HOTEL PARCO DEI PRINCIPI

"Blue sky, blue sea, blue islands, blue majolica, green plants, roses at the princess's feet, dancer's footprint" (Gio Ponti)

"We must measure ourselves against the past, present, future and utopias." Gio Ponti

"... I always think of the infinite possibilities of art: give one a twenty-by-twenty square and-though over the centuries everyone has indulged in endless drawings-there is always room for a new drawing, for a drawing of your own. There will never be the last drawing..." Gio Ponti

The realization of the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento, represents, for Gio Ponti, a real challenge, in many of the architect's own themes, from the genius loci, to architectural planning, design, furnishings, historical pre-existences, and last but not least, the important challenge of the morphology of the site, a tufa cliff 70 meters above the sea, but the whole thing is wrapped in a nineteenth-century garden, a real park. A botanical park of three hectares, which guards rare plant species, many romantic corners, and which houses, also, native essences, orange, lemon, Mediterranean shrubs roses, lavender, rosemary, until it gets lost in the breathtaking panorama of the Gulf of Naples, and the Sorrento coast, dominated by Vesuvius, always present, wherever you turn your gaze, everything happens, always, under its careful observation. 

The History of the Site 

Before becoming a Hotel, the Parco dei Principi in Sorrento was an illustrious place, a meeting salon for aristocrats and intellectuals. 

The site, on which the hotel is built, belonged to the Jesuit Order until the 18th century, when the King of Naples, Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, acquired the property and donated part of it to his cousin Paul Leopold of Bourbon, Count of Syracuse, who, in 1792, built the Villa Poggio Siracusa, (whose sumptuous rooms hosted ladies and barons eager to leisurely amuse themselves in that joyous Eden). At the end of the 19th century, a period of decline began for the Villa, until in 1885, the Cortchacow family, a cousin of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II, purchased the area.

The mansion returned to its former glory, becoming the scene of stories, passions and famous receptions. The new owners initiated the striking construction of a dacha in the English-Gothic style. The hotel stands, today, on the very remains of the, never completed, dacha.

The Making of the Hotel Parco dei Principi. Manifesto of Contemporary Architecture

It was in the early 1960s when Neapolitan engineer Roberto Fernandes, already the owner of the Royal Continental Hotel on the Lungomare Caracciolo in Naples, where he had, also, worked for Ponti, purchased the land by commissioning architect Gio Ponti, to transform that place into a hotel. The historical legacy, the extraordinary location and the natural chromatics inspired Ponti to create a structure rooted in its place of origin, characterized by the verticalism of the ancient dacha and the landscape of the Sorrento coast. The Hotel Parco dei Principi was inaugurated on April 11, 1962, and from that day on testifies to the absolute and felicitous intuition of Engineer Roberto Fernandes. "He had the genius to discover the qualities of what everyone knew, and no one noticed," so Fernandes himself liked to say of Gio Ponti.

Gio Ponti, considered as the most important Milanese pencil of those years, expresses, in this project, his idea of architecture as a profession: "architecture must serve the future society on the functional, technical, productive and economic level; it must serve the happiness and need of men on the level of their life; it must nourish the intellect of men on the level of intelligence and style; as art, on the other hand, it must nourish the soul of men and their dreams on the level of enchantment." 

Precisely in the realization of the hotel, Gio Ponti fuses a past that is foreign to him with his present, without disrespecting either the balance of the lines or the design, aimed at building a strong link between nature, architecture, and landscape. A 'delicate, almost absent architecture, which prefers to blend in with the majestic rocky outlines in which it is grafted, and which, at the same time, contains a sober and innovative design.

The architect draws inspiration from the pre-existence, the dacha, for the course of the heights, the plan arrangement of the volumes and the scenic effect from the garden and the sea, but, at the same time,he elaborates a project, which has all the peculiar elements of his poetics: the work on the surfaces, the linearism and verticalism, the "visual eyes," the decoration, the lightness, and the landscape views. From the earliest studies, he keeps constant the layout of the 100 rooms, distributed on the four above-ground floors (plus two basements), and on the four fronts, with many communicating rooms and spacious and equipped distribution spaces.

