Curated Itinerary
Italian Liberty — The Grand Tour
Italian Liberty was never one style: it was a European idea that seven cities each rebuilt in their own accent, and this route takes one building from each. It opens in Trieste at Casa Bartoli, where cascading acanthus ornament and iron-lattice balconies bring the Viennese Secession to Piazza della Borsa, then crosses to the Lido of Venice and the Grand Hotel des Bains — opened in 1900, immortalised by Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti, and silent today. Then Milan and Sommaruga’s Palazzo Castiglioni; Turin and the house Pietro Fenoglio built for himself in 1902; Florence and Michelazzi’s Casa-Galleria Vichi, a narrow facade erupting with sculpted flora beside the Arno; Rome and the enclave Gino Coppedè designed in the Trieste-Salario quarter; and finally Palermo, and Ernesto Basile’s Villa Igiea on the water. Two thousand kilometres, one grammar, seven dialects.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Casa Bartoli to Villa Igiea, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
Read the article
The magazine has a longer piece on this walk: Italian Liberty, the Grand Tour: seven buildings in seven cities.
Get this route — explore at your own pace
The walk and the notes are open to everyone, right here. To take the route with you — the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — you need a CHO account, and a free one is enough. We do not sell these routes: we build them ourselves and give them to the people who read us.
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This route was built with the tools we give operators.
Guides, associations and cultural operators build their own routes here: pick the stops from the archive, add your notes, and the map, the GPX and the printable version come out on their own. Your programme gets a permanent page, your events go on the city pages people read while planning — and if you sell your route as a road-book or a virtual tour, you receive 80% of the price net of tax.
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Casa Bartoli
A landmark of Viennese Secession Liberty in Trieste, Casa Bartoli rises at Piazza della Borsa with cascading acanthus ornament and iron-lattice balconies…
Grand Hotel des Bains
The grandest Belle Époque hotel on Venice’s Lido, opened in 1900 and immortalised by Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti — now silent, awaiting a long-promised…
Palazzo Castiglioni
Giuseppe Sommaruga’s Palazzo Castiglioni on Corso Venezia is the moment Milan’s Liberty grammar found its public face — sculptural mass, polychrome surfaces…
Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur
Pietro Fenoglio designed his own house on the corner of Corso Francia and Via Principi d’Acaja in 1902 — the moment Turin chose Liberty as a residential…
Casa-Galleria Vichi
Giovanni Michelazzi’s most ambitious urban statement: a tall, narrow Liberty facade erupting with sculpted flora on a Renaissance street beside the Arno.
Coppedè District – Virtual Tour 360°
The Coppedè District is a small, unrepeatable architectural enclave in the Trieste-Salario area of Rome, designed by the Florentine architect Gino…
Villa Igiea
Ernesto Basile's Liberty masterpiece on Palermo's Acquasanta waterfront — a grand hotel where the Florio dynasty entertained Europe's elite at the height of…
Download for tour navigation
🔒 The walk and the notes are open to everyone on this page. The files to take with you — the stop list as a PDF, and the GPX and KML tracks for your phone — come with a CHO account, and the free one includes them.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.