Palazzo Pavesi Ruschi is a large residence with three facades, “with a view from three angles”, two of which on the main square, one on the transit route. The building is organized on three floors divided as follows: ground floor, first floor or main floor, second floor. The basements were also surveyed and, in the southern part, traces of a previous area were found, with two entirely visible columns with capitals attributable to the 11th-12th century. […] The building is structured around two porticoed courtyards and two entrance halls with accesses, respectively from the square and from the street. The courtyard on the street, with a portico on one side only, gives access to a stone stairway of rigid shapes that winds around the central body; from it there is access to a large reception hall on the street, with sitting rooms and alcoves all around. The courtyard on the square has a portico on two sides and gives access to the magnificent stone and wrought iron staircase which winds around the pivot of a column and is housed in a panoramic tower which rises above the roofs; from here you enter the gallery painted by Giovan Battista Natali, various living rooms and another alcove; passage and service rooms join the two wings of the building.

The history of the palace begins in 1688, when Geronimo di Lorenzo Pavesi bought the palace of the Belmesseri counts located in the “Piazza di sotto” of Pontremoli. […] The will of the Pavesi family to enlarge the residence and make it Palazzo Pavesi has been clear since the last years of the seventeenth century, both for the purchase of the adjacent Case Campi, which took place a few years later, and for the intention to eliminate of the appurtenances of the building everything that does not have to do with the appearance of a stately building. […] The story of the restructuring was documented with diligence and meticulous care and can be placed between the years 1734/1743 by the brothers Giuseppe, Francesco and Paolo the archdeacon, sons of Lorenzo Pavesi. […] The most important document is the one dated 1734, in which we read the will to unify the various bodies acquired and give the whole building a single architectural line, clearly demonstrating the desire to follow a project conceived by “Maestri Architetti”. These, left anonymous in the document, can be recognized in Francesco Natali and in his son Giovan Battista. […] Combined, planned, designed and defined in a single structural whole, visually represented in a single style, the Palazzo is now finished or, in any case, at a good point if, in 1738, the brothers divide the property, a division that will come, however, officially sanctioned with a document of 1755, after the Archdeacon Paolo, dying, will have left his portion of the house on the ground floor in equal parts to the two brothers.

The Palazzo is entirely frescoed by Giovan Battista Natali and his assistants, including his nephew Antonio Contestabili. The gallery is depicted as a colonnaded courtyard, as the architect, constrained by the pre-existing buildings, cannot create an adequate gallery in the building, bright and equipped with large windows overlooking the courtyard. This is why he painted the largest hall, which serves as a hallway for the other rooms on the main floor (and which is called La Galleria), with large colonnaded compartments that open onto visions of landscapes. […] In the alcove on the river, the usual themes reappear, vases of flowers and garlands, but the construction of an exedra-shaped building appears on the large arch above the painted headboard. In the other salon, perhaps for the first time, Natali benefits from the collaboration of his nephew Antonio Contestabili; the vault, although structured and set on solid pillars, between arches, windows and charming loggias, appears flatter, sensations due, perhaps, to the rigorous two-tone of the “ton sur ton”. […] The alcove in this wing of the building has an antechamber ceiling in gray and gold, built with tense and nervous limbs that recall the best moments of Giovan Battista Natali and his father. The alcove leads to a small drawing room and, from here, to the grand hall facing the street, painted only on the vault and probably once covered in damasks. The apartment on the ground is a masterpiece of sobriety; there are no quadrature levels in the ceiling which, however, has volutes and vases of flowers.

(taken from “Dwellings of Pontremoli” by Isa Trivelloni Manganelli, 2001)

photos: arch. Elia Santini