At the top of the promontory, the complex is a slight and delicate presence, but, at the same time, soaring upward because of the masonry partitions, which mark the rhythm of the volumes. A snow-white plaster wraps it, interrupting only at the openings: air, light and the blue of the sea enter the rooms, while the view escapes through the windows in search of the horizon, in a continuous exchange. The facades are treated as independent surfaces: one bears the horizontal mark of continuous bands of balconies; another is defined by a checkerboard of covered loggias and small terraces. The realization of the hotel went from architecture to Mediterranean hotel, from planning to design, and fully reflects the articulate and complex personality of Gio' Ponti. Not only an architect, but also an admirer of painting, design, teaching, journalism, an advocate of Industrial Design and a great admirer of craftsmanship.

Between Design - Art - Craftsmanship - Ceramics

Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Gio Ponti loved to visit Salerno, and its province rich in traditions, colors, folklore and artisans, it was during his stays in Salerno, that he came in contact with the Ceramic Factory "D'Agostino Ceramiche," among the most important manufacturing realities of Italy, equipped with the modern technologies of the sector, where both modern-style majolica tiles for wall coverings, and objects of daily use were in production. He learned, therefore, from its owner, architect Matteo D' Agostino, his American partner Ernestine Kannon, painter, decorator, and art director, and the 'Ing. Host Simonis, who experimented, with success, the use of new mixtures of earths and new glazes and pigments, the design of shapes and colors, textures, transparencies, and the study of ceramic material. 

Here he studied the renewal of the language of ceramics, emphasizing the territorial context through colors, geometric and naturalistic traits, devising the famous tiles, white and blue, that today Ceramica Francesco De Maio reproposes to combine craftsmanship, territoriality and design in an all-Italian doing. Ceramica Francesco De Maio has been elected by Ponti's heirs themselves as the sole exclusivists for the reissue of the 33 white and blue decors, and which keeps inside a small museum with some of Ponti's original drawings and sketches that gave life to the white and blue decors.

The collaboration with Ceramica d'Agostino, allowed the Blue and White Ceramic Decorations, conceived through a series of "mathematical and geometric" combinations, to be declined in all the hotel's one hundred rooms, suites, lobby, reception, Lounge bar, and restaurant. The absolute protagonist is the color blue and white, which envelops all guests, right from their entrance in the lobby, and then continues in all the common areas, designed to unite, as a single environment, the inside with the outside, with the blue color of the sea and the sky. 

The rooms become like a large palette, where the monochromatic hues of white and blue, through powerful plays of light, seem to multiply; the colors, thus, subdivide and enrich the rooms, into even larger spaces. 

Ponti's majolica tiles become a hymn to the blue painted by the white; the blue appears, while, at the same time, the white is stunning in its purity. White enhances the blue, and makes it read in its profound beauty. The color is one, or rather two, but the possibilities of combinations for majolica, become, as many as 27, for the composition of floor and wall coverings, in the tradition of Neapolitan riggiole and Mediterranean countries. The complete series of 27 designs, executed by hand on 20*20 cm majolica tiles, was conceived by Ponti for the Parco dei Principi hotel in Sorrento, which became the first design hotel in the world, paving the way for this design-hospitality combination.

One module, a 20*20 tiles; 27 decors; one color, blue, compose and give life to the Hotel's environments. Ceramics, design become the protagonists along with the blue sea of the Gulf of Naples, of the interiors. Coverings, majolica floors revive and shine a new light on the ancient tradition of riggiole napoletane, employed in the new contemporary idea of the module.

So much so that the majolica tiles, become a real wall covering, carried all the way up to the walls, turn into an immense giant order, (by artist friend Fausto Melotti). 

From the bottom, it rises to the top, to the walls, taking the place of decorations and paintings, becoming material experimentation, leaving the rigid form of design, allowing the craftsman to become an artist, who tries his hand at new colors, and glazes, with vitreous crystals, glazing, and craquelé effects. The latter represent a set of elements, which will be taken up, in the years to follow, by many ceramic artists, in an attempt to overcome both the limits of the ceramic material, and the traditional concept of ceramics linked to an artisanal production, and of folk and folkloric tradition, to push towards the most modern themes, artistic, and contemporary design.   

Hence, inside, the multiple decorative motifs and combinations of the majolica tiles on the floors, the inclusion of the white pebbles, (produced by Ceramica Joo) of the lounge area, and the blues embedded in the vertical walls, form a collage ideally connected to the surrounding seascapes, while defining a specific aesthetic language, in which different arts converge and merge.

