Casa natale di Antonio Rosmini

On Via Stoppani, a seventeenth-century house preserves the room where Antonio Rosmini was born in 1797, a library of some fifteen thousand volumes and the first edition of Manzoni's Fermo e Lucia.

Why it matters

Antonio Rosmini-Serbati was an Italian philosopher and the founder of the Institute of Charity, the religious congregation known as the Rosminians. The Vatican biography records his birth in Rovereto on 24 March 1797 and his death in Stresa on 1 July 1855, between which he reshaped Catholic thought and drew a long-running controversy over his books. The house that saw the first of those dates still belongs to his order, and it preserves the furnishings, the prints and the working library of a family at the centre of the Catholic intellectual world. Manzoni, his close friend, is present here too.

What to notice

The house preserves the birth room with its original furnishings and the apartment of Rosmini's uncle Ambrogio, the architect whose plans shaped the building's later form. The Sala degli Specchi, the hall of mirrors, is the ceremonial heart of the piano nobile, still used for cultural events. The historic library holds roughly fifteen thousand volumes across every field of knowledge, flanked by a significant collection of ancient prints and paintings gathered by Ambrogio. The singular document is a first edition of Fermo e Lucia, the early draft of I Promessi Sposi: a note in Rosmini's hand records his dislike of the title, which may have led Manzoni to rename the novel. In the small garden in front stands the city's monument to its most celebrated intellectual son.

Context and history

The palace originated in the seventeenth century as a property of the wealthy Parolini family. In 1678 Nicolò Rosmini, the philosopher's great-great-grandfather, married Cristina Parolini, the last of her line, and the Rosmini "al Portone" branch settled in the house, living there until the family ended with Antonio's death in 1855. The building was redrawn by the engineer Mascanzani on plans by Ambrogio Rosmini and grew over the nineteenth century from a residence in open countryside into the palace of today. The Rosminian fathers have kept it ever since, and the Biblioteca Rosminiana still works in its rooms.