Coriolano Monti and Bologna after Unification

We asked some questions to Daniele Pascale Guidotti Magnani, architect and researcher at the Department of Architecture of the University of Bologna, who recently wrote a volume on Coriolano Monti.

Who was Coriolano Monti and why a book about him?

Coriolano Monti was a key character both for the urban history of Bologna and also because he brought the architectural theme of the porticoes into the contemporary world. His work in the years immediately following the Unification of Italy was crucial because he was chief engineer of the city from 1860 to 1866. In this role he was responsible for carrying out a series of urban modernisation works made necessary by new transport needs and, in some cases, also for quite apparent speculative reasons. Among these works are above all the new Via Farini and Piazza Cavour, the so-called Falansterio in Via Saragozza and the building housing offices and flats in the Canton de’ Fiori (perhaps the first example of a bourgeois block of flats in Bologna, on the Turin or Paris model). His training was quite traditional: he studied in the academies of fine arts of his native Perugia and Rome; in Rome he then became politically engaged in the exhilarating circumstances of the Roman Republic (1848-49). This event, unfortunate in itself, however, was a harbinger of profitable opportunities for Monti, who on that occasion befriended Marco Minghetti; it was that same great Bolognese statesman who remembered him during Bologna’s annexation to the kingdom of Sardinia and installed him as chief engineer in his hometown. Curiously, the period that Monti spent in Bologna was his most professionally profitable time: he resigned in 1866 because he had been elected a member of Parliament, and from then on he dedicated himself almost exclusively to politics until his death in 1880. In Bologna his work was continued above all by Antonio Zannoni, a multi-talented professional who restored the Roman aqueduct and adapted it for modern needs, and who completed various architectural projects in the areas already affected by Monti's works.

What new materials did your research rely on?

The historical-architectural research on Monti’s Bolognese years was greatly facilitated by the fortunate preservation of a significant number of his autograph drawings, preserved in the State Archive of Perugia. Luckily, these drawings (perhaps due to their large size) were sold by the family and collected during the 20th century by a Perugian historian, Ottorino Gurrieri; upon the latter's death, they were deposited there. These drawings had never been published on a large scale. However, they were already known, for example, to Giuliano Gresleri who had some of them displayed as part of the Norma e Arbitrio exhibition, organised for the Bologna Capital of Culture celebrations in 2000. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Unification of Italy, I was lucky enough to consult them in full and to exhibit several reproductions in a small exhibition curated by the Dimore Storiche Italiane Association. Although Monti's drawings are still available for viewing (although in some cases they need restoration work), his most personal papers remained in the hands of the family and traces of them were lost upon the sudden death of the last descendant, Rita Monti (who, moreover, was a committed historical researcher and student of her illustrious ancestor). This is a serious loss, but I sincerely hope that in the future this further collection of documents may re-emerge. Of course, it was also important to study the documentation kept at the Historical Archive of the Municipality of Bologna, which for the post-unity years is particularly rich in drawings, letters, reports and minutes of the Municipal Council: all this material allows us to understand Monti's design thinking and his ideas of urban management.

Is there an underlying theme through Monti's works, in your opinion? Style? The presence of the portico as often as possible? Anything else?

The unifying characteristics of Monti's works are both purely architectural and of another kind. On the one hand, some stylistic and spatial threads can be recognised: the portico is used in compliance with the urban character of Bologna and in general Monti’s façades do not deviate from proper neo-Renaissance style, which was widely used at the time as a means of formal validation for a newly founded State. You can therefore recognise some recurring styles, such as the use of aedicule windows with triangular and curvilinear tympanums, superimposition of orders and ashlar frames.

But the interest in Monti's work is not limited to stylistic matters, which itself often leads to academic outcomes verging on the punctilious. It is perhaps more interesting to learn that his work was based on some basic principles, often reiterated in his reports and letters. Such ideas were crucial in the aesthetics and in the professional ethics of the mid-19th century: profit and economic return for the owner, and for the public administration, bourgeois decorum devoid of flashy rhetoric; convenience intended as a spirit of adaptation to the deep typological, volumetric, formal reasons of the building; economy and the sense of pragmatic savings that always led him to choose poor (and local) materials such as brick and terracotta. The result of this practice was that of a reassuring formal medietas, or moderation. Paradoxically, this can be considered one of Monti's successes: although his architectural works conform to an honest design process (often of good quality), his greater abilities are to be found in urban design. For Monti this is never a violent act, but generally an action of good adaptation to an existing context, without upheavals dictated by circumstances unrelated to the real functionality of the urban fabric.

Why do you think he has been forgotten? We certainly owe Elena Gottarelli for rediscovering him. What more do we know now?

