Casa di Eleonora Duse

At the Porta di Santa Caterina, where the medieval walls pinch the street, stands the house Eleonora Duse chose for her last years. The facade and its 1925 plaque recall the actress; her grave is at Sant'Anna.

Why it matters

Duse was the most celebrated Italian actress of her age, praised across Europe and America for an acting style stripped of rhetoric. When she went looking for somewhere to withdraw, she picked this small walled town in the Treviso hills. The house marks the point where the public Duse story turns private: it preserves the scale of her daily life and links to the room dedicated to her in the Civic Museum and the theatre that took her name. Her story also connects to her tomb under the walls of Sant'Anna.

What to notice

The palace sits against the town walls. A marble plaque on the facade carries words Gabriele d'Annunzio dictated in 1925 for the first anniversary of her death, recalling "the lamp extinguished at the chapel of the little Madonna she held so dear" — a phrase that ties the house to the wayside shrine Duse loved on the road toward the hills. The Porta di Santa Caterina interrupts Via Canova here, marking the hinge between the borgo and the open country toward Monte Grappa. That orientation mattered to Duse and informs the story locals still tell about her windows.

Context and history

The building long predates its famous tenant. In the sixteenth century it was home to Francesco Nursio Timideo of Verona, secretary to Queen Caterina Cornaro, whose court had made Asolo a centre of Renaissance letters; by the late nineteenth century it belonged to Jane Morison Miller, a Scot and friend of Robert Browning's sister, in the years when Browning himself was writing his Asolando. Duse, a guest of her friend Lucia Casale, fell for the town in 1919 and settled in this house, which she had restored with the intention of ending her days there.

One episode belongs to the town's memory of her. Duse gave up the house after learning that a woman grieving a soldier fallen on Monte Grappa during the First World War wished to keep his memory alive from its windows, which faced the mountain. Duse's response, as the story is told on the official tourism page, was to call the spot an altar and set two vases of flowers on the sill between them. She later took the house up again, and it passed to her daughter Enrichetta. Sold in 1934, with the proceeds given to the Società Acelum, the educational foundation of the town's provost Monsignor Brugnoli, it has remained in private hands ever since. Duse herself died on 21 April 1924, in a hotel room in Pittsburgh during an American tour, and was buried at Asolo according to her wish.