The poet who gave the street its name leans out of the balcony arch, carved in stone, watching the traffic.
At a glance
Casa Donzelli stands at Via Torquato Tasso 8, in the Porta Magenta quarter. It was built in 1913 to a design by the architect Enrico Zanoni, and is the last and latest of the three Milanese houses commissioned by the industrialist Beniamino Donzelli.
History
Donzelli (1863–1952) built three apartment houses in the same few streets in the space of a decade: Via Gioberti in 1903–04 and Via Revere later in the decade, both by Ulisse Stacchini, and this one, ten years after the first, by another hand. The sequence is a record of how quickly the language changed: by 1913 the Viennese severity of the first house had softened, and the ornament had become more literal.
What you see
The front reads as three vertical bays: two projecting bay windows at the sides and a central body faced in stone on the lower two floors and in fired brick above. The portal is a lowered arch, surmounted by a balcony carried on brackets and decorated with floral motifs in wrought iron. The french window opening onto that balcony repeats the lowered arch, and the arch is interrupted at its crown by a carved bust of Torquato Tasso — the poet after whom the street is named.
Cultural significance
The bust is the point. Liberty ornament was normally abstract or vegetal; a portrait of a sixteenth-century poet set into a 1913 facade is a piece of civic address, the building answering its own street name. It marks the moment when the style had become established enough to be used conversationally rather than programmatically.
Key facts
- Architect: Enrico Zanoni
- Built: 1913
- Patron: Beniamino Donzelli (1863–1952), industrialist
- Facade: two lateral bay windows, central body in stone and fired brick
- Detail: bust of Torquato Tasso set into the arch above the balcony
- Address: Via Torquato Tasso 8, Milan
- Coordinates: 45.4710 N, 9.1653 E
Practical information & getting there
Metro M1 Conciliazione, five minutes on foot. A private apartment building; the facade is the visit, and the bust is best seen from the far pavement, where the whole arch comes into view. The other two Donzelli houses, in Via Revere and Via Gioberti, are both within a fifteen-minute walk.
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