The Chamber of Wonders

After a long and demanding restoration project, the Della Monica Castle is back in the national spotlight with an exhibition that stems from the desire to deepen our knowledge of a cultural phenomenon that, at the end of the 19th century, led various Italian artists and collectors to evoke the myth of the Middle Ages, also with the aim of enhancing artistic craftsmanship.

Starting in 1889, the Teramo painter Gennaro Della Monica began the construction of a building characterised by visionary eclecticism, realising, with the progressive extensions conceived by his vivid imagination, a unicum in the sphere of Italian architecture of the Umbertine period. Thanks to his travels in Italy, Della Monica certainly came into contact with that small elite of artists, intellectuals and collectors who were setting up residences inspired by the medieval tradition, animated by the gothic revival that was sweeping European culture. In Florence, he perhaps got to know the English aristocrat Federico Stibbert, who enriched his residence with extraordinary collections of arms and armour, as well as furnishings, paintings and precious medieval and Renaissance art objects. In Milan, his path was intertwined with that of the Bagatti Valsecchi brothers, who were engaged in renovating their residence to create a noble Renaissance palace with attention to every detail, from architecture to furnishings, and Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli. In Turin, Della Monica recognised in the medieval village of Valentino, philologically reconstructed by Alfredo D'Andrade, the concretisation of a utopia that he also felt urgently, as he embarked on a similar undertaking on the slopes of the Teramo hill.

Precisely in virtue of this need to include the Della Monica Castle in a cultural circuit that would express its originality and at the same time its tourism potential, a collaborative relationship was established with the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan, which granted the loan of arms, armour, and precious furnishings, including a chest bearing the arms of the Piccolomini family, who also had vast feuds in Abruzzo,  valuable pastille and ivory artefacts which, inside the rooms decorated by Della Monica with scenes inspired by mediaeval life, find their ideal contextualisation, giving life to a Chamber of Wonders inspired by the refined rooms, full of rare and costly objects that characterised stately homes in the past.

Unfortunately, during the 20th century, the furnishings of Castello Della Monica, which had been carefully selected by the creator of the enterprise, were dispersed, but the rare photographs documenting its interior show how the artist had collected furnishings and armour on the antiques market to evoke an atmosphere of yesteryear which, thanks to the loans generously granted by the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, we intend to reconstruct in order to re-weave the subtle web of historical, artistic and cultural references that such an enterprise presupposed.