Ferrara, works at Palazzo dei Diamanti: Sgarbi collects signatures to stop them, the municipality retorts

Popular art critic and TV personality Vittorio Sgarbi has launched a collection of signatures to stop future works at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. In fact, the historic Renaissance building will see some rearrangement works about which there is a strong clash in the city: on one side there is Vittorio Sgarbi, according to whom the works will create an extension of the Palace that will be inappropriate and unbecoming, while from the Municipality come reassurances that they will simply be restoration works that will not alter the Palace.

In any case, Sgarbi, through the Cavallini Sgarbi Foundation, has taken action with a collection of signatures: “In Ferrara, the city of the Renaissance, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Palazzo dei Diamanti, the most important building of the Herculean Addizione,” the text of the petition reads, “is about to be assaulted, in its perfection, by an ”extension“ project costing 3.5 million euros, on which ”Italia Nostra“ has already expressed a negative opinion. The intervention stifles the building’s relationship with the city’s open space. And it takes on the same absurd significance as adding a canto to the Divine Comedy or Orlando Furioso would. The following collection of signatures is not against anyone, but to defend the integrity, threatened by a utilitarian vision, of a monument that belongs to humanity. What applies to Dante and Ariosto applies to Biagio Rossetti.” Sgarbi also proposed that, with the same amount of money that will be used for work on the Palazzo dei Diamanti, Palazzo Prosperi Sacrati should indeed be recovered.

On Change. org are the names of what would currently be about two hundred signatories to the petition: names such as former Minister of Cultural Heritage Massimo Bray, former FAI President Andrea Carandini, art historians including David Ekserdjian, Andrea Emiliani, Antonio Natali, architects Mario Botta and Pier Luigi Cerri, photographers Aurelio Amendola and Italo Zannier, writers Pietro Citati, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Claudio Magris and Moni Ovadia, journalists Furio Colombo, Roberto D’Agostino and Massimo Gramellini, entertainment personalities such as Albano, Mogol, Roberto Vecchioni, Sergio Castellitto, Luca Barbareschi and Alessandro Preziosi, and politicians from all sides of the political spectrum such as Massimo D’Alema, Luigi Brugnaro, Maria Stella Gelmini, Luca Lotti, and Leoluca Orlando.

The crux of the issue is the glass and steel pavilion that will be built in the garden of the Palazzo dei Diamanti: an unacceptable interference with the historic building according to Sgarbi, but the Municipality of Ferrara retorted in a press conference yesterday, entrusting the retort to the director of the Ferrara Galleries of Modern and Contemporary Art, Maria Luisa Pacelli: “Palazzo dei Diamanti is not being touched,” she specified, “it is being restored. The famous extension does not affect it: a completely reversible pavilion is being built in the back garden, and very far from the wall that separates the first court from the garden. This is.” In addition, the mayor of Ferrara, Tiziano Tagliani, already the protagonist in recent days of very harsh clashes with Sgarbi, specified in a press conference that some of the names of the petitioners in reality would not result. A concept also reiterated by Culture Councillor Massimo Maisto: “I would ask journalists, since so many people know them, to do some verification: because someone really signed, someone did not sign. And I think it is a serious thing.”

Below is the presentation of the project as per the communiqué of the team that will carry it out, and which is composed of 3TI Progetti, Labics, Elisabetta Fabbri and Vitruvio s.r.l.: “The new addition, in fact, bases its formal matrix on the same geometric logic that structures the Palace designed by Biagio Rossetti, a choice that allows the new intervention - different in language and matter - to enter the evolutionary logic of the existing artifact. The adoption of a single and rigorous geometric matrix that governs all measurements, from the main ones to the rhythm of the pillars, not only allows finding the correct measurement for each part, but also reveals the will to conceive the new addition as an element of relationship and not as an autonomous object. Consistent with the spatial structure of the Palazzo dei Diamanti-characterized by an alternation of solids and voids, building volumes and open spaces-the new intervention is arranged planimetrically in such a way as to ideally continue its logic: in fact, the new factory is distanced from the wall that concludes the 16th-century courtyard, realizing an additional courtyard that enriches the already valuable spatial sequence. In this way, the ideal path that from the entrance of the Palace, through or the body of the factory and the portico, arrives in the courtyard to the boundary wall towards the garden, continues in a new sequence that still alternates full and empty spaces. A sequence characterized by the presence of water, which gives the empty space a suspended character, and of the portico of the new building that restores depth to the gaze. [...] Finally, that condition of the unfinished that characterizes the Palazzo ferrarese, evident in the contrast between the richness of the exterior marble facings and the more bare character of the inner courtyard and the garden boundary wall, is also found in the new intervention: there is no cladding, no superstructure. The building is reduced to its essentials, to its pure structure, like an ancient factory in the making.”

Pictured: a rendering of the project.

Ferrara, works at Palazzo dei Diamanti: Sgarbi collects signatures to stop them, the municipality retorts

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