City of Art. The 20th Century La Spezia

The Old Town, dominated by the huge bulk of the St. George fortress, the 19th century city and the Naval Arsenal, a city with the grace of the liberty style and futurist artistic vertigo. The 19th century endows La Spezia with another soul, affording a great range of artistic trends from the first half of the XX century to be seen by the visitors of today.
The higher parts of the city around the upper ring road clearly bear these marks, as they had been set aside mainly as residential areas and also the public buildings, often expressing an intensely emotional “civic” ethos. Piazza Verdi and the surrounding area are emblematic in this respect, where there is a harmonious concentration of this aspect of the city. Palazzo Vivaldi and palazzo Contesso face onto the upper part of the square at the junction with via Chiodo, the latter being originally a particularly finely decorated seaside hotel, some decorations still visible in the sculptured parts and subdued chromatic contrasts.

The great solid structure of the Central Post Office, designed in 1933 by Angiolo Mazzoni, has a whirl of mosaic work representing land, sea and air communications, a work by Fillia and Prampolini inside the tower at the top, created to celebrate the futuristic city, its dynamic spirit and technical victories. Then we have Palazzo degli Studi, finished in 1923, a work by the architect from Carrara Armando Titta and Palazzo Giachino
at the beginning of via Veneto, built in 1912 and quite probably referable to Vincenzo Bacigalupi. With its compact volumes, its formal elegance is entrusted to the projected and painted decorations both on the facade and under the porticoes, mixing vaguely suggestive neo-medieval decorations with classical formulae. The Palazzo del Governo (government house), designed and built after the Province system had been set up in 1923 and a work of that prolific Franco Oliva, is a classic of the classicism typical of the 30’s. Inaugurated in 1928, the building is abundantly decorated by statues and commemorative bas-reliefs by Augusto Magli, extraordinarily merging in with the architectural volumes creating an impressive overall effect.
Palazzo Boletto, elegantly placed to close up the square towards the sea, was built in 1927 to a project by the architect Bacigalupi. The building was originally smaller than it is now, effectively coinciding with the western wing only and was extended in 1933 by adding an eastern wing, again designed by Vincenzo Bacigalupi.
Uphill behind the square we have Palazzo San Giorgio, at number 9 via dei Colli, designed by Raffaello Bibbiani in 1927, an important example of civic architecture where the flowing well-proportioned volumes are magnified by the wealth of decorations on the building by Augusto Magli; again the Fondega buildings, built by Vincenzo Bacigalupi in the period running between 1906 and 1914, subsequent to parcelling out the estates belonging to the marquises Oldoini located here, and Pensione Orioli, a building with quiet tones built as a hotel and now a private house, designed by the futurist Manlio Costa in 1935-’36 and here a gentle advocate of an eclectic style of residential building.