When the British aristocracy invented the Grand Tour around 1660, they came to Italy to draw ruins. They sketched the Forum, copied Raphael, bought antiquities, and went home. They missed, by two hundred years, an Italy that did not yet exist: the Italy of Liberty. Between 1898 and 1914 a different country was being built — wrought iron over brick, ceramic flowers on stucco, peacocks above doorways in Milan, Palermo, Turin, and a Venetian sandbar called the Lido. You can walk that country today. Almost no one does.
What was the Grand Tour, and what it missed
The Grand Tour was an educational rite. From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, young aristocrats — mostly British, increasingly German and French — travelled south to Italy to complete their education. They went to look at antiquity and at the Renaissance. They studied the Forum in Rome, the ruins of Pompeii after 1748, the bronzes of Florence, the Venetian vedute of Canaletto. They came home with souvenirs. The Grand Tour shaped European taste for two centuries.
What the Grand Tour did not show its travellers was the Italy of the future. The country they walked through had no electricity, no national rail network, and no unified state. The Risorgimento was still decades away. The bourgeoisie that would commission Italian Liberty did not yet exist as a class. The villas that today line the Lido di Venezia, the floral-eclectic palazzi of Milan, the Sicilian villini of Ernesto Basile — none of these were imaginable in 1750. By the time Italian Liberty arrived, the original Grand Tour was already a memory.
The seven cities of Liberty Italy
Liberty Italy is concentrated in seven cities. Each has its anchor architect and its anchor building. None requires more than a long weekend on foot.
I. Milan · Palazzo Castiglioni
Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867–1917) designed Palazzo Castiglioni between 1901 and 1903 for the entrepreneur Ermenegildo Castiglioni. Brera-trained, he learned from Camillo Boito; the building reads as Liberty’s monumental wing — heavy stone base, ferrous Liberty railings, plaster grotesques above the cornice. The original female nudes by Ernesto Bazzaro on the facade scandalised 1903 Milan and were moved before opening: they survive at Villa Romeo-Faccanoni further north.
II. Turin · Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur
Pietro Fenoglio (1865–1927) built Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur at Via Principi d’Acaja 11, on the corner of Corso Francia, in 1902 as his own home and studio. Wrought iron, stained glass, pastel pigment. Fenoglio designed over three hundred Liberty projects in the city — the largest single concentration of Italian Liberty architecture in any one urban fabric — clustered in the Cit Turin district, walkable in a single afternoon from this corner.
III. Genoa · Castello Mackenzie & the Stock Exchange axis
Gino Coppedè (1866–1927) built Castello Mackenzie, Palazzo Zuccarino, and Villa Canali Gaslini for Genoa’s shipping and insurance bourgeoisie; his brother Adolfo designed the Liberty interiors of the Palazzo della Borsa (1906–1912). Harbour-city Liberty along Via XX Settembre and the Stock Exchange axis — a heavier, more capitalist register than Palermo’s southern Liberty, with bronze fittings, granite cladding, and the visual vocabulary of marine insurance offices.
IV. Venice · Hotel Excelsior, Lido
Giovanni Sardi (1863–1913) built the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido for the Compagnia Italiana Grandi Alberghi. It opened on 21 July 1908 with three thousand guests for an inaugural ball that ran past dawn. The east facade reads Moorish from the lagoon and Liberty from the boardwalk — minarets, Venetian arches, ceramic stripes, all on a building that was, in 1908, the largest seaside hotel in the world. The Lido walking circuit from the Excelsior west along the boardwalk reaches Villino Eden, Villino Mon Plaisir, the closed-since-2010 Grand Hotel des Bains, and a string of Liberty villas commissioned for the Venetian summer set between 1900 and 1914.
