I’ve already written extensively about the great Italian operatic composer Giacomo Puccini’s houses. My two main posts are at
https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/from-the-villa-by-the-lake-to-the-bungalow-by-the-sea/
and at
https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/where-turandot-grew-up/
This is an extract of what I wrote in 2013 when I looked over the fence at Giacomo Puccini’s last house:
A similar fate of neglect appears to be that awaiting Puccini’s last house in Viareggio. Not too many know about this house or where it is. I was determined, however, to find it and clear directions from a newsagent on Viareggio’s esplanade took me there. It’s, in fact, opposite the Pineta di Ponente, a couple of blocks from the seafront.
Why did Puccini move to Viareggio when he loved his little villa at Torre Del Lago so much? For two reasons: first, a peat extraction company had moved near his villa and started digging with mechanical means, producing noise which the sensitive master (or anyone else, for that matter) couldn’t tolerate. Second, the master’s health had begun to deteriorate, largely through his eighty-a-day (and five cigars) smoking habit (he especially favoured gold-tipped Sobranie) and it was thought that somewhere nearer a big centre like Viareggio would be more convenient, especially in days when roads and communications were not what they are now. In Viareggio Puccini had a ‘bungalow’ built for him by one of his favourite architects.
(Actually, I should add that Puccini had already owned the land on which he was to build his dream house since 1915. He had bought it, in fact, for his mistress, baroness Josephine von Stengel , who subsequently thought better and returned to her husband Arnold von Stengel ). Sadly, she died in 1926 just two years after Puccini’s death, aged just 39.
If you think that a seaside bungalow evokes visions of Peacehaven-on-sea then think again. The new bungalow is a marvellous thing, built in an eclectic style by architect Vincenzo Pilotti, and with ceramic decorations by Galileo Chini who went on to teach architecture and design at the court of the king of Siam (now Thailand) whose throne room he decorated. Indeed, there is an oriental perfume about this house.
I wonder, however, if, like the Chinese courtiers, Giacomo still hankered after his beloved Torre Del Lago. He certainly must have missed the easy reach of the second of his three great hunting passions, shooting at water-fowl on the lake. (The other two of the composer’s hunting passions, if you didn’t know them, were good opera libretti and beautiful women).
It is impossible to get into Puccini’s last house and almost impossible, too, to view its exterior in its entirety – so overgrown is the garden around it. One can’t even read the commemorative plaque placed on its façade clearly.
All this, however, is going to change. In 2011 a court decision resolved the litigation which had been going on as to Puccini’s house at Viareggio and authors’ rights. The Fondazione Puccini gained two-thirds of the remaining rights for the operas (from ‘Fanciulla’ onwards) and also received the Viareggio villa – acquisitions equivalent to a sum of well over a million euros. I hope that it’s going to open to the public in the not-too-distant future….
In fact, nothing changed until 2015 since there were further significant court decisions to be overcome, also relating to the fact that the property had become ‘demaniale’, i.e. state-owned. In Italy, if anything becomes ‘demaniale’ it regrettably may predict an atrophic disaster.
In 2016 I wrote (extract):
Viareggio’s supreme Chinese connection is a building which conveniently lies between Via Marco Polo, the first Italian traveller to China, and the Piazza Puccini. It was the house Puccini had built by his architect friend Pilotti (who’d also designed his villa at Torre Del Lago) with decorations by Galileo Chini. (Chini incidentally designed the scenery for Puccini’s last opera). With an almost Indochinese, indeed Laotian feel to it, the building provided the immortal maestro with a much needed escape from the noise that the newly-founded peat extraction factory near his beloved Torre Del Lago villa was now grinding out. (How could even the famous Puccini not have stopped this factory from being set up? What regard did the Italian government have for their greatest composer’s peace and quiet?).
