Gino Coppedè (1866-1927)
Gino Coppedè was born in Florence on 26th September 1866, to Mariano, a carver by trade, and Antonietta Bizzarri.
After the Professional School of Industrial Decorative Arts, where he was able to hone his skills in woodworking, he enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in architectural drawing in 1896.
His first major commission was the design and construction of the MacKenzie Castle in Genoa, which he worked on from 1897 to 1906. The building, inspired by Florentine architecture, included a mixture of exuberant elements, somewhat unusual for the architectural style of the Ligurian city, but which won him the favor of the wealthy local bourgeoisie.
The so-called “Coppedè style” was based, in fact, on the amplification of architectural elements from different periods, reworked in an original but harmonious way. A novelty in the building scene that, nevertheless, managed to win the appreciation of critics and the public, launching the architect to a brilliant career, which made him famous far beyond national borders.
Numerous, in fact, were the projects that bore his signature in a variety of Italian cities: many in Genoa, but also in Naples, Rome, as well as in numerous cities in central and southern Italy, such as Messina, where he contributed to post-earthquake reconstruction.
After World War I, Coppedè’s activity continued vigorously, thanks in part to the numerous awards and academic appointments he received.
It was only following the death of his wife Beatrice, daughter of sculptor Pasquale Romanelli, whom he had married in 1889, that he decided to move to Rome to devote himself to the completion of the famous Dora residential neighborhood, now better known as the “Coppedè district.”
The Cerruti firm-with which he had a strong professional bond-had commissioned him to build a stately neighborhood intended to satisfy the sophistication desired by the upper middle-class Romans of the 1920s. Here his style reached the height of eclecticism, with a fusion of architectural languages that, though seemingly irreconcilable, found an astonishing balance.
Gino Coppedè died in Rome on 20th September 1927.
You can consult thedeathcertificate on the Ancestors Portal: Archivio di Stato di Roma, Stato civile italiano, Roma, 1927
The original is kept at the State Archives of Rome.
For more on the figure of Gino Coppedè, see the entry of the Dizionario Biografico degli italiani edited by Mauro Cozzi.
Part of his archive (100 drawings, 3 photographs, 7 heliocopies; 1904-1920) is kept at the State Archives of Florence; a second part (about 102 drawings), relating to some of the work he shared with his brother Adolfo, is at the
