Via dei Palazzi (Station 2 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

The idea of building this new district came from the then Podestà Tommaso Lardelli (1818-1908), who intended to create a business card of Poschiavo to receive those arriving from the South. Tommaso Lardelli commissioned the Italian architect Giovanni Sottovia to design the buildings.

Wolfgang Hildesheimer describes the Palaces of the repatriated emigrants in the following words:

"This brings us back to the architectural style, since especially the migratory movement towards Spain has not remained without architectural consequences. Around 1850 the first generation of returnees built palaces that show not only the Spanish element but also the pastry element – as a reminder of their career. Therefore, seeing the unbridled imagination in the details of the pictorial decorations and stuccoes of the facades, we must not look for the symbolic value, as we are tempted to do: No, it is icing transposed into architecture, decoration of desserts al fresco. And finally, the trompe-l'œil and the fake windows, whose perspective illusions, although pedantically foreshortened, only work when seen from one side and appear even less natural on the other.

Anyone who draws the conclusion from this description that these houses are ugly is mistaken. They are curious. The proportions, however, 'spin'. They are life's goals realized with love, but unlike the classic residential house – a nightmare of one's own four walls and a made and standardized roof over one's head – here it is the materialization of strictly individual dreams of different walls and different roofs above the heads of a large family, now almost extinct and scattered."

Source: Erlebnis des Unerwarteten, in Merian 14/8, 1961 (trans. Monika Thurner).