Paradoxically, the cause of Monti's fading from memory lies in his ability to adapt to the Bolognese context. Monti became “classical” in a very few years and, at the dawn of the new century, with the gutting of the Mercato di Mezzo and then, in the Fascist era, of Via Roma, which is now Via Marconi, Monti's work appeared so mild and low-key compared to these disrespectful later operations. His work is now so integrated into the historical fabric that it emerged as a reassuring architecture, now typical of the urban image of Bologna. Another reason was probably the multi-decade work of Rubbiani and then of Comitato per Bologna Storica e Artistica, which tended to highlight and enhance a historical era, i.e. the medieval and Bentivolean age, which Monti, for reasons of training, had never fully appreciated, nor had he been inspired by it. Monti's works, in fact, were very good for building that post-unitary bourgeois Bologna, but they certainly could not aspire to duly represent the city's aesthetic identity as Rubbiani and his associates had sought to do, based on the art and architecture of the years of municipal and stately autonomy. It can be said that in the years after unification, a desire for uniformity, a desire to build a national style prevailed in all Italian cities, whereas towards the end of the century lines of thought emerged that tended to exalt the ‘particular’ and local histories. Think, for example, of the extraordinary collection of local styles and forms put in place in the Roman Exposition of 1911 to celebrate the 50 years of Unity. In this context so massively shaped by Rubbiani's thought and work, Monti's output was destined to have no critical luck.

Elena Gottarelli's studies were crucial to his rediscovery: her Urbanistica e architettura a Bologna agli esordi dell’unità d’Italia, published in 1978, finally did justice to Monti. And at the same time, this important historiographical work remained partly isolated: the 1970s were those of the extraordinary Bologna Historic Centre renovation plan – but the municipal technicians’ attention was turned above all to the minute fabric of the historic city, which they saw as an emblem of the not only architectural but above all social character of the city. In that historical and political context, Elena Gottarelli had chosen a field of investigation that looked at the historic centre of Bologna, but which at the same time was somehow against the grain. The recovery plan studies on the historic centre of Bologna focused in fact on the ancient fabric, leaving aside what was made from the second half of the 19th century onwards: only a century later, Monti's work had not yet been well understood (Gottarelli’s perspicacity becomes evident) and perhaps it was still considered an emblem of a bourgeois Bologna, far from what was considered the true character of the city. Yet, Gottarelli had lucidly understood that "the undoubted integrity of the historic centre of Bologna should be more realistically considered a “19th century integrity”, as she stated at the beginning of her book. Rubbiani's narration of medieval Bologna and the popular Bologna of municipal technicians of the 1970s was ill-suited to explain a post-unification Bologna enervated by the pragmatic and “modern” ideals espoused by Monti. Paradoxically, the Bolognese are more aware of Monti today, in times of gentrification of the historic centre, obsession with urban decorum, or social network aesthetics. In this case, the elegant enfilades of the porticoes of Via Farini, for example, seem to respond better to an unconscious desire for order and decorum developed also by the tourist boom the city is experiencing. But this is an interest that stops at the surface of Monti's work and in general of 19th century aesthetics, without considering its profound socio-economic reasons and cultural implications, as Gottarelli did, and after her, Aurelio Alaimo and Axel Körner. When we talk today about the modernisation of Bologna's infrastructure networks, we must always emphasise that Bologna not only has a medieval or Renaissance past, in some ways picturesque and tourist-friendly, but has also had over the centuries a continuous aspiration to modernity, first with the Napoleonic age, and then with the work of Coriolano Monti. He put a lot of energy into the improvement of city streets and was the first designer of the current Via dell'Indipendenza, thought of as a valued artery for the progress of Bologna.

What is the value or what are the values of Monti's work in Bologna?

In general, the value of Monti, recognised by Gottarelli and by those who came after her, is the ability to adapt gracefully to pre-existing architecture: Monti adopted colours close to the traditional Bolognese hues, never avoided the use of the portico, and generally appreciated the forma urbis of Bologna. However, the reality of the late 19th century must be taken into account: before the Rubbianesque interventions, Bologna had not yet recovered that medieval and Renaissance image (real or invented) that we today attribute to the city, made of exposed or plastered brick façades, terracotta cornices, and battlements. The Bologna that Monti could see was a somewhat ‘smoother’ city, where the 14th-15th century decorations had largely been abraded and replaced by uniform plasterwork with an invariable reddish colour. In general, Monti managed to make the city more modern almost without aesthetic upheaval. An example is given by his designs for the shops on the Portico della Morte or in the Canton de’ Fiori: Monti definitely innovated the store model by introducing in Bologna the commercial shop window that we still know today and that until then did not exist. It is a masterful case in which technological innovation (in this case the industrial development of ever larger panes of glass) directly (and brilliantly) affects the way of designing.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the urban design skill demonstrated by Monti. This is particularly evident in the case of Via Farini, where Monti managed to insert a new bourgeois road into a medieval fabric, carefully altering the pre-existing junctions (notable is the soft-curve junction with Via Santo Stefano, or the beautiful intersection with the San Mamolo road) and masterfully dosing the alternation between narrower and more dilated spaces. Of great effect was the widening of Piazza Cavour, the true heart of the new bourgeois city — a modern financial ‘forum’ — where Monti managed to pragmatically solve the problem of grafting Via Farini onto Via Garibaldi. The latter was a street inherited from the previous government and which showed all the problems (especially on the western side) arising from the total absence of effective planning. Monti dedicated a care to solving urban problems that seems almost always absent in the later works. Think of the anonymous open space (later enhanced by a garden) of Piazza Minghetti, overlooked by the truncated buildings (completely detached from the context) of the Cassa di Risparmio and the Post Office; or Via Rizzoli and Via Ugo Bassi, where the richness of the materials used fails to hide the paucity of ideas.

