ASTALDI SMALL VILLA

VILLINO ASTALDI

Via Niccolò Porpora 22/Via Saverio Mercadante

1920/23 Arnaldo Foschini (1884/1968) e Attilio Spaccarelli (1890/1975) for the engineer Adolfo Sebastiani

The original name was VILLINO ROSMUNDA and the architectural style was the traditional one very common at the time, the so called Cinquecentismo (revival of the sixteenth century), even though adorned with decorative elements typical of the Roman Barocchetto

RAISING OF ONE FLOOR

1955/56 Mario Ridolfi (1904/84) and Wolfgang Frankl (1907/94) for the Maria Luisa and Sante Astaldi owners of the building since 1954

For about three decades, from 1950 to 1980, the villa hosted a literary salon attended by various personalities from the Italian cultural world

"The Astaldi Small Villa, celebrated for the memory that ties it to the figure of Ridolfi and never to that of Foschini is, today, a work of architecture among the most complex. It is the symbol of the past that has ceased to flow in the present and a trip through the restlessness of our modern consciousness: not only a stratification that, as a geological repository, shows the trauma of the various periods of styles, but also the representation, visible, of a critical demolition of an entire season of Roman architecture and a break of which we still carry the scars. (...) Mario Ridolfi, one of the best architects in the Rome scene demolishes the top volume of the attic of the building to build a large floor of reinforced concrete, protruding from the top. A new building was so created, freely resting, it seems, on a kind of artificial soil, on modern ruins: 'completely detached - in the words of Ridolfi - and disengaged from the rest', it is devoid of the organic link that, in Rome, has always tied pre-existing constructions to the new ones. For this history of lacerations, Villino Astaldi seems to synthesize, in an exemplary manner, values ​​and contradictions of modern Roman architecture, where the quality of architecture is confronted with the fragility of rules and the sense and character of constructed evidence seems to become uncertain, even in the consciousness of the best architects" (Giuseppe Strappa - The value of a symbol, in Corriere della Sera on 04.03.2006)

After the death of the Astaldi couple the building was the headquarters from 1983 to 2006 of the association ITALIA NOSTRA to which it had been bequeathed

In 2006 it was sold for 12.85 million euro to a cultural association