The Florentine architect Gino Coppedè was chosen in 1913 by the Cerruti financiers from the “Edilizia Moderna” firm to design and build a large property complex in Rome in the area which extends from Piazza Buenos Aires, called “Piazza Quadrata” by the Romans, home to the Argentine national church, to the Via Tagliamento, home of the “Piper” discotheque, famous in the sixties as the cradle of adolescent pop.
The complex consisting of 26 apartment buildings and 17 small houses is now known to everyone as the “Coppedè Quarter”. Its style is unmistakable: an ornamental extreme inspired by precepts of liberty introducing the art déco but re-elaborated in a completely personal manner, with variations on medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, mannerism, mixed with different motifs including those of Greek classicism.
All this gives a fantastic, almost magical, atmosphere to the quarter, which has made it, for example, an ideal environment for Dario Argento’s horror films.
Coppedé directed the works up to his death in 1927. Three years previously a fountain had been installed in Piazza Mincio, the centre of the district that can be seen from the two most characteristic spots in the complex; the enormous wrought iron chandelier, hanging from the arch connecting the two properties on the side of Via Tagliamento marks the main entrance to the quarter and the Fairy’s Villa situated opposite the arch with its skewness, its confusion in styles, its abundance in decorative elements, synthesises, better than any other building, the creative conception of its designer.
The fountain is characterised by frogs populating the two basins, four housed in the lower bowl who pour water into the shell’s valve supported by four couples of figures and the eight on the edge of the higher bowl waiting to jump towards the central spurt of water..
This work underlines the fantastically eclectic, almost magical atmosphere pervading the area, full as it is with classical memories, instilled into the stylistic expressions of the belle époque, on the decline during the building of the complex and swept away completely by the first world war that brought an end to the construction work.
Coppedé does not forget his work in and for Rome: the large bee on the edge of the four sided basin can only remind us of Bernini and his Fountain of Bees and the Barcaccia.