Villa Solinas — Gaetano Urbani’s Gothic Villa on Rimini’s Marina (1874)

History

Rimini’s seaside town did not grow by itself; it was built on purpose, and it began with bathing. In 1843 the brothers Ruggero and Alessandro Baldini opened the first bathing establishment on this shore. Thirty years later the municipality, under mayor Pietro Fagnani, took the establishment into public hands and set about turning the empty ground between the city and the sea into a residential quarter. The avenue that now carries Prince Amedeo’s name was then known simply as the Stradone dei bagni, the baths road, with trees along both pavements.

To get villas built, the council gave plots away. In 1874 Gian Maria Solinas Apostoli was awarded his for nothing. He was, in the words of the historian Giovanni Rimondini, “certainly not a nobleman of high rank, but a great bourgeois, a figure of some weight in the national Parliament and the financial world, whose career culminates and ends with his appointment as senator”. He came from Sassari and belonged to the mixed bourgeois and aristocratic world that ran post-unification Italy; the connection with Rimini may have come through Enrico Serpieri, who owned mines in Sardinia and from 1863 chaired the Cagliari chamber of commerce, or simply through Rimini’s own members of parliament.

The design went to Gaetano Urbani, the municipal engineer, who built the first villas of the new quarter and who was following what was then the newest thing in Europe: the Gothic revival inside the wider eclecticism of the 1870s. Rimini Sparita’s account is blunt about the result — Urbani gave Villa Solinas characteristics “not found in any other building” here. Rimondini devoted a whole book to the villa and to Urbani’s first ten villas of Marina Centro.

The garden was laid out in the English manner, irregular, with winding paths and statues; Urbani had seen and admired the gardens of the Ardenza at Livorno, and drew on them here and for the gardens of the bathing establishment. The fountain that faces the front of the house is the work of the Rimini sculptor Filogenio Fabbri — which places it well after the villa itself, since Fabbri was born in 1880; he is the same sculptor who made the Fountain of the Four Horses a few hundred metres away. The decorated iron railing along the street survived the regime’s requisition of metal before the Second World War, and is still there.

The setting has changed around it. In 1964 the parish church of San Girolamo went up next door in the frankly modern forms given it by the architect Luigi Fonti, and the villa now stands against it — a contrast that is the first thing anyone walking the avenue notices.