Casa di riposo Jona Ottolenghi

Behind a garden on Via Verdi in Acqui Terme operates one of Italy's most unusual pairings of welfare and art: a working rest home created from the city's old hospital by architect Marcello Piacentini, whose grounds hold a celebrated bronze group of the Prodigal Son cast from a model by sculptor Arturo Martini.

Why it matters

The Casa di riposo Jona Ottolenghi — known locally simply as "il Ricovero" — continues an unbroken tradition of care on this site, where Acqui's hospital stood for centuries before being converted in the twentieth century into a home for the elderly. Its dedication honours Jona Ottolenghi, a Jewish philanthropist and scholar whose generosity shaped the institution, and whose family name remains central to the city's history. The building acquired its present form through the intervention of Marcello Piacentini, one of the most prominent Italian architects of the early twentieth century. But the reason art lovers seek it out stands in the garden: the bronze Figliol Prodigo, the Prodigal Son, modelled by Arturo Martini in 1926 and placed here in 1931 — a key work of the interwar revival of figure sculpture in Italy.

What to notice

From Via Verdi, the composition reveals itself in stages: garden first, then the rest home's sober facades. In the garden, look for the bronze group — a father embracing his returning son — weighing some six hundred kilograms, cast by the Chiurazzi foundry after the painter Eso Peluzzi reportedly urged Martini that a work of this quality had to be immortalised in bronze. The Ottolenghi family acquired the piece at the Rome Quadriennale — after the bronze had already appeared at the 1929 Biennale di Milano — and set it here three years before the rest home's inauguration. The sculpture matters in Martini's career: it appeared on the cover of the 1967 Treviso exhibition catalogue associated with Giuseppe Mazzotti and Carlo Scarpa, evidence of how central the figure became to his reputation. The small Ottolenghi chapel inside the complex contains a golden mosaic that locals nicknamed "la piccola Ravenna", with an Annunciation frescoed by Fiore Martelli, stained-glass windows of the Christian virtues by Pietro Chiesa junior, silver works by the Ferrari workshop, and door carvings by Herta Ottolenghi, including the wooden entrance door bearing the initials R and O. A bust of Jona Ottolenghi is placed in a niche of the courtyard.

Context and history

Care on this site goes back centuries: the municipal portal describes the building as the city's sixteenth-century hospital, restructured in 1934 under Piacentini, while local historical research traces an earlier hospital foundation beside Acqui's main church to 1415 — a house later run by the Fatebenefratelli order. In the late nineteenth century Jona Ottolenghi — a man of letters of noble origins who appears in the correspondence of Giuseppe Mazzini — donated a very large sum, reported as 200,000 lire in the columns of the newspaper La Bollente, for a public assistance wing at the hospital; the project was completed after his death by his great-nephew Arturo Ottolenghi, who with his wife Herta drove the transformation of the hospital into the modern rest home, inaugurated in 1934 and dedicated to Jona's memory under the psalm motto "Aperiente te manum tuam omnia implebuntur bonitate". The Ottolenghis were the same family behind Villa Ottolenghi , the monumental villa and gardens on the hill above town, and the two enterprises share their taste for major contemporary art. The institution still operates as a care home under a foundation, and the institution remains a functioning care home.