Lido Favorites

Favorite thing: What happened, in fact, back in those years sounds incredible for/due to all the circumstances that have been mentioned above. It was in the years when "art nouveau" in various sectors, but especially architecture, was reaching maximum levels of approval in Italy (later than the rest of Europe) from architects who found it difficult, however, to find the necessary conditions of liberty in projecting and building due to the limited objectives that always required an already-established centre. In those years, however, the Lido, on the contrary, was actually emerging as a large seaside resort and this had led the entrepreneurial middle class, in particular Venetian (but not only), to purchase large tracts of land to build housing that was worthy of their level. They were favoured in this by the fact that this land cost very little because by then it consisted of neglected vegetable patches - compared to what they had been used for over centuries - given that their old owners were discovering how much more advantageous it was to use them for tourism activities, which at the time were undergoing major development.
That high inflow of customers and the almost complete freedom of planning in an almost deserted environment allowed many illustrious architects of the period to test out, on the Lido, the originality of that "art nouveau" that had been called "Liberty" in Italy. This application was not to be, however, a copy of foreign models that had already been tried out, because it was strongly influenced by the large architectural tradition of Venice. In fact, the Venetian style (in its diverse Romanesque, Byzantine and Gothic variants) was to be the basis of almost all the villa projects. The "liberty" aspect was to take shape not so much in the internal construction project as in the decoration of the external façade and the railings surrounding the garden. Or, at times, in the sense of complete freedom of creative expression, of genuine constituent eclecticism.