La ricostruzione di Palazzo Cenere alla Spezia

In the second half of the 19th century, after the establishment of the military arsenal, La Spezia experienced an extraordinary growth that launched it among the emerging cities of the newborn Italian Kingdom. The issue of providing the town with a new ‘civic palace’ suited to the new size of the city, as well as to the new tasks entrusted to municipal administrations, arose in this context. The paper discusses the renovation of the old communal seat (1900-1907) and the violent controversies that accompanied it, focusing on the ‘artificial stone’ cladding of the building: questioned not so much for aesthetic reasons, as for its costs, judged utterly exorbitant, as a result of the incompetence of local authorities and their technicians. The political crisis that followed, culminating in the commissioning of the municipality, may be considered emblematic of the tensions, conflicts and fragilities revolving around the renovation of Italian town halls at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries