2_ENG_Architettura_144-203_beg_Layout 1 12/03/13 15:59 Pagina 181
On the opposite side are various rooms newly decorated in the nineteenth century with episodes linked to the history of the family, including two rooms that document the final passage of ownership at the end of the century to the Southern Railways Company: a room covered with tiny decorations in white stucco with gilded edges and the symbols of the company (a hammer above an anvil and two cogs on the walls and, alternatively, a hammer and anvil and cog inside octagonal lacunaria on the vault) and another with the vault painted with the Glory of George Stephenson, the British engineer known as the father of railways who designed the fa-
v Baldassarre Franceschini called Volterrano, Blindness
mous steam locomotive used to transport coal from the mines.21 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, at a time of great transformation in the garden
of the human mind being enlightened by Truth,
at the hands of Count Guido Alberto, we should mention the work of Antonio Marini, who in the
Volterrano Suite, Palazzo Scala-Della Gherardesca, Florence.
neoclassical style painted and signed the vault of the small Doric temple designed by Giuseppe Cacialli and restored the courtyard in 1841.22 After 1870 the count and Giuseppe Poggi were responsible for
v
large-scale extensions and reconstruction on the side of the property adjacent to the main road, and
Allegorical scenes dedicated to the Della Gherardesca family, ceiling of a first floor room of
some interventions of period “restoration� such as the execution of the vaults with polychrome lacunaria in the loggia around the courtyard.23 Two stone tablets on the new facade facing the main road
Palazzo Scala-Della Gherardesca,
document these nineteenth-century interventions in the garden and the building complex generally.
Florence. v
In the twentieth century, following the transfer of the property to the Italian Metallurgical
181