History

Giovanni Michelazzi was born in Rome on 11 July 1879 and trained there before settling in Florence in the early 1900s, at a moment when the city’s prosperous bourgeoisie was eager to replace the stolid historicism of late-nineteenth-century residential architecture with something altogether more spirited. The Liberty movement — Italy’s inflection of the international Art Nouveau wave — offered exactly that: sinuous plant forms, the total integration of craft and construction, and a programmatic refusal to quote from the past. Michelazzi would become a leading figure of Florentine Liberty, completing a body of work between roughly 1905 and 1920 that ranks among the most consistent and inventive of any architect working in the city during those years.

The Ravazzini commission came in 1906. Ettore Ravazzini, a local entrepreneur, owned a plot in the quiet residential zone south of the Arno that had been opening up to development since the late nineteenth century. Michelazzi produced a design that retained the conventional volumetric envelope of a Florentine villino — three bays, two principal storeys above a rusticated base, a shallow pitched roof — while dissolving every surface between the structural elements into decorative incident. The construction contract went to the Gherardelli company, and the building was complete by 1907.

The ceramics were entrusted to Galileo Chini, whose firm Arte della Ceramica (later known as Fornaci San Lorenzo) had by then supplied decorative programmes to some of the most ambitious Liberty interiors in Tuscany. For Villino Ravazzini, Chini produced polychrome panels of stylised floral ornament — wisteria, iris, and abstract vegetal scrolls — that fill the spandrels and friezes between the four pilaster strips of the facade. The chromatic palette, running from warm terracotta through sage green and cobalt blue, gives the building a warmth and immediacy that photographs struggle to convey.

Like most of Michelazzi’s work, the villino passed out of public attention almost as soon as Liberty fell from critical favour after the First World War. Several of his buildings in Florence were demolished in the post-war decades. Villino Ravazzini survived, passing through private ownership without significant exterior alteration. It was eventually listed by the Ministero dei Beni Culturali as a building of historical and artistic interest, which has since protected it from unsympathetic modification. Scholarly attention returned in the 1980s and 1990s, when Italian architectural historians began reassessing the Liberty heritage; the villino now features in most serious accounts of Florentine fin-de-siècle architecture and in the itineraries published by Italia Liberty.