Chinese-looking, indeed Indo-Chinese looking, is this highly attractive bungalow now thankfully saved from the disastrously dilapidated condition I last saw it in a few years ago. A victim of a typically interminable Italian law-suit the villa finally became the property of the Puccini foundation in 2012. The garden had been cleared of its brambles and I was at last able to read the plaque placed on one of its walls.
La comunità di Viareggio promette di costudire consacrati a GIACOMO PUCCINI
e casa e bosco che furono reggia e giardino alla splendente regina Turandot.
(The community of Viareggio promises to look after the house and the woods, consecrated to GIACOMO PUCCINI, which were the palace and garden of the resplendent queen Turandot).
Let’s hope they really carry out that promise this time!
The portico is lovely and reminded me of a sweet country place we’d stayed at Luang Prabang, Laos last December.
But the cherry on the icing was that it was in this very house that Puccini composed his masterpiece, Turandot, all about the tortured love of Calaf for the ice-cold Chinese princess, Turandot, who eventually melts into his arms when she discovers the secret word ‘Love’:
La casa e bosco che furono reggia e giardino alla splendente regina Turandot
If love makes the world truly go round then I was surely moved. Like his neighbours during the time Giacomo Puccini was composing his last opera, I imagined I could catch the music from this transcendently ecstatic work on his piano (now at the Villa Torre del Lago).
On Saturday 23 June this year I was privileged to visit Puccini’s last house at Viareggio for the very first time. The visit had to be pre-booked and was to be described as an overview rather than an official visit. No interior photographs were allowed to be taken, principally for the reasons of security and for the fact that, frankly, the present condition of the house is rather dilapidated and not what your standard historical villa tourist would like to be presented with. The visit was free but its aim was to encourage visitors to publicise its presence and to help in finding generous benefactors.
The house looks towards the pine-wood and not towards the beach. Evidently Puccini didn’t like the sea! Another thing: Puccini was only able to enjoy the house for very few years. It was finally completed in 1921 (with the characteristic Italian tradition of ‘tettoiaggio’ i.e. placing a flag on the completed roof and having a party) and in 1924 Puccini died in a Brussels clinic after a supposedly successful operation.
We were greeted by Signor Viani, who has a distinguished family tree which includes one of Italy’s greatest twentieth century painters, Lorenzo Viani. We were then shown around by three charming girls from Viareggio’s secondary schools who were very well prepared in their knowledge of the house.
They explained that the true architect of the house was Puccini. He would thumb through ‘House and Garden’ type magazines from all parts of the world and when he found something that he liked, whether it be the design of a balustrade or the beams on a ceiling or the shape of a fireplace, he would consult his architect Vincenzo Pilotti. (Strangely, a school friend, who became one of the United Kingdom’s most distinguished architectural writers, but who sadly died at the end of last year, signed his brilliantly written critiques of modern architecture in ‘Private Eye’, Piloti –this time, of course, alluding to Le Corbusier’s trade-mark of standing buildings, stilt-like, on rows of concrete pillars).
Even if Puccini called it his ‘bungalow’ the house actually has two storeys although the ground floor could more appropriately be entitled the basement.
The details of the house are absolutely stunning and all chosen by Puccini from his artist friends, especially Chini who was in charge of the ceramics:
I felt that the house owed quite a bit to Frank Lloyd Wright, in particular the Darwin D. Martin house with its horizontal emphasis and its layout with an L-shaped format. I was told, in fact, that Puccini received house design magazines from the U.S.A. where he’d scored a great success with ‘The Girl from the Golden West’, starring Caruso as Dick Johnson in a work specially written for the greatest tenor of all time, in 1910. (For more detail see my post on Enrico Caruso at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/the-greatest-of-all-singers-his-villa/ )
We first visited the piano nobile. Here we were shown Giacomo and Elvira’s son Antonio’s bedroom with his en suite bathroom complete with attractive tiles and a bidet. We saw the dining room with a dumb waiter connected to the kitchen below and a service room where Puccini’s servants would wait to attend to their famous household at dinner time. We then saw another fabulous bathroom with beautiful chamfered orange tiles and next Giacomo and Elvira’s two bedrooms (for they slept separately, although their beds were placed with the respective headboards next to each other and just divided by a wall. Puccini’s bedroom had a little door leading down a narrow staircase to his study in the ground floor (or basement) where he would do his composing, mostly at night.
