Walking Tour in Viareggio

Viareggio is not the obvious place for a Liberty walk: no palaces, no grand set pieces. What it has is five buildings strung along the seafront within about a kilometre of each other, and they are there because the town burned. In 1917 a fire took the wooden promenade, the line of bath-houses, cafés and shops that had grown along the beach. Viareggio rebuilt it in masonry, and a government commission that included Alfredo Belluomini, Ugo Giusti and the painter Galileo Chini set the style of the new seafront. These five buildings are what that decision produced.

What you see

Start at the Negozio Martini on Viale Regina Margherita, beside the Gran Caffè Margherita: the chalet shopfront Modesto Orzali designed in 1899, with ceilings by Tito Chini, from the generation before the fire. Struck by bombing in 1944, it was rebuilt in 1947 in simplified form and is still a shop, five bays of wooden pilasters on a marble base.

A few doors on, the Magazzini Duilio 48 of 1927–1930 is the department store of the reconstruction: pilasters, oval glass signs, curved corner windows and the interlaced 48 still riding above the door. Its designer is not recorded; the language is unmistakable. Then the Bagno Balena, where the 1928 entrance is Belluomini’s masonry under Galileo Chini’s majolica, one of the clearest pieces of the rebuilt seafront.

Turn inland for Villa Argentina, an 1868 villa remade in 1926, attributed to Belluomini, with Chini majolica and Giuseppe Biasi’s Persian wedding painted in the ballroom in 1930. It belongs to the Province of Lucca and is open for exhibitions. The walk ends at the Grand Hotel Royal on Viale Carducci: the old Palazzo Nelli, raised by Belluomini in 1925 into a hotel with twin towers and Chini ceramics, looking south down the promenade.

How to do it

On foot, five stops, about two hours including the time to look at the façades. The four stops on the seafront are within 200 metres of each other; the longest leg is 1.2 kilometres, from the Bagno Balena to Villa Argentina, and the walk closes with 900 metres from the villa to the Grand Hotel Royal. Measured on the streets, the whole route is 2.3 kilometres.

Under the map you find the track and the points to download for a phone navigator. The bathing establishments and the shops are open to customers, not for visits; the façades are seen from the street.

When to go

Morning or late afternoon, when the light comes in from the sea and the majolica reads clearly. July and August are the busiest weeks on the beach, and the seafront is crowded; April, May, September and October leave the pavements free and the buildings to yourself.

Read the article

The magazine has a longer piece on this walk, with a photograph of each building and the history behind it: Viareggio, five Liberty buildings on the seafront.