Garage Musmeci
One of the city’s earliest purpose-built car showrooms, dressed by Fichera in flamboyant Liberty.
At a glance
On Piazza Bovio, near the corner of Via Francesco Crispi, Francesco Fichera (1881–1950) designed an unusual building around 1928. The ground floor held an automobile showroom, a new kind of space in the Liberty years, with the apartments of the owner, Baron Musmeci, above. Its exuberant ornament later drew the scorn of the rationalist architects of the MIAR, who saw it as everything the new architecture should leave behind.
Key facts
- Architect: Francesco Fichera (1881–1950)
- Original use: car showroom below, owner’s apartments above
- Style: flamboyant Liberty (Art Nouveau)
- Built: around 1928
- Location: Piazza Bovio, near Via Francesco Crispi
- Now: ground floor occupied by a car-parts shop
History
The motor car reached Catania in the first decades of the twentieth century, and with it the need for a new building type: somewhere to display and sell automobiles. Fichera answered with a showroom on the ground floor and a private residence above, a hybrid that captured the optimism of the early motor age.
Its Liberty dress did not age well in the eyes of the next generation. In 1931 the building earned a place in the “Table of Horrors,” the collage of works the MIAR rationalists mocked at Pietro Maria Bardi’s Roman gallery during their Second Exhibition of Rational Architecture. The episode is itself a record of how fast taste turned between the 1920s and the 1930s.
What you see
The building turns its corner with a chamfered face and a large rounded balcony, the kind of theatrical hinge that Liberty architects liked at a street junction. Colourful gilded mosaics and large carved face-masks run across the walls, the flamboyant detail that the rationalists found so objectionable.
It is a working building rather than a monument, but it remains one of the clearest survivals of Catania’s early-twentieth-century taste for ornament on every surface.
Practical information
- A private building on a city square; it is seen from the street.
- The ground floor is a working shop, so the corner is easy to find.
- Look up: the mosaics and masks are above eye level.
Getting there
Piazza Bovio lies between the San Berillo district and the centre, a short walk from Via Etnea and the Palazzo delle Poste. City buses serve the surrounding streets.
Nearby
- Palazzo delle Poste, Fichera’s post office on Via Etnea
- Via Etnea and the Giardino Bellini
Sources
- “Garage Musumeci, Catania”, Wikipedia (en)
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