Ultimately, Monti's work in Bologna was impressive and pervasive, and above all capable of encouraging positive changes in the hitherto strictly conservative mentality of the political, administrative and employer class. The age of urban transformations in Bologna was a positive experience, but it was to be the definitive conclusion of the intentions developed in the last years of papal power. As in other cities in Italy, Bologna had to wait for the ’70s and ’80s for new and grander works. Monti died in 1880, when the demolition pickaxes were finally beginning to open the new Via Indipendenza, a project that he had aspired to for the entire duration of his mandate. Perhaps, if the intertwining of politics and expediency had allowed Monti to start his work from here, the whole of Bologna would have benefited, emerging immediately after the completion of national unification as a city equipped with modern road infrastructure and at the service of the railway.

In the private archive, are there documents that tell the personal story of his relationship with the city or with the porticoes or the Bolognese people?

In his approach to the city, Monti undoubtedly behaved in a authoritarian manner, and this caused considerable bad feeling, even within the technical office he himself founded and organised. Although some young designers such as the fervent Zannoni and the diligent Priori were faithfully by his side, others, perhaps because they considered themselves somehow damaged by the presence of a ‘foreign’ technician, always worked with him unwillingly. Few owners adapted benevolently to the projects of the chief engineer, and there were actually many attempts to profit at the expense of the public. Protests also took place, as in the case of the powerful Marquises Pizzardi or the Counts Tacconi: it is no coincidence that their palaces were completed only after the departure of Monti. Clashes with the Bolognese intellectual class and above all with Monti’s colleague Fortunato Lodi, professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, were almost continuous. Relations with his young colleague Giuseppe Mengoni were also unhappy: their disagreement over the Porta Saragozza square, actually triggered by Mengoni but managed with diplomacy by Monti for as long as was possible, has deprived us of any solution for that area, which has remained a large space without any real design. In general, the Monti that emerges from his correspondence with the administration after 1864 is a man aware of the value of his own work, but somewhat tired of the continuous attacks he was subjected to: perhaps this is also the reason that led him to move to Florence and then again to his native Perugia.

As for the porticoes, Monti certainly knew how to adapt to the Bolognese genius loci that saw in them, since the famous 1288 edict, an integral element of the urban form; this is also demonstrated by the description of one of the projects competing with the Monti design for the railway station street. It was that of the engineer Neri, who considered the presence of the porticoes fundamental also in new buildings "to maintain the character of our city". Monti managed to grasp the importance of the portico for the city at a functional level. However, it should be noted that Monti, linked to an academic style imbued with the study of the architecture of the mature Renaissance, is not always benevolent towards Bologna’s porticoes in stylistic terms. Proof of this are some of the porticoes designed by him entirely anew, such as the one along the former Vignoli building on Via Indipendenza, or the one along the Guidotti building on Piazza Cavour. Both have massive pillars, rather than the streamlined Tuscan-style columns typical of Bologna since the mid-16th century. This attitude is evidenced, positively and negatively, by two different “restoration” episodes: in 1865 Monti had to remedy masonry material fallen from the portico of St. Bartholomew, and the collapse of two arches of the portico dei Servi. In the first case (a 16th century portico whose arches framed by the order are a good example of late Renaissance design), he expressed his appreciation for the formal character of the architecture, whereas in the second case he made no attempt to hide his impatience with late-Gothic forms, which were also becoming ‘fashionable’. 

Daniele Pascale Guidotti Magnani, L'opera di Coriolano Monti a Bologna 1859-1866. "La saggia architettura" negli anni dell'Unità d'Italia, Milano, Silvana Editoriale, 2023.

Many thanks to Historical Archive of the Municipality of Bologna for the images