Liberty Torino

Turin is the only Italian city where Liberty was a movement before it was a style. The Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna opened in the Parco del Valentino in April 1902, ran until November, drew ten participating nations, and refused on principle to admit “simple imitations of past styles.” This was the moment Italian Art Nouveau decided what it wanted to be called and what it wanted to be.

Pietro Fenoglio (1865–1927) is the architect who answered the question on the walls. He graduated in 1886 from the Regia Scuola di applicazioni per gli ingegneri di Torino, entered independent practice in 1889, designed several hundred projects in roughly twenty-two years, and helped organise the 1902 and 1911 expositions. Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur, finished the year of the Esposizione, is the building most often called the purest Art Nouveau in Italy. Around it, in the Cit Turin and San Donato districts, his own houses and those of his peers — Gussoni, Benazzo, Vandone, Casanova — made a coherent neighbourhood out of a vocabulary the rest of Italy was still translating.