Villa Livia: Museum and International Center for Numismatics
Villa Livia (photo, above) is a Neapolitan
villa located on the street, Parco Grifeo, above the
via Corso Vittorio Emanuele, in the Chiaia section
of Naples. It was built in 1931 in the style known
in Italian as Liberty and
in English by the French term, Art Nouveau.
That style was already somewhat of an anachronism in
Italy, and the building was just a few years ahead
of the large Fascist
buildings of the mid-1930s that, to this day,
still dominate nearby areas on the same street. The
villa is at about the halfway point between
sea-level and the Vomero
section of Naples. The villa was built at the
behest of Domenico de Luca Montalto, the husband of
duchess Livia Serra di Cardinale,
great-granddaughter of Gaetano Filangieri, Jr. and
was donated in 1960 to the Filangieri
Civic Museum of Naples. The villa is now an
adjunct of that museum, the main premises of which
are in the downtown section of the city, some
distance away. There was no particular link between
the two sites or collections of artifacts, and one
assumes that the donation of the entire villa and
its contents was because the donor family had no
heirs and that the duchess was related to the
Filangieri family. The donors specified that the
contents of the villa should not be broken up or
removed and that the furnishings be viewed, as far
as possible, in the original settings; the goal was
to have a casa museo (a home museum) and not
just a building with antiques in it. The premises of
the villa are spacious, set-off from the outside
world, and "period" enough to serve occasionally for
on-location shooting for film companies.

On
the premises of the Villa Livia is this lovely
console table (i.e. meant to be located
against a wall) from the 19th century and
built in the workshop of the Della Valle Bros.
in Naples. Console means 'bracket' in French;
the term console thus stems from earlier
versions of such “wall tables” that had only
two legs in front and had to be fastened to
the wall at the back.
On display on the premises are exquisite
furnishings from the 1700s and 1800s (image, above)
including items of majolica
tile, porcellan, and chandeliers from Murano.
The art collection holds works by Abraham Brueghel,
Philipp Roos, Johann Heinrich Roos, Micco Spadaro e
Consalvo Carelli. Since 1975, part of the premises
have also housed the International Center for
Numismatic Studies with its 21,000-piece collection
of ancient coins, including ones from Greece, Rome,
Magna Grecia, (the
Greek cities in Italy), Etruria,
and native Italic tribes.
The organization has a 4,000-volume library, hosts
periodic conventions and publishes a numismatic
journal.
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