Villa Griselli was built at Caluso in 1926 for doctor Ercole Griselli, who had been born in the town but had spent the preceding years in Argentina, where he devoted himself to the treatment of diphtheria. He came back with money and with ideas: the house he had built is in the Art Nouveau style, and in the architecture of the Canavese it remains an exception.
What to see
The feature you recognise from far off is the turret, closed by a thin and very steep conical roof. Around it the fronts are deliberately asymmetrical, with volumes that jut out and draw back and roofs crossing at different heights; what holds them together is the calibrated pairing of materials, which gives the building a stylistic cohesion that the irregularity of the masses alone would not secure. The taste is northern rather than Mediterranean: dark exposed timber under the eaves, wrought iron on the balconies, slate on the roofs.
Visiting
Scholars have linked this architecture to the experiments of Ernesto Basile and Giuseppe Sommaruga, the two leading names of Italian Liberty, and have recognised in it echoes of the work of Henry van de Velde and of the School of Nancy. But the most tempting hypothesis concerns Buenos Aires, the capital of South American Art Nouveau, which Griselli had come to know during his Argentine years: the villa may be the built memory of a distant city, carried back to a wine village of the Canavese.
Our editors' tip
The date deserves attention, because it explains everything: 1926. In Europe the Art Nouveau season had been over for a long while, swept away first by the war and then by rationalist taste. Griselli had a villa built out of its time, in a style no longer used in Turin and hardly ever used in the Canavese, and that makes it an isolated case rather than an example. Look at it from one side rather than head on: the fronts are designed never to match one another, and as you walk round the turret changes its relation to the rest of the house at every step.