History

The Majani company, founded in 1796 by Teresa Majani as a confectionery business, had grown by the early twentieth century into one of Bologna’s most prominent commercial establishments. The commission for Via Indipendenza 4 was an act of branding: the client wanted a building as distinctive as the chocolate it sold. Augusto Sezanne, a Bolognese architect trained in the academic tradition but drawn to the formal vocabulary of the Vienna Secession and the French Art Nouveau, delivered exactly that.

The building drew sharp public criticism from the start. Bologna’s streetscape is medieval and Baroque; the Liberty facade stood directly opposite the seventeenth-century San Pietro Cathedral. Critics mocked it as “la sedia viennese” — the Viennese chair — targeting both its foreign stylistic reference and its angular dissonance with the surrounding arcades. The nickname has persisted to the present day.

In 1937, during the Fascist architectural rationalisation that swept many Italian city centres, the architect Melchiorre Bega remodelled the upper floors in the Rationalist style then mandated for commercial modernisation. In 1953 the building passed to a bank; in 2004 H&M converted it to retail use.