The Italian house

The Italian house is not the shelter, padded and furnished, of its inhabitants against the harshness of the climate as is the case of the dwellings beyond the Alps where life seeks, for long months, shelter from the inclement nature: the Italian house is like a place chosen by us to enjoy in our life, with happy possession, the beauties that our lands and our skies give us over long seasons.

In the Italian house there is no great distinction between exterior and interior: elsewhere there is even a separation of forms and materials: in our house the exterior architecture penetrates the interior, and does not fail to use stone or plaster or fresco; in the vestibules and galleries, in the rooms and stairways, with arches, niches, vaults and columns it regulates and orders in spacious measures the spaces of our life.

From the inside, the Italian house succeeds in the outdoors with its porticos and terraces, with its pergolas and verandas, with its loggias and balconies, its roof terraces and belvederes, all very comfortable inventions for a peaceful home and so Italian that in every language they are called by names from here. 

The same architectural ordinance therefore governs, to varying degrees, the facades and interiors of the Italian-style house and also regulates the surrounding nature itself with terraces and steps, with gardens, precisely called Italian-style, nymphaeums and perspectives, vegetable gardens and courtyards, all created to give comfort and scene to a happy home.
Its design does not descend from the material needs of living alone, it is not only a “machine à habiter”. The so-called “comfort” is not in the Italian house only in the correspondence of things to the needs, the necessities, the comforts of our life and the organization of services.

This “comfort” of its is something superior, it is in giving us with its architecture a measure for our own thoughts, in giving us with its simplicity a health for our customs, in giving us with its broad welcome the sense of a confident and numerous life, and it is finally, for its easy and happy and ornate opening out and communicating with nature, in the invitation that the Italian house offers to our spirit to go to restful visions of peace, which consists in the true sense of the beautiful Italian word, COMFORT.

Gio Ponti – “The Italian House” from Domus 1928