Description
Villa Marmori is an Art Nouveau villa from the 1920s on Via XX Settembre, in the centre of La Spezia: one of the most successful, if late, examples of the Liberty style in the city. Today scales and arpeggios drift out of its windows, because it houses the music conservatory.
Its full name is Marmori Ceretti. It stands on raised ground, over two floors, in the residential district that grew out of the town plan of the late 19th century, and it tells you a great deal about the taste and ambitions of La Spezia's middle class in the early 1900s.
The design, from 1923, is by Franco Oliva, an architect who worked a great deal in La Spezia in the first half of the century. Oliva conceived it as a total work of art: not just walls and rooms, but furniture, door handles and even the cutlery, all drawn by a single hand.
Inside, your eye goes straight to the stained-glass windows by Giovanni Beltrami, with a clear Art Deco flavour, and to the frescoes by the painter Luigi Agretti. The floors and the wooden window and door frames deserve attention too: they are still a little treatise on fine woodworking, born of the same unified design.
The wrought iron is worth a look of its own: the gate on the street, the railings and the chandeliers are the work of Alessandro Mazzucotelli from Lombardy, and they give anyone walking along Via XX Settembre a first taste of the villa before they ever see its rooms.
The owners did not stop at the architecture. For the halls they bought sculptures by Giuseppe Grandi and paintings by Augusto Ferri and Antonio Discovolo, and they called in the best artists of the day to decorate it: a home conceived almost as a small private gallery.
Since 1984 the villa has been the home of the Giacomo Puccini Conservatory. Founded in 1979 as a branch of the Genoa conservatory and independent since 1992, it draws students from the Riviera di Levante, Lunigiana and northern Tuscany, with frequent exchanges with Bayreuth, La Spezia's twin town.
Its full name is Marmori Ceretti. It stands on raised ground, over two floors, in the residential district that grew out of the town plan of the late 19th century, and it tells you a great deal about the taste and ambitions of La Spezia's middle class in the early 1900s.
The design, from 1923, is by Franco Oliva, an architect who worked a great deal in La Spezia in the first half of the century. Oliva conceived it as a total work of art: not just walls and rooms, but furniture, door handles and even the cutlery, all drawn by a single hand.
Inside, your eye goes straight to the stained-glass windows by Giovanni Beltrami, with a clear Art Deco flavour, and to the frescoes by the painter Luigi Agretti. The floors and the wooden window and door frames deserve attention too: they are still a little treatise on fine woodworking, born of the same unified design.
The wrought iron is worth a look of its own: the gate on the street, the railings and the chandeliers are the work of Alessandro Mazzucotelli from Lombardy, and they give anyone walking along Via XX Settembre a first taste of the villa before they ever see its rooms.
The owners did not stop at the architecture. For the halls they bought sculptures by Giuseppe Grandi and paintings by Augusto Ferri and Antonio Discovolo, and they called in the best artists of the day to decorate it: a home conceived almost as a small private gallery.
Since 1984 the villa has been the home of the Giacomo Puccini Conservatory. Founded in 1979 as a branch of the Genoa conservatory and independent since 1992, it draws students from the Riviera di Levante, Lunigiana and northern Tuscany, with frequent exchanges with Bayreuth, La Spezia's twin town.