The Tower and the Orangery

Site overview

Oral accounts passed down by local people identify the very early years of the 20th century as the period of construction for the Tower; it can be stated with certainty that by 1905 the construction was already completed, as it appears in a postcard with a postmark from that year.

The tower was built privately by the Rossi family on the land where their villa had been erected a few years earlier. The tower was designed in the Neo-Gothic style because of the meaning that the architectural element of the “tower” held within residential buildings—namely, a symbolic affirmation of power—and because it was part of the 19th-century cultural climate of revisiting the Medieval era.

Not far away is the orangery (arancera), which at the end of the 19th century, when it was part of the Rossi family property along with the Villa, was used for the cultivation of oranges (the land in front was occupied by an orchard). Local associations have overseen the restoration and safeguarding of this historical heritage.