«Why are they great architects? Because they projected a small provincial city into the future». With these words, the Culture Councillor of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, Marco Mietto, presents a truly courageous exhibition. “The construction of the modern city. The archives of twentieth-century architects in Reggio Emilia” is the result of monumental and painstaking archival research that has touched technical studios, families and especially the special archival collections of the city’s Panizzi Library. The exhibition, curated by Giordano Gasparini and Andrea Zamboni, is accompanied by a truly stunning catalogue, published by thedotcompany edizioni, which in its four hundred pages manages to explain what the work of a group of professionals who inhabited both their own time and the near future meant for the city of Reggio Emilia.
AA.VV., “La costruzione della città moderna”, installation view at Palazzo da Mosto, Reggio Emilia, 2025, © outThere, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
Viewable at the Renaissance Palazzo da Mosto and promoted by the Magnani Palace Foundation in collaboration with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and the Panizzi Library, the exhibition is ideally divided into ten rooms where visitors can closely observe the thinking, preparation, and fabrication of the city’s buildings by Guido Tirelli, Pietro Cavicchioni, Prospero Sorgato, Carlo Lucci, Osvaldo Piacentini and the Architects and Engineers Cooperative (Antonio Pastorini, Eugenio Salvarani and Enea Manfredini). These are, as Giordano Gasparini stated, «professionals who had international connections and carried within themselves very innovative visions», and in this exhibition they are placed «under a great spotlight thanks to an enormous amount of documents, technical drawings, sketches, and photographs». Indeed, as Andrea Zamboni adds, the exhibition lends itself to «different levels of interpretation, starting from the core consisting of the central tables in the palace rooms, then moving on to personal and curricular elements of the architects, and finally entering into the genesis of the buildings, seeing their final form and urban contextualization». Because, ultimately, architecture is also a way to read the administrative and social history of a place.
AA.VV., “La costruzione della città moderna”, installation view at Palazzo da Mosto, Reggio Emilia, 2025, © outThere, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
The fifty-year period from 1913 to 1963 is revisited through some of the most significant works of public and private construction, and thus through a series of styles that have marked the successive eras. Eclecticism, rationalism, brutalism, and other styles closer to our time characterize these works that can constitute, following the city streets, a true educational and knowledge tour. The exhibition features. The exhibition features 129 works by Guido Tirelli, not only from Reggio Emilia, but also from other areas. This exhibition focuses in particular on the Albergo della Posta (1910-13 and 1926). Rebuilt on the splendor of the 13th-century Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, it has served as a hotel for five hundred years and features a Grand Hall decorated with one of the city’s most prestigious pictorial cycles, commissioned by the architect himself, Giuseppe Tirelli. Today it presents an ensemble of styles that largely combines eclecticism with neo-sixteenth-century taste. Prospero Sorgato was the protagonist of a major event held in Reggio Emilia in 1922, the first and only edition of the Agricultural, Industrial and Labor Exhibition, which also included side events that today we would call an off-circuit. The architect’s name is linked primarily, but not only, as the exhibition demonstrates, to Villa Zironi (1925), an example of Sorgato’s creative vein and meticulous attention to both interior and exterior details.
AA.VV., “La costruzione della città moderna”, installation view at Palazzo da Mosto, Reggio Emilia, 2025, © outThere, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
Speaking of villas built in the early 1900s and inspired by styles from the distant past, mention must be made of Villa Ferretti-Mazzoni (ca. 1925) and thus architect Pietro Cavicchioni. Seeing it, one seems to be standing before a fortified castle, such is its exterior might. Neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque influences alternate in some of the most significant villas designed by Cavicchioni, who also left a strong mark on other public buildings such as the Open-Air Cinema and the Station Hotel. A religious anthology instead features Enea Manfredini, starting with the Chapel of the Arcispedale Santa Maria Nuova (1962). The predominant style is neo-rationalism, with clearly exposed concrete; the chapel truly seems like a temple with a truncated pyramid roof that further exalts the architectural brutalism. The skyscraper at Porta San Pietro is a collective work in a city with a very strong cooperative and associative presence: it is indeed signed by the Architects and Engineers Cooperative (founded in 1947) and Osvaldo Piacentini, and dates to 1951-53. With underfloor heating and condominium waste recycling, the building was truly innovative thanks to the contribution of a group that was more a project community than a simple ensemble of professionals. They are responsible for the first Coop supermarket in Reggio Emilia (1963), as well as the first self-service (with cart) that introduced the escalator to the city, until then unknown.
AA.VV., “La costruzione della città moderna”, installation view at Palazzo da Mosto, Reggio Emilia, 2025, © outThere, courtesy Fondazione Palazzo Magnani
The Ambra Cinema (1950-52, with double entrance on two different streets) is one of Carlo Lucci‘s flagship projects. Shell-shaped auditorium, movable screen to allow other types of performances, perfect acoustics and visibility are the guiding principles of this building designed by a non-Reggian architect, as Lucci was originally from Florence, and a great theorist of interweaving the contemporary with the ancient. Antonio Pastorini and Eugenio Salvarani are also an important part of the Cooperative’s history, from which they left in 1956 to begin careers as soloists and often as a duo. The building created for the Max Mara company stands out, on the partially decentralized Via Fratelli Cervi: the experience of visiting today’s contemporary art collection is enhanced by the luminosity that floods the spaces thanks to the large windows designed for work activities in the five-year period 1956-61. But the exhibition doesn’t end here: five videos and an extensive calendar of specific seminars enrich this immense research work and deserved tribute to visionary men. And again, three site-specific works physically accompany the route, resulting not as mere embellishment but as significant artistic testimonies in dialogue. In the internal courtyard “Poetically Man Dwells,” an enameled iron installation from 2011 by Graziano Pompili; at the beginning of the actual exhibition route “Greetings” by Angelo Davoli (oil on laser print from 2006) and also “The Painters’ Cooperative of Reggio Emilia” (oil on canvas from 1890 by Augusto Mussini).
Info:
AA.VV., The construction of the modern city. The archives of twentieth-century architects in Reggio Emilia
22/11/2025 – 8/02/2026
Palazzo da Mosto
Via Giovanni Battista Mari 7, Reggio Emilia
www.palazzomagnani.it
I am Giovanni Crotti, born in 1968, and I feel obliged to thank writing because it drives my life. I cultivate within me multitudes that lead me to investigate, know, and deepen every cultural and creative expression, and then write about it, always trying to be clear and documented in the contents.
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