The other principal square of this period, on the farther side of the new quarter and at the outer end of the present-day Via Roma, is the Piazza Carlo Felice. This was laid out by the engineer Lombardi and by Frizzi in 1823, and has façades by Carlo Promis (1808-73) that also extend on both sides of the square along the broad Corso Vittorio Emmanuele II. Continuous arcades cross the street ends, as in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and the balconies are syncopated. The fine big trees in the square and along the Corso are a happy addition to the urban scene quite uncharacteristic of the rest of Italy.
The inner end of the Piazza Carlo Felice is not curved but semi-octagonal. Originally the outer end was open and defined only by rows of trees; later, in 1866-8, the handsome Porta Nuova Railway Station was built there by the engineer Alessandro Mazzuchetti (1824-94) and the architect Carlo Ceppi (1829-1921). Now this terminates the long central axis of the city which extends from the Royal Palace through the Piazza Castello, the Piazza San Carlo, and down the Via Roma to the Piazza Carlo Felice.
Turin has other monumental edifices of this period besides the Gran Madre di Dio. There are, for example, two later churches in the new quarter, San Massimo and the Sacramentine; the latter, by Alfonso Dupuy, was built in 1846-50 from a design of 1843, with later portico by Ceppi; the former in 1845-54 by Carlo Sada (1809-73). Both are domed, but less Pantheon-like than the Gran Madre. They lack, unfortunately, the elegance and delicacy of scale of the houses of the period in the streets that surround them.
Milan owes less than Turin to the architectural activity of this period. The present decoration of the interior of the opera-house, La Scala, which was built by Giuseppe Piermarini (1734-1808) in 1776-8, dates from 1830 and is by Alessandro Sanquirico (1774-1849). This is quite similar in the sumptuousness of its white-and-gold ornamentation to Genovese’s later throne room at Caserta. The square gatehouses at the Porta Venezia, built in 1826 by Rodolfo Vantini (1791-1856), are boldly scaled and effectively paired. The Palazzo Rocca-Saporiti of 1812 by Giovanni Perego (1776-1817) in the Corso Venezia with its raised colonnade rivals in interest Cantoni’s better-known Palazzo Serbelloni of the 1790s near by. The much smaller and considerably later Palazzo Lucini of 1831 in the Via Monte di Pietà by Ferdinando Crivelli (1810-55) is so expert an example of High Renaissance design that it can readily be taken for real cinquecento work. Paradoxically, such an extremely literate specimen of the Renaissance Revival is far less characteristic of Italy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century than of England or Germany. More typical of Italian taste in the thirties and forties are the buildings facing the flank of La Scala across the Via Verdi with their complex rhythm of fenestration and their very rich but still vaguely Grecian ornamentation. Eventually the Italians did, however, take up occasionally the Renaissance version of the international Rundbogenstil, and none too happily. For example, the Casa di Risparmio (known vulgarly as the Ca’ de Sass), built by Giuseppe Balzaretti (1801-74) in 1872 across the street from the refined and discreet Palazzo Lucini, is a stonier example of Tuscan rustication—as its nickname suggests—than was ever produced by the Northern Europeans who first revived the mode half a century earlier.
A charming ornament to a smaller city is the Caffè Pedrocchi[[70]] in Padua of 1816-31 by Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1852), a pupil of Selva, and Antonio Gradenigo (1806-84). Delicate in scale, interestingly varied in the handling of solids and voids, and most urbane in the discretion of its carefully placed ornamentation, this is certainly the handsomest nineteenth-century café in the world and about the finest Romantic Classical edifice in Italy (Plate [23A]). Exceptional in this period in the Latin world is the Neo-Gothic wing known as Il Pedrocchino attached to the café, designed by Jappelli and for the same client; this was completed in 1837.
