Ugo Da Como Foundation Restores Glisenti Sitting Room for Historical Accuracy
In the Brescia Room of the Ugo Da Como Foundation in Lonato, a team of art historians, restorers, and architects, representatives of the Superintendencies, gathered to present and discuss the upcoming museographic restoration project that will focus on an entire room of the house-museum: the Glisenti Sitting Room.
Description and Objectives of the Restoration
“The residence of the Da Como couple — explains Stefano Lusardi, curator of the collections at the Foundation — is a highly significant and eloquent document of that very particular taste of early twentieth-century living, common to a specific social class. The furnishings of the so-called Casa del Podestà have maintained their precise patrimonial consistency, just as they were left by Senator Ugo Da Como (1864-1941) and later by his wife Maria Glisenti.”
The Maria Glisenti Private Sitting Room will be the subject of a meticulous restoration intervention aimed mainly at two objectives: on one side, verifying the conservation status of the contained objects; on the other, repositioning the entire furnishings according to the inventory records kept in the Foundation archive.
Each object will be placed exactly where it was positioned and desired by the house’s last owners. The project (led and overseen by Stefano Lusardi), which is the starting point for a broader and more complex comprehensive intervention involving all the rooms of the house-museum, was strongly supported by Vice President Dr. Luciano Faverzani.
The conviction is that restoring the typological arrangement of furnishings is the right path to make more understandable — not only to scholars but to all visitors — the reasons behind the creation of what is today the Ugo Da Como Foundation.
Historical and Architectural Description of the Sitting Room
The so-called Glisenti Sitting Room was described in 1910 as follows: “A room with a vaulted ceiling covered in painted panels where the furniture reflects old gold and blue tones, and where a splendid S. Pietro by Ribera, a Luca Mombello, a Salvator Rosa, a statuette by Chelli, a drawing by Appiani, and a small fisherman by Gemito are displayed. The room is lit by an arched window with a trilobed tympanum and by a stone loggia — an extremely elegant loggia of political rallies, as the Lonato deputy jokingly told me, leaning on the parapet and pointing to the old bell tower of S. Antonio church below, rendered picturesque by a small mullioned window and the moss-covered stones of its shaft.”
The Glisenti Sitting Room is associated with the name of Maria Glisenti, daughter of the deputy Francesco, who married Ugo Da Como in 1894. She belonged to one of Brescia’s most prominent families active in iron craftsmanship and had a close connection with Giuseppe Zanardelli, who was the most prominent Brescia-born politician of the period spanning the two centuries.
This room is the only part of the entire Podestà house that recalls a figure whose memory has nearly disappeared but who undoubtedly played a specific role in the creation and furnishings of the Brescia senator’s house.
The elegant, intimate sitting room follows the Red Room in the visitor itinerary and offers some interesting insights into the overall understanding of the house-museum. The Sitting Room was most likely furnished by Maria Glisenti herself.
The restoration intervention, details of which will be discussed later, aims primarily at two objectives: “On one side, the recovery of the overall concept pursued by Da Como and his wife for their house, verifiable thanks to detailed archival documentation; and on the other, the conservation verification of all objects and elements present in the sitting room.”