The Design of 1960s Furniture Accessories.

After 60 years, the Hotel Parco dei Principi, if it undoubtedly represents the symbol of the tourist development of the Sorrento Peninsula, no less it should be seen as a container, a witness of a glorious moment of Italian design in the 1950s. Gio Ponti thought of everything, of every element, that could complete a luxury Hotel, such as the Parco dei Principi, in fact, he designed some famous furnishings, which entered the history of 20th century Italian design. 

"Ponti's genius," says Architect Mautone, curator of the Hotel's recent restoration, "had been to imagine a decomposable element, but with high structural strength, always remaining somewhere between mass industrial production, and refined craftsmanship." And so, while the seat 'Superleggera', is observed from new points of view, the well-known armchair 'Lisa', decomposed into its "8 pieces" (a seat, an upholstered backrest, two supports in curved wood and four metal legs) reveals its logic, daughter of a design conceived to be mass-produced and assembled, in continuity with the line, already anticipated by the Viennese Thonet.

Ponti for the common areas, provides different models of armchairs and chairs: in addition to the 829, the 802 by Carlo De Carli, the 696 by Cassina, the 865 (also in the sofa version) and 814 by Ico Parisi, while in the restaurant the armless seat 646 designed by the same Ponti.

The result, then, is of simple, almost Spartan interiors, highlighting technological ingenuity and the harmonious coexistence of different arts. Almost foreseeing the distrust, which such bare furnishings, might have generated in a public accustomed to another kind of 'luxury'. (Domus) 

For each room he indicates the chosen combination, leaving the bathrooms finished in mosaic stoneware, and the hallways tiled in "Blu Ponti" majolica tiles, 13×20 cm. Such are the furnishings of the suites themselves, the bedside tables, armchairs, doors, tables, upholstery, bedspreads, which are blue, the dressing table, lamps, console table with blue formica top and drawers, and even the telephones. Ponti also designs the curtains on the facade facing the sea (soft, white and blue), and the iron spire on the main elevation, which slants the entire structure even more upward.

The Restoration of the Last Years

The current appearance of Princes' Park is the result of a lengthy restoration effort that began in 1999, led by Neapolitan architect Fabrizio Mautone. The restoration was carried out with a philological approach; monographs were studied, drawings researched, and sketches and historical documents archived. Proceeding from the interior to the exterior, first the rooms were restored (1999-2001), and then the facades (2003-2004), eliminating superfetations and performing a sew-ins, when it comes to materials and finishes, or replacing severely damaged parts. The furnishings were also recovered, thanks to the work of expert Neapolitan cabinetmakers, who restored splendor to the woods of the seats. Architect Mautone on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, takes a further step by transforming, what was the first design hotel, into a Hotel - Museum. The "educational-exhibition" itinerary, staged in the common spaces on the ground floor, sheds light on the personalities and companies involved in the original project.

The Legacy of Gio Ponti

Gio Ponti and his creations are more alive than ever, the small Museum inside the De Maio Ceramics, in Nocera Superiore (Sa), offers the possibility to see many three the sketches and executive drawings of the floor combinations, the majolica panels with the first compositions of the decorations, and at the same time allows to come into contact with the production techniques and colors of majolica. In addition, the Hotel Parco dei Principi itself, performs its original function of tourist hospitality, and on some special occasions it is usable, even for those who are not guests of the structure, so the direct visit, with the small Museum inside, with the didactic-knowledge path, allow you to come into contact with the thought, the ideas of the architect and immerse yourself in the poetry and atmosphere of the environments, so skillfully created.

Gio Ponti had the intuition of everyday architecture and design, of spatial solutions for modern houses, of complex projects in the urban context, and above all, he made a contribution, in post-war Italy, of the full economic boom, to the reconstruction of Italian taste. His legacy is thus an invitation to surround oneself with beauty as a stimulus to enjoy life.

Bibliography: 

Rivista  Domus 09/07/2012: “50 anni di Gio Ponti a Sorrento”, by Fabrizia Vecchione;

Abitare magazine 07/16/2012: "Living in blue and white at Gio Ponti," by Alessia Pincini;

Decor magazine 6/15/2012: "All the genius of Gio Ponti in a Villa in Sorrento, now Hotel Bianco e Blu, with a view of Vesuvius," by Alessia Musillo.