Italy’s Moorish Revival Castles: Forgotten Architectural Fantasies
From The Observatory
Source: Public Domain Review
In the 19th century, two eccentric aristocrats built elaborate Moorish-inspired castles in Italy, blending architecture, mysticism, and experimental healing into immersive private worlds.
This article was originally published as “A Thousand and One Nights in Italy: The Moorish Fantasias of Cesare Mattei and Ferdinando Panciatichi” on The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material/. It was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.
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The Moorish Revival in European architecture arose during a period of Western fixation on North Africa and the Middle East. Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Syria, while ultimately a failure in military terms, sparked widespread interest on the Continent for all things pertaining to Oriental art. Add to this the mass construction of synagogues in the principal capitals of Europe during the first half of the 19th century, which were among the earliest expressions of neo-Orientalist architecture on European soil after the style was adopted as an emblematic marker of Semitic cultural identity. (Many of these synagogues were, it should be noted, destroyed during the tragic November pogroms of 1938, including the Munich Synagogue (1884–1887) designed by Friedrich von Gärtner and the Dresden Synagogue (1838–1840) by renowned architect Gottfried Semper.) Last, and by no means of lesser import, the rise of the British fever for all things Alhambrist and Andalusian. According to Tonia Raquejo, it was English travelers who first diverged from the Italian routes of the Grand Tour in the late 18th century to venture into Spain, drawn to the country’s great Arab monuments.
Against this backdrop, the Moorish Revival style began to gain prominence in Europe by the mid-19th century, particularly in England, France, Portugal, and Spain. In the latter, neo-Mudéjar would rise to the status of a national style, emblematic of the country’s rich multicultural heritage. This was not the case in Italy. The nascent nation, immersed in its Risorgimento, found historical continuity instead in Greco-Roman culture, fostering a notable architectural neo-renaissance. Consequently, and in contrast with Spain, Arabized notes appeared only marginally in 19th-century Italy, always external to the national identity and largely confined to aristocratic eccentricities. Two of the finest examples in this regard are the Rocchetta Mattei and the Castello di Sammezzano, which were the product of their owners’ overt singularity.
These Italian palaces, pioneering in their genre, were constructed in a region renowned for its proliferation of classical architecture and even predate the great regional synagogues, such as those in Florence (1874). Nevertheless, as we shall see, they constitute two of the most fascinating examples of Moorish Revival palatial architecture to emerge in Europe in the 1840s and 50s, alongside the Maurisches Landhaus (1846) in Stuttgart, the Quinta do Relógio (1850) and the Palácio de Monserrate (1854) in Sintra, and the Casamaures (1855) in Grenoble. In due course, this Moorish Revival initiative—pursued by Count Cesare Mattei and Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi—would be taken up in other Italian works, such as the marvelous Villa Crespi (1879) on the shores of Lake Orta.
Life and Death at the Rocchetta Mattei
It is 1850 in Bologna, and Cesare Mattei looks on in dismay as his mother, Teresa Montignani, agonizes on her deathbed. Her prolonged suffering prompts the exhausted count to abandon his political responsibilities and dedicate himself to a mission that is both altruistic and utopian: to free the world from the pain of disease. Making use of a strange universal formula, he shuts himself up in a “medieval fortress” in the Apennine commune of Grizzana Morandi, and, with his court of faithful followers, builds a sanctuary of healing called Rocchetta Mattei.
A magician, alchemist, and self-taught doctor, Cesare Mattei made his mark on the world with his energy medicine based on the law of polarity: elettromeopatia (electrohomeopathy), which claimed to harness the power of vegetable electricity to balance the circulatory, lymphatic, and nervous systems. His healing method quickly spread around the globe, and delegations were founded throughout Europe and Asia. As foreign demand for his medicinal remedies grew, he came into increasing conflict with allopathic doctors, especially the famous orthopedic surgeon Francesco Rizzoli.
Cesare Mattei became something of a savior to desperate people. Far away from the Apennines, his patients received homeopathic remedies and phytopharmaceuticals bearing the castle-shaped logo of Rocchetta Mattei, and fantasized about Moorish Revival architecture, which often resembled the imagined scenery of the Thousand and One Nights. Some of his most select customers were Tsar Alexander II, Ludwig III of Bavaria, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, who embraced Cesare Mattei’s electrohomeopathy and publicized it worldwide. The patients in greatest need received the healing potions for free, as Mattei’s company was based on the socialist principle of universal health care. Even Dostoevsky viewed the count’s remedies as a balm for his “torment of torments”; his devotion is evident in his references to Cesare Mattei in the paradise of the desperate that is The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
To construct Rocchetta Mattei, the count sought help from some of the greatest artists of the time, who formed part of the exquisite pleiad of Bologna’s Aemilia Ars society. The interiors of the castle are a frenzy of referential architecture, with an emphasis on oriental and medieval influences. There is a miniature replica of the Alhambra’s Court of the Lions (1391), a Piranesi-esque copy of the Mézquita de Córdoba (786) in wooden trompe l’oeil, and even courtyards carved into the rock, dotted with endless references to the mystical world of mesmerism, spiritism, and alchemy.
