History

Angelo Marogna designed the Clemente showroom when his Liberty idiom was still forming — five years before the Villa Sisini commission would give it its most refined expression, and two decades before his last known project in 1930. The building brought the decorative ambitions of the early Italian Liberty movement into the commercial streets of Sassari’s historic centre at a moment when the style was at its height across mainland Italy.

The Fratelli Clemente commission is characteristic of how Liberty architecture spread in provincial Italian cities: not only through grand residential villas but also through the shopfronts and commercial premises of the aspiring middle class. Catalogued and protected by the Sardinian regional authorities, the building has survived into the twenty-first century as one of the earliest surviving Liberty commercial frontages in the city.