CASA BOSSI, IN NOVARA, ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING AND DEBATED WORK, BY ALESSANDRO ANTONELLI, WILL MAYBE HAVE A FUTURE

TODAY IN A GRAVE STATE OF NEGLECT
DESANTI AND THEN BOSSI HOUSE IN NOVARA (1859)
A WORK BY ALESSANDRO ANTONELLI 




"Of extreme vanguard and great architectural quality" (Franco Bordino), 
"The heart of stone"  (Sebastiano Vassalli) 


COULD BE ABOUT TO BEGIN A NEW LIFE

Alessandro Antonelli, great italian architect from 19th Century, also author of the Mole Antonelliana in Torino, already Israeli Temple, which is today site of one of the most beautiful italian museum, the "Cinema Museum", has realized many works in Novara and surroundings, between which we show you in this article, as one of the most significant works created by the Master.

Bossi House in Novara - 1857, original project, prospect of the main facade.

Taccuini Internazionali dedicates to its readers this article
dedicated to Bossi House

AN ACT OF LOVE FOR BOSSI HOUSE

by Eliana Frontini

So much has been said about Bossi House, since the far 1997, when Astrea Association (a free association of Novara citizens for transaprency and administrative efficiency), once verified that the building constructed by Alessandro Antonelli was in a very bad state of preservation and that the variouss political initiatives carried out until then were only intentions without any concrete fact, had publicly declared the intention of "adopting" the building.Bossi House has been inhabited until the eities of the last century, then it was closed, and from then on Novara citizens have observed its degradation, that makes the building more crumbling year by year. In 1999 the roof was rebuilt to avoid the definitive collapse of the building.Today, something seems to move in behalf of repair: in the past months a new association, the "Love Committee for Bossi House", with president Roberto Tognetti, has been constituted. The purpose is promoting, together with Novara's Municipal Administration, which own th house, Bossi's house knoledge, conservation, valorization and recovery, through the research and the settlement of suggestions for a use that can promote, suggest and produce "culture", and contribute to the economic and social growth of the town and its territory. Anyone con join Love Committee for Bossi House, with a minimum donation of 2 euros.

 

Alessandro Antonelli - Bossi House in Novara

in a picture taken at the beginning of the past century

But how come Novara's cituzens are so "in love" with this old residence? What is its story? Even protagonist of a novel by Sebastiano Vassalli, "Heart of Stone", which makes it a "character " to all intents and purposes, Bossi House was projected in 1857 by Alessandro Antonelli for Luigi Desanti, a nobleman coming from Corsica. Originally, it was just an enlargement and modification of a preexisting building from the 18th century, which Desanti had purchased from Marchioness Amalia Coconito of Montiglio. The building was than sold to Kt Carlo Bossi in 1880 by Desanti's daughters, since he died in 1865. When even his heir Ettore Bossi died in 1951, the building became property of Dominioni Civic Institute, which in 1970 sold the most part of its furniture at auction.

The remaining pieces were unfortunately victims of stealing and act of vandalism., whose signs you can see inside the house. It was a reale pity, because Bossi House was full of frescos on walls and ceilings, from simple still life paintings to complicated trompe l'oil (literally "deceive the eye", a pictorial technique that consists of painting could rapresent a window, a door, a sky, to give the false impression of a bigger room).Antonelli used anyware the dictates of neoclassical style, which he managed to personalize with original and charecteristic ideas.

 

Alessandro Antonelli - Bossi House in Novara, in a picture of this day and age

Neoclassicism is the name given to the cultural movement developed in Europe and America between the 18th and the 19th Century. As the term indicated, it was born from a renewed interest for ancient art, the geek-roman one in particular. It is essentially an art of ideas, in which the artist summarrized every work's tradition, exactly like Antonelli did, in Bossi House, in particular: the main facade, which faces the Bulwark, has an elegant vestibule with six columns that support a big tympanum. Practically... a Pantheon in min iature! The facade, between a floor and another, fllowing the best classical tradition, is dedicated by a frieze divided in metopes and triglyps.

 

Alessandro Antonelli - Bossi House in Novara, plan of the first floor

But the greatest and most useful idea Antonelli applied in Bossi House was a separation between the rooms disigned for the servitude and the ones used by the owners, giving life to a solutions of a great functionality: the main stairs of the building, wide, majestic and refined, were designed for the owners and couldn't be used by the servitude; but alongside the main stairs, Antonelli inserted other ones, definitely smaller, which you can't see from the outside, riserved to the domestic staff... Antonelli had understood that the building had to follow a new bourgeois mentality, open to social relationships. Moreover, the building is a real constructive miracle, like all other Antonelli's work: surprisingly you can't find any bearing wall, but the weigth is equally distributed on pillars and columns. The tympanum that completes the facade, then, is passable and praticable from the inside, like a panoramic veranda open to the city. The new association periodically opens the inside of Bossi House to public, and you can proceed until the internal garden to attend cultural demonstrations and guided tours.

 

Alessandro Antonelli, Bossi House in Novara, transversal section on the entrance level

This is the way Vassalli concludes the novel dedicated to Bossi House: " The big house on the bastions is always there, looking at the plain and the far mountins through the empty orbits of its windows, waiting for something we don't know (Nobody in the world knows how to make much of it).
During the nights with the moon, sometimes you can see a shadow moving from a ruined hall to another ruined hall, from a smashed attic to another smashed attic. It's a nocturnal bird; but somebody says it is the Architect..." (Sebastiano Vassalli). It was 1996

 

Alessandro Antonelli, Bossi House in Novara, in a today picture taken from the backside, towards the internal courtyard, which proves the state of total neglect.

Eliana Frontini

Novara, July 2010
(published also on "Nuovo Sestante" n. 40, august-september 2010)