The glass museum of Altare is housed in an Art Nouveau villa commissioned by a parish priest. Villa Rosa was built between 1905 and 1906 to a design by the Savona architect Nicolò Campora, at the wish of Monsignor Giuseppe Bertolotti; it served as the Saroldi family's summer residence and only much later became home to the local collection of art and industrial glass.
What to see
The holdings bring together the two faces of local production: art pieces and everyday ware, all from the furnaces of the village and the surrounding area. This is the material of a trade practised in Altare without a break from the 12th to the 20th century: glass “of every sort and manner”, glass for pharmacies and hospitals, art objects and, in the twentieth century, chemical glass able to withstand thermal shock. In 1856 the furnaces merged into a single cooperative company, the SAV, Società Artistico Vetraria, the second cooperative founded in Italy.
Altare glass never stayed at home: its masters exported technique even before objects, opening furnaces across half of Europe. The best known, Bernardo Perotto, born here and active in Orléans, obtained royal patents from Louis XIV in 1688 for casting crystal in plates, a method that allowed mirrors larger than a square metre and remained the only industrial system until 1920. The building is part of the visit too: listed since 1986, bought by the State in 1992, restored over a decade by the Ligurian heritage office.
Visiting
Villa Rosa also houses the municipal library, and the museum has not always been here: until 2004 it occupied temporary quarters in the former oratory of San Sebastiano, built around the sixteenth century. In that same year the villa passed by agreement to the municipality of Altare and to the Fondazione Istituto per lo Studio del Vetro e dell'Arte Vetraia, which run it. Altare lies eleven kilometres from Savona on the SS29 road over the Colle di Cadibona; opening hours change with the season, so check them before setting out.
Our editors' tip
We suggest looking at the house as closely as at the display cases: wrought iron, stained glass and Art Nouveau detailing are the right frame for this collection, and that is no accident, because the villa went up when Altare's glass industry was still in full swing. And do not stop at the show pieces: it is the pharmacy and laboratory glass that tells the trade for what it was, furnace work that lasted eight hundred years here.