What was Sassari like in the early 20th century? After the emergence of the first appendages that stretched neatly around the regal Piazza d’Italia, a class of professionals and bourgeois began to look to the nearby Capuchin Hill as an ideal place to go to live, to enjoy more light and fresh air. And so, in that particularly prosperous economic moment that saw Sassari at the center of trade with France and the United States, the Cappuccini neighborhood was born.
Among the promoters of the 1916 Fosso della Noce Extension Plan was the Emilian engineer Teofilo Crovetti, who, won over by the beauty of a still wild island, decided to move to Sassari with his wife and two children to the villa that, still today, because of its happy location at the corner of Viale Trento and Viale Caprera, welcomes the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Europe was experiencing the Belle Epoque, a period that was identified with the artistic and decorative expression of the Art Nouveau style, Parisian art nouveau, a style that drew its inspiration from nature and flowers and gave rise to artisanal and decorative forms of great aesthetic taste such as wooden doors, wrought-iron railings, cement flooring and stained glass windows that, a century later, we can find in Cappuccini, a neighborhood that hosts the highest concentration of Art Nouveau villas in our city.
The walk will show the exteriors of some of the most beautiful villas and tell the story of the families who lived there. For example, you will discover the stories of a very talented shoemaker who lived and worked here, but also the story of a family who so appreciated the clean air of the new neighborhood that they immortalized it with a Latin inscription on the facade of their house.
