Italian Liberty had no more forceful voice than Giuseppe Sommaruga. In a career of barely two decades he gave Milan its most argued-over palace, raised a grand hotel on a mountain above Varese, and showed what the new style could do when it stopped whispering. Cultural Heritage Online keeps his key buildings in its archive. This is the life behind them.
Brera, Boito, Broggi
Sommaruga was born in Milan on 11 July 1867. From 1883 he attended the courses of the Brera academy, studying under Camillo Boito — the theorist who shaped a whole generation of Italian architects — and from 1887 he trained in the office of the architect Luigi Broggi. In 1891 he earned his diploma qualifying him to teach architectural drawing. The formation was academic. What he did with it was not.
Palazzo Castiglioni and the scandal
The building that made his name went up on Corso Venezia between 1900 and 1903. Palazzo Castiglioni was Milanese Liberty at full volume: rugged stone swelling into floral ornament, balconies and lamps of wrought iron by Alessandro Mazzucotelli at his most inventive. Two nude female figures by the sculptor Ernesto Bazzaro proved too much for the city; judged scandalous, they were removed from the facade. The removal only added to the palace’s fame — and to its architect’s.
The industrialists’ architect
Sommaruga became one of the most sought-after architects of Milan’s entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, and his buildings read as portraits of that new industrial money: confident, unembarrassed, built to last. The Faccanoni family of contractors gave him a string of commissions in Sarnico, on Lake Iseo — a villa in 1907, an infant school and the family mausoleum — and his houses and tombs carried the Liberty language across Lombardy at every scale, from apartment block to cemetery plot.
A hotel on the mountain
Above Varese, high on the slopes of the Campo dei Fiori, he built the most ambitious resort project of the Italian Liberty season: the Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori (1908–12), a long, crested silhouette designed to command the mountainside as Varese grew into a fashionable destination. The hotel operated for decades and closed in 1968; it has stood largely empty since, opened to visitors only a few days a year by FAI, the Italian environment fund — a Liberty time capsule suspended above the lakes.
The last villa
His last great Milanese work rose at Via Buonarroti 48 between 1912 and 1914: a compact stone villa for the Faccanoni family, its ironwork again by Mazzucotelli. A few years later it was bought by the industrialist Nicola Romeo, whose name Alfa Romeo still carries. In 1914 Bazzaro’s exiled nudes from Palazzo Castiglioni were placed against its side, where they remain — the scandal of 1903 quietly rehoused in a garden. The villa now houses the Clinica Columbus, with a rear building added by Gio Ponti between 1938 and 1940.
An early end
Sommaruga died in Milan on 27 March 1917, at forty-nine, with the war emptying Italy’s building sites. Italian Liberty did not long outlive him; taste turned, and the style he had argued for at full volume fell out of fashion within a decade. The buildings survived the argument. Protected, restored and still debated, they remain the loudest and most convincing case for what Milanese Liberty was.
In the archive
Follow Giuseppe Sommaruga across Cultural Heritage Online — the buildings he designed, the city context and the anniversaries we mark:
- Palazzo Castiglioni, Milan — the Corso Venezia palace (1900–03) that announced Milanese Liberty.
- Villa Romeo-Faccanoni, Milan — his last great villa (1912–14), home of Bazzaro’s relocated statues, today the Clinica Columbus.
- Grand Hotel Campo dei Fiori, Varese — the mountain-top grand hotel (1908–12), closed since 1968.
- Liberty Milano — the city’s Liberty context, from Corso Venezia to Porta Venezia.
- Milan — Liberty, Rationalism and the World Capital of Design — the full city story.
- 11 July 1867 — the birth of Giuseppe Sommaruga, in the CHO anniversary calendar.
- 27 March 1917 — the death of Giuseppe Sommaruga.
