History

Turin entered the twentieth century as one of Italy’s most industrially dynamic cities, and its western arteries — Corso Francia foremost among them — filled rapidly with apartment buildings for the professional middle class. The decade surrounding the First World War brought a particular flowering of ornamental ambition, as architects pushed the Liberty idiom toward its most theatrical extremes before the austerity of stripped classicism and rationalism would close the curtain on organic ornament.

Casa della Vittoria belongs to this closing act. Built around 1920, it arrived at the moment when Liberty was already giving way to new currents, yet its designer — attributed in local tradition to Gottardo Gussoni, though documentary confirmation remains limited in publicly accessible sources — showed no interest in restraint. The building commands its corner on Corso Francia with a confidence that borders on bravado: five residential storeys culminate in a medievalising tower whose Lombard-Gothic biforate windows and corbelled parapet sit incongruously, and memorably, above an otherwise sinuous Art Nouveau mass.

The name “della Vittoria” likely commemorates the Italian victory of 1918, a dedication common to streets and buildings completed in the immediate postwar years. The popular sobriquet Casa dei Draghi came later, coined by the residents and passers-by who noticed the building’s most singular feature: writhing dragon- and sea-creature-like figures deployed across the facade’s terracotta and stone ornament. Whether these creatures were intended as symbols of protection, as decorative fashion, or as a deliberate nod to the heraldic tradition of northern Italy remains a matter of local legend rather than documented intent.

Throughout the twentieth century the building remained in private residential use, escaping the more drastic alterations that stripped ornament from many comparable Turin blocks during the postwar housing boom. It stands today as one of the more complete examples of late Liberty residential architecture in the Cit Turin quarter, a neighbourhood that retains an unusually rich fabric of early-twentieth-century apartment houses along its main boulevard.