Villa Romeo Faccanoni

Considered the second most imPortant, among the buildings built by Giuseppe Sommaruga in Milan, after Palazzo Castiglioni, the villa Faccanoni was at the time of construction an elegant example of residential architecture built in Art Nouveau style for a bourgeois client of the beginning of the last century . The property developed on three floors for a total of 337 square meters and included a large concierge and a garden of more than 2000 square meters. The floral-style decoration was made by the Mazzuccotelli company as regards the wrought iron works and by the cabinetmaker Eugenio Quarti who took care of the interior decoration. The compositional scheme of the villa was very close to what the architect was experimenting in Sarnico for other members of the Faccanoni family, in which the desired asymmetries of the plan allowed to perceive a variety of views and points of view of which today unfortunately we can no longer to enjoy. The current building in fact presents itself in the new guise of a private Clinic (Columbus Clinic) after the intervention carried out on a project by Gio Ponti at the end of the 30s who enlarged and transformed the rooms of the villa using a series of technical-constructive measures (the rooms to the south, the communications and floor controls in the center of gravity of the structure, the balconies, the medicine and surgery wing that directly overlook the garden) which still testify to the quality of the project. On the outside, the main facade and the two sides still retain elements of the original Sommarughian decoration, as well as the façade overlooking the garden where the two female statues by Ernesto Bazzaro were placed, removed from the Portal of Palazzo Castiglioni.
The villa at number 48 in via Buonarroti was built between 1912 and 1914 for the engineer Luigi Faccannoni based on a project by the architect Giuseppe Sommaruga, who had designed two other similar buildings in the same area near the nearby trade fair. , the Galimberti buildings on via Buonarotti (1908) and Salmoiraghi (1906) on via Raffaello Sanzio. In 1914 the two statues removed from the Portal of Palazzo Castiglioni in Corso Venezia were placed on one of the façades of the villa, which had caused so much discussion and which, due to the nakedness of the female figures, had earned the most imposing of the works of Sommaruga and Milanese liberty architecture the nickname "Ca de 'Ciap".
In 1919 the villa Faccanoni was bought by the car entrepreneur Nicola Romeo. Between 1938 and 1940 the extension and rearrangement works were carried out on the building, used as a private clinic, based on a project by the architect Gio Ponti. The latter made use of the collaboration of the surgeon Mario Donati to adapt the spaces of the residential building to the new intended use with a design criterion based on the idea that a domestic and comfortable environment, far from the aseptic spaces of traditional hospitals is more similar to a home, could allow the patient to be treated as a man and not just as sick. Work interrupted due to the war, the factory suffered several damages due to the bombings of 1943 and was completed only after the end of the war. The Columbus Clinic was inaugurated only in 1949 and derives its name from the "Columbus Hospital", founded in New York by the missionary Francesca Cabrini in 1894 to assist Italian emigrants.The whole history of the building can be read in the monograph "Giuseppe Sommaruga (1867-1917). A protagonist of Liberty", edited by Andrea Speziali, CartaCanta editore 2017.