We then walked down a long and wide corridor leading to the main staircase and were advised not to descend if we suffered from respiratory or allergic dysfunctions. It was easy to see (or smell) why. The dankness in the basement, the mould of the walls, the floor, which until quite recently had been submerged in a foot of water, emanated that decayed smell of advanced decomposition and putrefaction which one associates more appropriately with Edgar Allan Poe tales.
Here were the servants’ quarters and an ample kitchen with a large cooking area. Here too was the central heating boiler, albeit a little rusty. Here were the pipes leading to the chunky radiators in the floor above and here, too, was the creator’s kernel, the piano room and, adjoining it, the library where he would keep his music scores (which included everything from Palestrina to Wagner to Debussy and to the latest productions of Schoenberg – Pierrot Lunaire).
It was empty, all empty: the piano on which he composed everything from Madama Butterfly to Turandot, now in the pristinely kept tourist mecca of Puccini’s house in Lucca; the shelves decayed and vacant, the decorations and stencils eaten away by the inexorably devouring dampness.
And yet….
….I have never come closer to Puccini’s ethereal presence as in this house. As we entered the maestro’s study situated below his bedroom and reached by a hidden staircase and were told that it was here that he composed all that remains by his own hand of ‘Turandot’, and as a recently discovered film (now digitally projected) showed him in this very room, walking past the same staircase that was next to us, looking into the fireplace that stood before us I felt my whole being shiver and my eyes became moist. It was an overwhelmingly traumatic experience which I have never quite experienced before and which I did my best to hide at the time.
We emerged into the garden which Mr Viani and his volunteers had cleaned up so that it now looked less like a Cambodian jungle than ever before. We admired the sprinkler system Puccini had had installed, the first one in Italy. We saw the caretaker’s house with, below, the garage where the master kept his last car, a Lancia Lambda which Puccini regarded as the best vehicle he’d ever bought (he usually didn’t drive his cars after the disastrous accident of 1903 which almost cost him his life and preferred to be chauffered instead (even on a motor-bike, in the side-car, naturally…). The garage entrance was the first in Italy to be self-opening. Puccini loved the latest technology!
I was particularly moved by the paw marks of Puccini’s favourite English setter dog set in concrete near his kennel. I don’t know the name of the dog but dogs were Puccini’s companion for many years in his favourite occupation (apart from writing operas and seducing women) which was hunting.
I could not find much sign of the radio aerial on the roof of the house for Puccini was also one of the first Italians to own a radio and receive broadcasts. At an evening with friends that included Toscanini he switched on the radio and heard a live broadcast from the New York Met of his opera ‘Madam Butterfly’. Toscanini said to Puccini, listening intently through the somewhat crackly reception ‘that proves Giacomo that you and your art truly belong to the world.’ So true!
Later, as my friends and I relaxed in the wonderfully restored art deco (Aldo Castelfranco, 1938) setting of Viareggio’s premier bathing establishment, the ‘Principe di Piemonte’ we admitted that we all of us experienced the same haunting feeling that Giacomo Puccini was looking at us with his gaze, half of ‘mestizia toscana’ and half of ‘spensieratezza’.
I have visited many houses of famous composers: from Beethoven’s in Bonn, to Mozart’s in Salzburg and Vienna, from Dvorack’s in Prague to Handel’s in London but never, in their beautifully restored and presented interiors, have I felt such almost frighteningly real presence of their illustrious musicians.
I applaud Mr Viani and his small band of volunteers who have saved our princess Turandot.
For more information see:
