Bosa, Deriu House

The

Deriu house is accessed from Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, which runs through the urban center, damming the intricate road of “Cortes” and “Cascios” of the medieval town, on the route parallel to the Temo river. The course is one of the few results of the “Plan d'ornato” wanted by the city administration and designed between 1864 and 1867 by engineer Pietro Cadolini. The intervention to align the fronts of the buildings and to regulate the road had a particularly important moment in the demolition of the Church of La Maddalena (1870) and in the simultaneous opening of the Constitution Square, decorated a few years later (1881-82) with the vulcanite and marble fountain, the arrival point of the nineteenth-century aqueduct.
Casa Deriu, one of the most beautiful buildings on the main side of the street, predates Pietro Cadolini's urban design, because the date 1838 (which, moreover, could refer to the renovation of a pre-existing building) is carved on the side of one of the exhibitions of the two façade doors, enriched by overhanging entablature and columns carved in the local red trachyte.
It houses the Casa Deriu Museum.
The entrance hall is characterized - according to a type common in ancient Bosan homes - by the presence of three arches. One gives access to the warehouses, the other to the central stairwell, while the third has an ornamental function.
The plan of the three levels is the same: two larger rooms overlooking the street, two smaller rooms overlooking the square Modoleddu in the N and two small interior rooms without light outlets.
The first floor is reserved for temporary exhibitions, including a small room intended for the exhibition of local crafts. The third floor houses the permanent civic art gallery “Melkiorre Melis Collection”, linked by the Melis heirs to the Municipality of Bosa in 1989.
The main floor, which was reserved for a main residence, is an intact example of a nineteenth-century home for high-census families, in use until the recent past with largely original furnishings. The current layout of the apartment offers a circular path, starting from the entrance to the left of the landing, which allows access to the living room, connecting with the bedroom (with adjoining wardrobe). From here you pass through a sort of antechamber, with double access to the dining room, from which you exit back to the landing through a short corridor carved with wooden partitions, which constitute the walls of the toilets and another room probably intended for servitude.
Among the furnishings and decorations, the parquet of the living room, with geometric patterns taken from the fake coffered ceiling ornaments; the bedroom floor in 19th century Campania majolica, well harmonized with the vault painted with frames and flower vases of neo-eighteenth century taste; finally, the ornate Jugendstil of the dining room, attributable to the first decade of the twentieth century.

Bibliography by
F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the end of the 1900s, series “History of Art in Sardinia”, Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, pp. 88, 90;
M.A. Scanu, “Decorators and pictorial decoration in Sardinia between Eclecticism and Liberty”, in Mediterranean Studies. Culture, History, Geopolitics of the Mediterranean Regions and Europe, Cagliari, Hen Kai Pan, 2002;
S. Carboni, “Deriu House Museum and Atza Collection”, in Bosa between Water and Fire, Bosa, Municipality of Bosa, 2004.