Municipality of Viareggio
Piazza Nieri e Paolini
55049 Viareggio,
Lucques, Italy
phone 0584 581119
mail
a.belluominipucci@comune.
viareggio.lu.it
The panorama of Viareggio’s seaside avenues presents itself with a dual register which sees seaside architecture emerging on one side (viale Margherita and viale Marconi), and residential architecture on the other (viale Manin, viale Carducci). Starting from the early years of the twentieth century, the city became a theater of experimentation, a place of choice, in which architects, engineers and master builders designed houses, villas, cottages, accommodation and entertainment facilities according to schemes transcribed by the avant-garde movements which gave renowned seaside resort the image of a cosmopolitan city.
The multiple presence of buildings guides us through a sort of museum itinerary, an itinerary created by the succession of structures characterized, largely, by a style of clear modernist derivation, the result of particularly indicative experiments in the Viareggio architecture of the early twentieth century. The heterogeneous silhouettes of the facades, the polychrome ceramic decorations, the wrought iron balustrades and the marble ornaments screen and create the scenographic backdrops of the seaside avenues. From the historical styles of the nineteenth century, to the floral research of Art Nouveau and Secession taste, from the eclecticism of the twenties to the Déco, the horizon of the new style manifests itself and elects Viareggio as the city in which the aspects of Modernism. The decorative ceramic apparatus, the leitmotif of most of the buildings on the seaside avenues, is the work of Galileo Chini, advocate of a conscious cultural awakening especially in the field of applied arts.
His commitment to the new way of understanding art, already present in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, was not a temporary involvement, but a conviction that the artist maintained throughout his long career, from graphic design to decoration, from scenography to ceramics. Chini’s artistic abilities are best summarized in this last sector, with the creation of the Ceramic Art factories in Florence (1896) and, subsequently, of the San Lorenzo furnaces in Mugello (1906).In this period the collaboration between Galileo Chini and the architect-engineer Alfredo Belluomini was born; the cooperation between the painter-ceramist and the architect has2strongly characterized the seaside architecture of Viareggio, bringing out Chini’s ability to create a singular panorama of shapes and colors perfectly in symbiosis with Belluomini’s inclination to experiment with multiple eclectic modulations and modernist.
Réseau Art Nouveau Network,
Bruxelles Urbanisme et Patrimoine
Mont des Arts 10-13, 1000 Bruxelles.
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