaldi (to connect the railway station to Circondario Ponente) further enhanced the area. During the Second World War, the partisans, who had meanwhile militarily occupied the city, convinced the English command that they could enter the city without being preceded by bombing. This is why the historic center survived the war events but not the economic boom years, when much of it was demolished and rebuilt. A fate that the villas fortunately escaped.
(Text by Arch. Silvana Capanni, Map “Between eclecticism and art deco in Lugo”)
Art Nouveau Decorations in Lugo
Art Nouveau, widespread in Romagna between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, also with significant buildings (including the Grand Hotel in Rimini, designed by Uruguayan architect Paolo Somazzi and inaugurated in 1908), appears late even in the Ravenna hinterland, in the territory historically defined as “Bassa Romagna.” In Lugo, in the area between Viale degli Orsini, Viale Bertacchi, and Viale Miraglia, a crossroads of tree-lined avenues, one can admire the best preserved examples of Art Nouveau decoration, although now late because most of the villas date from the 1920s and 1930s, with geometric-floral motifs that nevertheless refer to the grandeur of that historical-economic and cultural moment that was the Belle Époque. It is possible to view these villas from the outside and observe their decorative aspects, obtaining an accurate sampling. Some feature a recovery of neo-medieval or neo-Renaissance elements (02, 14, 15, and 15a: in the latter, at the corner of Viale Miraglia and Via Amendola, note the red brick structure and gray stone decorations, adorned with classical cornices and handles and volutes of a more Mannerist style; the villa’s decoration no longer appears as a sculpture superimposed on the architecture, but as an element inherent to the building itself, emphasizing its form and structure). In other cases, there is a transition from late Art Nouveau cadences to geometrizations typical of Art Deco (01A, 06, 07, 12, 20a), for some of which architect Carlo Paolo Visani’s design is certain (Villa Molinari in Viale Orsini, Villas Gardenghi and Guiducci in Viale Bertacchi, all dating between 1923 and 1924), for others interventions by Roberto Sella seem possible, a Lugo artist known for having decorated various buildings in Lugo and Faenza, as well as the Baracca Chapel in the Municipal Cemetery (1924). Villa Guiducci (25) is an exception, where the under-eave presents a decoration with putti and festoons created by Domenico Pasi known as Nino, reworking an elegant invention by Galileo Chini (25a).
(Text by Dr. Giorgio Martini, Map “Between eclecticism and art deco in Lugo“)
Between Eclecticism and Art Deco
Those who walk along Viale Miraglia, Bertacchi, and degli Orsini in Lugo will notice the numerous residential buildings that, despite their diversity in structure and size, largely share constructive and decorative stylistic characteristics. These are the “small villas” of Lugo’s new bourgeoisie after the First World War, single-family homes designed and built with references to the Eclectic style, Art Nouveau (in Italy, Liberty), and what from the second half of the 1920s would be called the Deco style, some of which were designed by Lugo artists including Architect Carlo Paolo Visani. This new building typology effectively contributed to determining the first clear emancipation from the typical historical building fabric of the city. Michele Rossi, a pharmacist by profession, already in 1925, therefore at the beginning of the works, foresaw the significance and importance of this new building area: “In the former gardens called San Domenico, where there was once talk of building the Hospital, a considerable number of villas with modern architecture have arisen. When the streets are completed, adorned with trees and other buildings added, everything suggests that this will become one of the most pleasant and preferred walks” (Michele Rossi, Guide to Lugo, Ferretti & C. Editors, 1925, Lugo).
In our territory, the specificities and particular stylistic characteristics of these buildings were a local translation of national and international artistic and architectural experiences, demonstrating once again, even in this field, the remarkable propensity and ability of “little Lugo” to assimilate new stylistic and aesthetic ideas born and developed in major European cities, starting with Paris. In the French capital, 1925 had seen the great success of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, definitively consecrating the evolution towards this new style, Deco, which integrated ancient, Greek, Roman, Oriental, Renaissance stylistic elements with typical forms of cubism and futurist and metaphysical painting, leaving room for refined decorative inserts that also included the use of new and often expensive materials, from stainless steel to aluminum, from exotic animal skins to wood inlays, to marbles of great rarity. In the new buildings, elegant small columns, porticoes, symmetrical and geometric forms that determine clear and outlined surfaces are fashionable. Deco, the last aesthetic frontier of Art Nouveau, was part of the climate of modernity initiated at the beginning of the century by artists, architects, and decorators who recognized the social importance of reproducibility and widespread applicability, particularly in the field of building and furnishing. Thus develops an architectural production that has now “dried up” the rich decorative modulations typical of previous years, including Art Nouveau, without however completely eliminating ornaments and without retrieving the eclectic repertoires of the recent past. It is essentially a middle way between the horror vacui of Art Nouveau and the rejection of decoration of rationalism. The most authentic Deco thus represents the natural continuation of Liberty and generally of Art Nouveau and stands as an alternative to the more decisive and totalizing expressions of rationalism, enemy of all ornament. This non-revolutionary but modern style in Italy influenced not only applied arts and architecture but also marked to a greater or lesser extent many urban layouts (the Monteverde district of Rome, the halls of the Vittoriale degli Italiani in Gardone Riviera, some neighborhoods in Milan, Catania, Bologna, etc.).
In Emilia-Romagna, where the medievalist epigones of Rubbiani and the defenders of the eclectic monumentalism of the early century were still active in those decades, we find echoes of the Deco style especially in private buildings in which, alongside geometric motifs, sea waves, zigzag friezes, Greek patterns, etc., there are also phytomorphic references, palms, niches of fake windows, stylization of masks, frames with simple decorations in non-obsessive symmetries.
These architectural and decorative characteristics typical of the Deco style are also found in the small villas of Lugo, now century-old testimony to the taste of an era and its aesthetic sensibility.
(Text by Dr. Antonio Curzi, Arch. Giovanni Liverani, Map “Between eclecticism and art deco in Lugo”)