Trieste in this period, like the cities of Lombardy and the Veneto, is more Italian than Austrian architecturally. As a result it outshines Vienna in the extent and the quality of its early nineteenth-century construction. The new buildings were largely concentrated around the Canal Grande, a rectangular lagoon extending inland from the Riva Tre Novembre. At the head of this rises Sant’ Antonio di Padova, built by Nobile in 1826-49, long after this former Trieste City Architect had been called to Vienna as head of the architecture section of the Akademie there. Occupying a position somewhat similar to that of the Gran Madre di Dio in Turin, Nobile’s church is considerably more interesting, particularly as regards the generous spatial organization of the interior. The Canal Grande is flanked by contemporary palaces that are harmonious with one another in scale but quite varied in detail. The largest and finest, facing the sea on the left, is the Palazzo Carciotti. This was completed in 1806 by Matthäus Pertsch, a Milan-trained architect who had provided in 1798 the façade of the Teatro Verdi here in Trieste. With its raised portico and small dome, the Palazzo Carciotti is one of the most prominent and successful Italian buildings of the opening years of the century.
At the other side of the Latin world, the Iberian peninsula participated rather less than the Italian in the advanced architectural movements of the first half of the century. In Madrid the Obelisk of the 2nd of May, built by Isidro Gonzalez Velasquez (1764/5-?) in 1822-40, and the Obelisk of La Castellana (1883), by Francisco Javier de Mariateguí, are rather modest specimens of a widely popular sort of erection compared to Smirke’s gigantic Wellington Testimonial in Dublin or Mills’s Washington Monument. The Palace of the Congress of 1843-50 by Narciso Pascual y Coloner (1808-70) is a dull example of that nineteenth-century Classicism that hardly deserves the qualification ‘Romantic’.
Italians, little employed elsewhere out of their own country in this period, provided the principal new public edifices of Lisbon. F. X. Fabri (?-1807) built the Palace of Arzuda, begun in 1802, and Fortunato Lodi (1806-?) the Garret Theatre more than a generation later in 1842-6; both are as uninspired as the contemporary monuments of Madrid. As late as 1867-75 the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon by the local architect Domingos Ponente da Silva (1836-1901) maintained the Classical mode at its most conventional. Already, with the establishment of the Braganza headquarters in Rio de Janeiro early in the century, Portuguese vitality was passing to the New World (see Chapter [5]). Yet if Lisbon has no individual Romantic Classical monuments of much interest, the lower city, extending from the Praça do Commercio to O Rocio, is a splendid example of late-eighteenth-century urbanism, initiated after the earthquake of 1755 by Eugenio dos Santos de Carvalho (1711-60).
In the eighteenth century Petersburg owed its grandeur as a Baroque city largely to the work of imported Italian architects; but with the rise of French and English influence in the later decades of the old century and the first of the new the day of the Italians was over, there as elsewhere (see Chapter [1]). Alexander I’s aspirations, after as well as before Waterloo, were wholly French, not Italian. The Committee for Construction and Hydraulic Works, indeed, which Alexander set up in 1816 to pass the designs of all public and private buildings in his capital, had a French military engineer, General Béthencourt, as its chairman. Yet the principal architect of the post-Napoleonic decades, Karl Ivanovich Rossi (1775-1849), although he had an Italian family name and was of Italian origin, was Russian-born and Russian-trained. Rossi’s General Staff Arches of 1819-29 and the vast hemicycle of which they are the centre continue happily the urbanistic tradition of the older generation; but the detail is Roman not Greek, and the taste altogether coarser and more provincial than that of Thomon and Zakharov (Plate [27B]). This is even more true of his Alexandra Theatre of 1827-32 and his Senate and Synod of 1829-34.
August Augustovich Monferran (1786-1858), to whom was assigned the building of St Isaac’s Cathedral[[71]] in 1817, a vast pile that he completed only in 1857 (Plate [27A]), was French, despite the Russian form in which his name is here given, and actually a pupil of Percier. In his youth he had worked under Vignon on the Madeleine, moreover. Monferran lacked, like most of his own generation who remained in France, both the originality and the finesse of the earlier generation, just as Nicholas I lacked the taste of his brother Alexander I. A wealth of sumptuous materials, granites and marbles, marks this church, however, and the dome is of some importance in technical history because it is entirely framed in iron (see Chapter [7]).