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 Villa
Ruggeri - Pesaro
On the
seafront of Pesaro is found one of the few
examples of Art nouveau architecture in the
Marche region, villa Ruggeri, built in 1902
upon a project by architect Brega.
Nevertheless,
a great contribution to the project was given by the client, the
owner of the pharmaceutical industry whose name was Ruggeri.
During his business trips, the latter had the opportunity to
observe the fashionable architecture, that is the new art nouveau
architecture, which had been brought about and was much
appreciated by the industrial middle-class.
In
opposition to the eclecticism, which revived the
Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance styles, the art nouveau
style becomes the expression of modernity,
the forefront of a new taste. Always looking for success even on
the cultural level, the middle-class became the spokesman of this
new style.
 Villa
Ruggeri is a 19th-century typical one-family
residence, with a regular plan and structure, but with a
wide use of stucco floral patterns over all the external surfaces.
Such patterns characterize all the architectonic elements such as
the doorway, the windows, the dripstones and the balconies, in
order to break the strictest building tradition related to this
typology.
It
is necessary to underline that in the Marche region other art
nouveau buildings have been built mainly in towns along the coast,
which became holiday resorts after the urban expansion towards the
"seashore", which has followed the construction of the
railway track: this has been the main urban area of architectonic
experimentation.
 Therefore,
in Porto San Giorgio we can find villa Tomassini,
in San Benedetto del Tronto villa Sorge,
in Civitanova villa Conti, but
also the electric streetcar station. To these we can add other
residential buildings located in Falconara, Senigallia and Fano,
just to prove that Italian art nouveau architecture only in few
cases affects public buildings.
As
a matter of fact, usually the art nouveau style does not modify
the traditional structural layout of the building, but it
distinguishes in a thoroughly new way all the decorations,
overcoming the still predominant neo-Renaissance lexicon and
opening to the new floral theme.
Nevertheless, the inspiration from nature is just the starting
point for decorations aiming to transform everything from
natural elements to abstraction, into a series of totally
innovative volutes and sinusoidal lines. |