Patients entered via the Sala della Música—topped by the Mattei family coat of arms—where they would wait to be seen by the count while enjoying music concerts and poetry recitals. They would then move into the unsettling Stanza Rossa, where Mattei, like a great oriental diva, was concealed by an elegant red curtain. In his alchemy laboratory, he magnetized the sick with aromatic herbs and other arts of the electrohomeopathic persuasion. Like a dreamy, heavenly orchestra, his calm voice was accompanied by the soporific burbling of Moorish fountains, lulling patients into a state of deep relaxation. A ceiling of pyramid-shaped stalactites made from a strange kind of papier mâché (using newspapers from the era) filtered the count’s voice, infusing it with low, hypnotic frequencies alongside the muffled sound of the water. Once the body’s electrical flow had been restored by his potions, the healer sent the patient down a psychedelic spiral staircase with geometric patterns in yellow, white, and black. Mattei sought to destabilize the patient’s senses through the imbalance triggered by a rapid, seemingly “psychotropic” descent toward a new place, a blurry exit from the castle.
Aiming to promote healing and longevity throughout the building, the count ordered his so-called Sala dei 90 to be built near the Stanza Rossa. The purpose of the room was to celebrate his 90th birthday, an age Mattei believed he was sure to reach thanks to his medicinal miracles. Beneath a celestial dome dotted with golden stars, evocative of Giotto’s sky at the Cappella degli Scrovegni (1305), his nonagenarian patients would come together, proving—with the simple fact of their living presence—the effectiveness of Mattei’s regime. The ceremony was meant to take place in front of an impressive stained glass window showing Cesare Mattei and his date of birth. Unfortunately, the loftiest plans are often disrupted by some banal occurrence.
On April 3, 1896, after a long winter at Rocchetta, Count Mattei wandered broodingly through the rooms of his castle. At almost 87 years old, his faith in his innovative potions was stronger than ever. From the heights of his balcony, he enthusiastically welcomed the arrival of spring. The barren snow slid down the mountain slopes, and an outburst of colors, flowers, and scents appeared, creating a poisoned Klingsor’s Garden for the count. Spring pollen began to impair his asthmatic bronchi, and, tormented by the constant wheezing in his chest, Mattei thought he could find the cure in his remedies. This time, he was wrong. The sound of the castle’s fountains accompanied the count in his final act, murmuring with him into the afterlife. Less and less oxygen, more and more light, then the gentle ascent of death. Meanwhile, nature followed its course. The wild horses and bears began their respective springtime courtships, and the peacocks at Rocchetta, with their eye-catching colored feathers, threw an aristocratic farewell bacchanal: natura non constristatur. Cesare Mattei died from pulmonary disease at the age of 87, thwarting his dreams of celebrating his 90th birthday.
He continued to believe in his scientific ideals until the end, breathing spirit into matter and bringing energetic lightness and nimble flight to our bodily ballast. He defied destiny, but the malice of time and the activities of the bees, flowers, and butterflies overcame him. “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” wrote Rilke. The true path of our existence is always signposted by the unknown. This is perhaps why the inscription above his majestic majolica sarcophagus, engraved by Minghetti and placed in the imposing Capilla, reads: “Anima Resquiat in Manu Dei” (“May the soul rest in the hand of God”). Stone once again proves more persistent than flesh: although Mattei did not live to see 90, his Sala dei 90—awaiting a birthday celebration that never arrived—endures.
Ferdinando Panciatichi’s Anastatic Alhambra
In the mid-19th century, Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi, a renowned ornithologist, malacologist, and bibliophile, was surprised to see the exotic endeavor on which Count Mattei had embarked in the neighboring Romagna. Enthused by this project, Panciatichi went one step further, erecting the most ostentatious Moorish Revival castle in the rolling hills of Reggello, Italy. The marquis, who was one of the richest men in Tuscany, spared no expense. To create his oriental dream, he considered his many properties and opted to renovate Castello di Sammezzano (1605), a late-Renaissance estate covering 65 hectares located 30 kilometers from Florence.
Panciatichi was 40 years old and deeply disillusioned with the political situation in Italy. His descent into misanthropic skepticism prompted him to leave Florence and dedicate the rest of his life to building an oriental castle. In despair, he carved an acerbic sentence highlighting the curse of the solitary traveler into one of its walls: “Va solingo il leon per suo sentiero, spiegaromita al ciel d´aquila il volo, sia nobile tedio voluttà d´impero, ogni forte nel mondo è sempre solo” (The lion walks alone along his path, the eagle unfolds its solitary flight to the heavens; let noble tedium be the voluptuousness of empire, for every strong soul in the world is always alone).
