The Grand Hotel Londres

Sooner or later, they will finish the metro construction mess at Piazza Municipio and you'll be able to see the Grand Hotel Londres in all its glory. Well, maybe not original glory since it is no longer a hotel; it houses the TAR (Tribunale amministrativo regionale) Campania [The Administrative Court for the Campania Region of Italy] on most of the floors and a cultural exchange organization, The Mediterranean Foundation, on others.

The building, itself, was a result of the grand urban renewal project known as the risanamento undertaken after a disastrous cholera epidemic in 1884. The Grand Hotel Londres opened in 1899 and was designed by Giovan Battista Comencini for the Società Veneta, a northern firm at the time the largest Italian builders of railways and public works. (The firm was responsible for the entire rebuilding of the main square, Piazza Municipio, as part of the overall risanamento.) Comencini's other architectural and engineering activities in Naples at about the same time include his design for the Grand Hotel Santa Lucia (1906) on the sea-front across from the Castel dell'Ovo and his participation in the new construction at Mergellina, including the Laziale tunnel that still connects that area to Fuorigrotta, beyond the Posillipo hill.

The design of the facade of the Grand Hotel Londres reflects the general European architectural tendencies at the turn of that century towards the style known in English by the French term, Art Nouveau. (As a point of interesting confusion--and certainly more than you want to know-- in Italian that style is called by the English term "Liberty,” after an English gentleman with the fascinating name of Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty, whose shop in London specialized in Art Nouveau objects. In Germany, it was called Jugendstil, though in Austria, where they, too, speak German, it was called the "Secessionist" style because...well, as I said, you don't want to know.)

For most of its existence, the Grand Hotel Londres was, in fact, a pretty classy hotel, though it was dangerously close to the port of Naples and the bombings of WWII. (It housed Allied personnel after the war.) Later, it fell on hard times financially and was closed. I remember seeing many years ago entire families of homeless squatters on the premises. They had simply taken over the hotel and hung there “We Shall Not Be Moved” banners from the balconies. As a matter of fact, it is very difficult in Italy, legally, to move squatters from abandoned or otherwise unoccupied buildings. Eventually, they moved or were moved, but I don't remember the circumstances.

 

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