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In various elegant shapes, portraits of young girls in bloom, voluptuous sinuous lines, floral decorations and references to nature harmoniously declined to permeate everywhere with beauty and, at the same time, bring art closer to everyday life. The message of Liberty can be outlined in this way, the all-encompassing style which in Turin finds the city symbolizing a season of aesthetic, artistic and social renewal. What indelibly marked the turning point of the former capital of the Kingdom, in the sign of New Art, was an event of epochal significance: the First International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art. At Palazzo Madama – Civic Museum of Ancient Art of Turin, until 10 June 2024, the Liberty exhibition. Torino Capitale, through around a hundred works, explores with graceful refinement the fundamental role of the city (Turin aims to join the RANN of Brussels and its candidacy as a UNESCO World Heritage City for Art Nouveau) for the affirmation of this style.
1902
The year was 1902 and the Savoy city found itself catapulted onto the world stage, with ephemeral constructions that represent the best of the innovative architectural projects and not only of the new century, thus marking a decisive turning point for the city and the entire country. “Tenaciously desired by a group of artists, intellectuals and professionals from Turin to redeem Italy’s cultural delay due to the extremely mediocre performance at the Exposition Universelle de Paris, with a disastrously unsightly pavilion and the content not up to what it could have and due”, as the curator Beatrice Coda Negozio explains, the city responded by “giving life to a unique model of urban civilization, an expression of a conscious attitude of local administrators who acted in unison to promote the economic and social development of the territory. Infrastructures and services for citizens of high architectural quality and sophisticated construction execution are designed and built, primarily schools (…) Functional and beautiful works, created with respect for the dignity of the person”.
Popular baths
They constitute a wonderful example of popular baths: in June 1901 the first heated brick establishment was inaugurated in Via VI Marzo. The ones in Via Vanchiglia are still in operation. In the early years of the century the city was in full industrial development and feverish construction activity.
Villa Crimea
Public and private clients ask for villas (see Villa Crimea, with the unmistakable tower in Via Casteggio), villas, public housing, factories, schools (an example is the elementary one, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, in Via Ricasoli, designed by Camillo Dolza and Giulio Casanova), kindergartens, churches, sports facilities, barracks, hospitals, monuments and spaces for an entire community of people, such as the “Leumann Village” with its Church of Sant’Elisabetta designed by Pietro Fenoglio.
Turin, city of Liberty in a refined exhibition
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From Baroque to Liberty
“The telluric spirit of the Baroque has found in Turin the most fertile ground for resurrecting in Liberty with creative results and formal originality that place it as a non-secondary capital of this style in Europe and in the world” writes Carlo Luigi Ostorero, who explains it in just its birth and rapid decline took twenty years because “too distant from the canon of tradition, from Roman times and from the supreme and ever-looming Renaissance, Liberty was officially considered too free an interpreter of what was supposed to embody the spirit of construction or, better, completion , of the nation’s physical project”.