Panciatichi personally designed every room at the new Castello di Sammezzano with assistance from Italian artists and Arab artisans—a project that occupied almost half a century. The Marquis’s extraordinary drawings, which would later be turned into sumptuous stuccoes, tiles, and majolicas, have been preserved to this day in the State Archives of Florence. Emulating Francis Cook and James Knowles’s work on the renovated Palácio de Monserrate (1858) in Sintra, he set out to disguise the old architecture at Castello di Sammezzano, transforming it into an elegant exercise in orientalizing diction. Panciatichi opted for an abstracting, imported style—a countercurrent to Italy’s long figurative tradition, as if surrendering his country’s most sacred treasure: the very essence of its artistic history. Echoing these disenchanted sentiments, he added another inscription to Castello di Sammezzano: “latrones et proxenetae Italiam capiunt vorantque nec de hoc doleo sed quia mala…omnia nos meruisse censeo” (Thieves and pimps seize and devour Italy, and I do not grieve for this, but because of the evils…I believe we have deserved it all).
In his endeavor to distance himself from the reality of his country—which, across this period, was embroiled in three independence wars—Panciatichi enclosed himself in a new, more peaceful and ideal world. Bulbous domes, guldastas, dados, calligraphies, valances, and thousands of engravings from the Near and Far East sparked his imagination. Gradually, the appearance of the old Renaissance palace was fully transformed—encased in geometric repetitions and serial decorations of Persian, Mozarabic, and Indian origin. Decades ago, in her essay for Franco Maria Ricci’s magazine FMR, Maria Cristina Tonelli described the complex as an authentic “anastatic Alhambra,” embellished with many designs: beautiful mosaics, colorful tiles, decorative plasterwork, horseshoe arches, columns with unclassifiable capitals, rosettes, niches with vases, stalactite ceilings finished with crystal, small hexagonal stucco mirrors decorated with colored glass, fan-shaped decorations, and sophisticated ceramic dishes.
In addition to this visual gluttony, Panciatichi did not neglect the aromatic and acoustic beauty of his palace. The heady scent of incense from Oman wafted through the rooms at the new Castello di Sammezzano, while water was used to create an airy sonic landscape, cleansing, purifying, and alleviating the disgust for modern life. Merleau Ponty believed that “through vision, we touch the sun and the stars,” but Juhani Pallasmaa warned of the hegemonic dangers of the primacy of the eye, or ocularcentrism: “Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates”. Expanding our sensory range to include taste, it is hard not to experience the Castello di Sammezzano as some kind of delicious architectural cupcake. Such an appetite is nothing new. When visiting Italy, Ruskin succumbed to a similar devouring instinct: “I should like to draw all St Mark’s and all this Verona stone by stone, to eat it all up into my mind, touch by touch.” Truman Capote, an insatiable hedonist, might have thought the same when he declared that “Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”
Panciatichi rounded off the stone building with a huge, picturesque garden filled with exotic species imported from America—including a Sequoia sempervirens—fountains, verandas, bridges, and a beautiful Moorish house for the guard. In this orientalist fantasy of a cottage, the gardener, like the humble Persian woodcutter Ali Baba, stored firewood for the cold Tuscan winter. Panciatichi linked the castle to the park via artificial caves in an attempt to merge the natural fragrance of the landscape with the colorful man-made architecture. In doing so, he sought a sensualized ideal of synesthetic living, an Edenic paradise born of a broad, totalizing imagination.
As Carlo Menicatti rightly observes, Panciatichi never visited the East, nor even Spain or Portugal, which are home to Europe’s Moorish substrate. His travels centered largely around France, Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. What inspired him, then, to create his Castello di Sammezzano? Essentially, his private archive—one of the most prestigious in Italy, which sowed the bibliographic seed for the contemporary Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze. Like a kind of Quixote absorbed in oriental texts, it was there that Panciatichi dreamed up his ideal castle. He spent most of his time reading, rereading, and reinterpreting the works of the great English theorists writing on neo-orientalism: Designs for the Pavilion at Brighton (1808) by Humphry Repton, The Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) by James Cavanah Murphy, and, especially, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra (1842) by Owen Jones, which took pride of place in his caliphal library.
But it wasn’t just the architectural works that proved influential. The bright hues of exotic birds—birds-of-paradise, Gouldian finches, coral beaks, society finches, crowned cranes, and rainbow lorikeets—drawn from the ornithological treatises in his personal library —contributed to his free, poetic, colorful aesthetic. Upon entering the Sala dei Pavoni, it is as if one is enveloped by the warm feathers of a large tropical creature.
For centuries, legend had it that Marquis Panciatichi had designed 365 rooms for Castello di Sammezzano, one for each day of the year. As Carlo Cresti, Massimo Sottani, and Matteo Cossimo note, this belief was plainly false. Such rumors may have been bolstered by the fact that, despite its dilapidated state and given its highly theatrical nature, Castello di Sammezzano was used as a backdrop for numerous erotic horror films, several gialli, a variety of B and Z series, and the occasional noteworthy auteur film, such as “Arabian Nights” (“Il fiore delle mille e una notte,” 1974) by Pasolini and Quiet Days in Clichy (Jours tranquilles à Clichy, 1990) by Claude Chabrol. Many of these audiovisual fictions give the impression of an endless number of rooms. This is the ultimate iconography of a new Castello di Samezzanno, disguised by a cinematography that would undoubtedly have stimulated the dreamy, hypersensualized, unprejudiced imagination of the unfairly forgotten Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi, who, before the dawn of film, created hugely immersive three-dimensional visual landscapes at the heart of the Tuscan campagna.