V. Trieste · Casa Bartoli
Max Fabiani (1865–1962), Otto Wagner’s pupil, built Casa Bartoli on Piazza della Borsa between 1905 and 1906. Vienna Secession in Italian air — a rare building where the Austrian and the Adriatic vocabularies meet legibly. The facade is sober where Sommaruga’s Castiglioni is theatrical: pilasters disciplined to the verticals, ornament thinned to ribbons, the ground floor opened to the square in plate glass. Trieste, irredente until 1918, holds the only Italian Liberty corpus where Vienna is the dominant grammar.
VI. Rome · Quartiere Coppedè
Gino Coppedè (1866–1927) designed the Quartiere Coppedè in the Trieste district between 1915 and 1927: a cluster of palaces and villini around Piazza Mincio with the Fontana delle Rane (Fountain of the Frogs) at its centre. The original plan listed eighteen palaces and twenty-seven smaller buildings; the realised count differs. Coppedè merges Liberty floral detail with medievalist, baroque, and Gothic citations — technically Liberty in date and bourgeois patronage, but stylistically the closest Italian Liberty ever comes to film-set fantasia. The Palazzo del Ragno, the Villini delle Fate and the Ambassador palazzo are the recurring backdrops for fashion editorials of the last decade.
VII. Palermo · Villino Florio
Ernesto Basile (1857–1932) designed Villino Florio between 1899 and 1902 for the Florio dynasty, the Sicilian shipping and banking family that financed half of Palermo’s belle époque. Roman, Norman, and Arab grammar braided through Liberty floral detail; Basile, who would later design the Palazzo Montecitorio extension in Rome, was the southern wing of Italian Liberty — warmer pigments, deeper porches, ornament drawn from Sicilian medieval cosmati rather than from the Vienna Secession. A 1962 fire gutted the interior; restoration finished only in 2003.
Why this is the right time
Italian Liberty was unfashionable for half a century. After 1918, Déco took over. After 1945, Modernism dismissed ornament outright. Liberty buildings were demolished, gutted, repainted, or simply forgotten. Many of the protected villas on the Lido today survived more by inertia than by policy.
The recovery is recent. Italian municipalities began listing Liberty buildings as cultural heritage from the 1980s. Photography of the era, on social platforms, accelerated public recognition only in the last fifteen years. The Quartiere Coppedè in Rome went from neighbourhood curiosity to recurring backdrop in fashion editorials. Casa Galimberti in Milan became a postcard.
Recognition is not protection. Several major Liberty buildings remain at risk: the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido has been closed since 2010, with restoration stalled. Genoa’s bourgeois palazzi along Via XX Settembre lose decorative detail with every commercial renovation of the ground floors. The case for walking these cities now, in 2026, is straightforward — what you can see today may not be visible in the same condition a decade from now.
Where to start
The original Grand Tour belonged to a generation that travelled by horse. The Liberty Grand Tour belongs to anyone who can walk a city. Each of the seven cities is a half-day to a full day on foot, with the buildings concentrated in compact districts: the Lido, Coppedè, Cit Turin, Galimberti, the Olivuzza, Piazza della Borsa, Via XX Settembre. You do not need to commission a guide, hire a coach, or book a year in advance. You need a map and a slow afternoon.
Sources
- Pietro Fenoglio — Wikipedia — biographical dates, Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur 1902, role in Turin Liberty.
- Giuseppe Sommaruga — Wikipedia — 1867-1917, Brera training under Camillo Boito.
- Palazzo Castiglioni — Wikipedia — Sommaruga, 1901-1903, scandal over Bazzaro nudes.
- Ernesto Basile — Wikipedia — 1857-1932, Villino Florio 1899-1902.
- Max Fabiani — Wikipedia — 1865-1962, Otto Wagner pupil.
- Casa Bartoli — Arte Liberty in Italia — Fabiani, 1905-1906, Piazza della Borsa.
- Gino Coppedè — Wikipedia — 1866-1927, Quartiere Coppedè in Rome and Genoese palazzi.
- Hotel Excelsior, Lido — Wikipedia (it) — Sardi, opened 21 July 1908.
- Castello Mackenzie — Wikipedia (it) — Coppedè, Genoa.
