Vita gazette – The sixth edition of International Liberty Week, the Art Nouveau Week, returns to Europe from 8 to 14 July 2024. The 2024 Italian edition has happiness as its underlying theme.

Another fantastic week of events begins to stay away from smartphones and communicate with natural beauty. Italy celebrates its Art Nouveau architecture and design with guided tours of Liberty landmarks as part of the fifth edition of Art Nouveau Week from 8-14 July 2024. 150 Art Nouveau villas will be open to the public for a week.

The Art Nouveau style—known in Italy as Liberty—was famous across Europe between 1890 and 1910. It was inspired by natural forms and structures, particularly the curved lines of plants and flowers, as a reaction to the outmoded academic art of the 1800s.

The Art Nouveau Week, from 8 to 14 July, organised by the Italia Liberty Association, represents the first edition of an international event created to celebrate the artistic movement which overwhelmed the traditional academy between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Italy celebrates its Art Nouveau architecture and design with guided tours of Liberty landmarks as part of the fifth edition of the Art Nouveau Week, from 8-14 July 2024.

The dates were not chosen at random: between 8 and 14 July, both Giuseppe Sommaruga, one of the protagonists of Italian Liberty, and Gustav Klimt, master of the Viennese Secession, were born.

The style in Italy

The floral style had its first testimony in Italy in Palermo at the end of the nineteenth century and in 1902 at the international modern decorative art exhibition in Turin, generally at the Italian shows of those years. The Milan Exposition repeats two unique characteristics: that of fitting the doors between two tall truncated pyramid pylons, often surmounted by statues, acclimated by an enormous Ionic volute, and that of making the doors and windows ovoid or round instead of rectangular. When he accepts these doors of ancient and logical form by exception or the need for closure, he never fails to enclose them within another oval or round opening. In the rest, he is free: perhaps only because of his freedom, he believes he is modern.

Professor Renzo Canella wrote in 1914:

“We use this generic name to indicate new architecture since none of those names, floral, liberty, etc., have a serious character to be universally accepted. This art cannot be called floral, not corresponding to the truth, since all new art does not intend to decorate itself only with flowers and plants but extends to every field, being as varied as the imagination of the builders. The same can be said for the name liberty. The Art Nouveau style was nothing more than an attempt to apply decorative lines to architectural lines. It was begun in England by a draper named Liberty and kept particularly to a straight line terminating in a graceful and elegant curve. Still, it soon degenerated into the art of the secessionist school, which was based on the prevailing principle of the jagged line.”