The party house Quirino De Giorgio built for his rural village of Vigonza: a brick block with a slender tower and a double loggia, designed to answer his theatre across the square.
At a glance
At the north-east corner of Piazza Enrico Zanella, where the borgo meets the road, stands a tall brick building with an open tower. It was built in 1936–1937 as the Casa del Fascio of Vigonza, the local house of the Fascist party, on a design by Quirino De Giorgio and as part of the same composition that produced the theatre, the market loggia and the houses of the Borgo Rurale Fratelli Grinzato. The party vanished in 1945; the architecture stayed. Restored, flying the Italian flag beside the town-hall area, it remains the vertical accent of the whole village.
Key facts
- Architect: Quirino De Giorgio (1907–1997); later reworked and extended by G. De Gaspari
- Built: 1936–1937
- Material: load-bearing exposed brick; brick-and-concrete floors; pitched roof in clay tiles
- Original use: Casa del Fascio (local Fascist party house)
- Catalogued: Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali, entry 0500251900
- Location: Piazza Enrico Zanella, Vigonza (Padua)
History
The casa del fascio was the first obligatory ingredient of any settlement the regime founded or re-founded, and at Vigonza it went up quickly, in 1936–1937, while the rest of the borgo was still on the drawing board. De Giorgio, then in his late twenties and running commissions across the whole province, gave the little town an unusually urban object: not a rural shed with a balcony but a compact palazzo in brick, with a tower open at the top like a belfry that never received its bell.
It is one of a series. Between 1936 and 1939 De Giorgio built party houses at Vigonza, Sant’Urbano, Noventa Padovana, Pontelongo, Piazzola sul Brenta and Rubano, each a variation on the same brief: a hall, offices, a place to speak from. After the war the building at Vigonza lost its function overnight, as they all did, and was absorbed into the ordinary life of the town centre; the national heritage catalogue records it, and a later campaign of works by G. De Gaspari reshaped and extended it. Today it stands restored at the edge of the square, a few steps from the municipal offices.
What you see
Two registers face the street: five round arches at ground level, and above them an open loggia of four rectangular bays behind iron railings, all in the same warm brick. The corner rises into a slender tower cut by a single tall arch, and between tower and block the parapet drops in one smooth concave sweep, a curve drawn to converse with the convex front of the theatre on the far side of the square. The two buildings face each other like question and answer.
Look at the wall surface itself: the brickwork is the ornament. Arches, piers and cornice are all drawn with the same module, the Venetian building tradition pushed toward abstraction, which is the signature of De Giorgio’s work throughout the borgo.
Reading the building
Cultural Heritage Online documents this building as a historical source. It was built as a Fascist party house and is recorded here as part of the fabric of the rural village of 1936–1938: we describe what stands, as a document of its years, without celebration and without erasure.
Getting there
The building faces Piazza Enrico Zanella in the centre of Vigonza, about ten kilometres north-east of Padua; it can be seen from the square and the street at any time, while the interior is not open to visitors. GPS (approximate, corner of the square): 45.44370, 11.98435 — open in Google Maps.
Nearby
- Teatro Quirino De Giorgio — Vigonza — the convex reply to this facade.
- Borgo Rurale Fratelli Grinzato — Vigonza — the village both buildings belong to.
- Ex Casa del Fascio — Rubano — the same brief, two years later, west of Padua.
Sources
- Catalogo generale dei Beni Culturali (ICCD) — Casa del Fascio, Vigonza, 1936–1937, entry 0500251900 (dating, materials, later works by G. De Gaspari).
- Echidna / Paesaggio Culturale — Teatro Comunale Quirino de Giorgio, on the concave–convex dialogue across Piazza Zanella.
- Comune di Vigonza — Archivio Quirino De Giorgio, on the architect and the borgo.
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