A new museum has been opened in Rome, after a lengthy and intricate campaign repair which are still in progress on others buildings in the Park of Villa Torlonia.
The Villa Torlonia complex has been expropriated and opened to the pubblic from the Municipality in the 1978 but, while the park has been used immediately, the uncertain conditions in which the buildings were, imposed lengthy and expensive repairs.
The "Casina delle Civette", plunged among the Californian palms and Himalaya cedars, was planned by the architect Jappelli in the 1842 like a "capanna svizzera" and reflected the purpose of solitary and romantic refuge: primitive and wild, typical of english gardens.
From1908 widening works of the architects Fasolo e Cambellotti changed it in the "Casina delle Civette" which became the favourite residence of Torlonia's prince.
Fasolo was inspired by the style of the Middle Ages: moorish greenhouse, medieval towers, Gothic cathedrals, drooping roofs, oriental fantasies.
All enriched by a fantasious sequence of elements, made of stairs, merlons, tiled drooping roofs, coloured ceramics and a brick wall at sight. Cambellotti added stained-glass windows with naturalistic decorations.
A particular care has been take in the fittings of the octagonal cupola all covered with boiseries and stuccos.
"La Casina delle Civette" is called so because there are many decoration elements inspired to the owl's theme or others nocturnal birds such as griffons and bats.
In the build, restored after a lenghty series of repairs, it's now contained a unique museum of the kind, either for the topic handled or for the tight association between the materials used and the structure of the Casina itself.
"La Casina delle Civette", is indeed, a museum of the roman versatility, in which we can see the development, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century.
Characteristics of the museum are the beautifull stained-glass windows, made by precious polychromes glasses.
They have been made between 1908 and 1930 by artists such as Umberto Bottazzi, Duilio Cambellotti, Vittorio Grassi, Paolo Boschetto, and they offer a unique exemple to study the evolution of the stained-glass windows in Rome in those years.
To conclude an outline of the stained-glass windows the "Sovraintendenza Comunale" has bought on the market many others of them of the same authors to set up this particular museum.
Among the best stained-glass windows we can remind "the owls" by Cambellotti and "the peafowls" made by Bottazzi, showed in the 1912 glass-window exhibition and from then disappeared, traced and brought recently from a private collection.