Sassari, Giordano Palace

Sassari, Giordano Apostoli Palace, interior

The building is part of the monumental layout of Piazza d'Italia, the most important in the nineteenth-century city.
Palazzo Giordano is located on the S side of the Piazza d'Italia, “vestibule of the new bourgeois city”. Built in 1878 for senator Giuseppe Giordano Apostoli, it was purchased in 1921 by the Bank of Naples, where it is now headquartered.
It was designed by the engineer Giuseppe Pasquale, who died before the completion of the work, and completed by the architect Luigi Fasoli, who took care of the details (the railings, the atrium, the balconies, the stairs, the flooring and the windows) and the decorative parts.
The building falls into that category of neo-Gothic that Rossana Bossaglia defines as “romantic-historical”, poised between the ideal sphere of the interpretation of Gothic in a modern key and historicistic inspiration.
Regarding the late-nineteenth-century interest in the city center, Amerigo Restucci highlights the “formal complacency” of the buildings that compose it. In Palazzo Giordano, this formal complacency is taken to the extreme, especially if we examine the manuscript compiled in 1889 by an anonymous author to whom Senator Giordano entrusted the task of celebrating his palace with a very detailed account of the structure and decoration of the building.
Rectangular in plan, with a façade divided into three levels with horizontal development, it has a lower floor with rustic ashlar vulcanite covering, on which, in the center, a portal framed by spaced pairs of protruding columns opens, and, on the sides, symmetrically alternating, arched doors and windows. A marcapiano frame separates this part of the building from the two upper floors, plastered, with double-glazed windows on the first and three-lobed single-light windows on the second level, all with ogival frames. The main floor has a central balcony that rests on the columns of the portal. The profiles of the building are marked by pilasters with frieze, while under the overhanging ledge, which holds the crowning balustrade, there is a series of arched hanging arches.
The subsequent sale of the building to the Bank of Naples led to the dispersion or loss of significant parts of the interior furnishings, but a sign of continuity is nonetheless given by the neo-gothic furniture that bears in part the coat of arms of Baron Giordano Apostoli, in part that of the credit institution, so much so as to allow for distinction, but also stylistic unity. The 1889 manuscript recalls that “all the luxury windows and cabinetmaking works [are] by the Clemente company, ornaments and stucchi del Galli”, implicitly underlining the compactness of the intervention from the beginning.
In the string of rooms overlooking the Piazza d'Italia and interconnecting, but also disconnected from corridors to the courtyard, the furniture was placed, as well as the doors carved with intertwined arches. It was above all the “yellow room” (today the representative hall of the banking institution) that exhibited a sumptuous decoration including a lowered pavilion with paintings by Guglielmo Bilancioni, stuccos along the frame, wall paintings pretending to be an upholstery, floor mosaics with a dancing girl, executed by Roman mosaicists on a design by the architect Luigi Fasoli, based on Pompeian examples. Even the staircase, surmounted by another painting by Bilancioni, shows a profusion of ornaments ranging from the bronze female figures that hold the lights to the wall decoration to the reliefs along the staircase. Here, the recurring decorative motifs reveal the extraordinary bestiary of medieval descent that adorns both this part of the building and the great hall, in keeping with the “gothicism” of the furniture.

History of studies
A review of studies can be found in the bibliography relating to the fact sheet in the volume of the “History of Art in Sardinia” on nineteenth-century architecture (2001).

Bibliography by
F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the end of the 1900s. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, sheet 11.