{"id":4293,"date":"2026-01-02T16:54:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T16:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/?p=4293"},"modified":"2026-06-24T06:57:36","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T06:57:36","slug":"villa_emma_nonantola_museo_luogo_memoria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/villa_emma_nonantola_museo_luogo_memoria\/","title":{"rendered":"Children of Villa Emma’s Memorial, Nonantola, Italy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Children of Villa Emma’s <\/strong>Memorial<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Client: Fondazione Villa Emma, Nonantola
Typology: culture
Year: 2018 – 2026
Place: via Mavora 39, Nonantola, Modena
Architect and team leader: Bianchini & Lusiardi Associati
Team: Ing. Emanuele Fornal\u00e8 (Structural design), Ing. Alessandro Farina (HVAC)
Awards: international architectural competition. First prize<\/strong>
Status: completed (2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This museum and memorial is dedicated to the story of a group of Jewish youths of German, Austrian, and Yugoslav origin who were headed to Palestine and, between 1942 and 1943, found refuge at Villa Emma \u2014 a country residence surrounded by greenery, located directly across from the new museum and separated from it by Via Mavora, the road connecting Nonantola to Modena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The L\u2011shaped plot lies within a southern expansion area of the town\u2019s historic centre, which underwent rapid urbanisation beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. The site is bounded on the west by Via Mavora\u2014separating it from the park of Villa Emma and serving as the location of the building\u2019s main entrance\u2014on the south by Via Donizetti, and on the east by Via Rossini, from which the museum\u2019s secondary entrance is reached by crossing a small green space owned by the municipality.
The memorial building has been positioned in the larger portion of the plot, with its longest side running parallel to Via Mavora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two late\u2011nineteenth\u2011century rural structures originally stood on the site. Severely deteriorated, they had been altered over time through interventions that compromised their original layout. The Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio determined that the two buildings were not of cultural interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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The memorial unfolds on a single level: its essentially rectangular plan is laid out on an orthogonal grid subtly disrupted by several symbolic axes corresponding to the paths and human relationships that shaped Nonantola during the period when the group of young refugees lived at Villa Emma. Its \u201cuncertain\u201d perimeter is based on dissolving the boundary to create a strong relationship between the interior and exterior. Additional references include the connection with the surrounding countryside as a space of discovery, and the evocation of the Jewish sukkah<\/em> as an archetype of temporary shelter\u2014one that welcomes and protects during a journey.

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The opaque walls and glazed surfaces that define the building envelope support the flat roof, which is punctuated by both fixed and operable skylights. The portion of the roof corresponding to the interior consists of an opaque slab, while the exterior areas near the entrances are sheltered by glass panels that protect against the elements and allow natural light to pass through. A unifying presence of the roof\u2014visible both outside and inside\u2014is a system of vertical steel louvres, while indoors the same motif reappears in the suspended ceiling, composed of wooden slats.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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From the exterior area, visitors are guided toward the building\u2019s entrance along a covered walkway flanked by a wall clad with bricks salvaged from the pre\u2011existing structures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The entrance\u2013reception area provides access on one side to the exhibition space and on the other to the group welcome room, which is adjacent to the cloakroom and service block. The exhibition space is a looped pathway overlooking the exterior area and articulated by a sequence of inclined partitions aligned with the directions from which the young refugees arrived and the places they frequented in the town. The Foundation\u2019s office area, which includes the educational workshop, has been designed to ensure flexible use and has an independent entrance on the building\u2019s eastern fa\u00e7ade. The multipurpose room, located to the north, can likewise be used for presentations and conferences independently of the memorial\u2019s opening hours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Descrizione originale del progetto<\/strong> (proposta di concorso)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"BeL-davanti<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Villa Emma Foundation chose to launch a design competition to select the project for a place of memory dedicated to the story of the seventy\u2011three Jewish youths who were headed to Palestine and, between 1942 and 1943, were given refuge at Villa Emma\u2014a large country house built in Nonantola at the end of the nineteenth century as a summer residence. The museum\u2011memorial will be built on the area known as Prato Galli<\/em>, located directly opposite the villa that sheltered the youths. The multifunctional building will include a museum installation, spaces for the Villa Emma Foundation, and a conference hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the memorial: notes on the historical events<\/strong>
The young Jewish exiles and their chaperones arrived in Nonantola in two separate moments. The first group\u2014composed of boys and girls from Austria and Germany\u2014reached the town\u2019s railway station in mid\u2011July 1942. Before that, the group had been stranded in Zagreb following the German invasion of 6 April 1941, and later in Slovenia. Thanks to the intervention of DELASEM \u2014 the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants \u2014 the youths were brought to Villa Emma, which had long been uninhabited and had been identified as an ideal place to host them. In April 1943, another thirty\u2011three younger children who had fled Bosnia and Croatia joined the first group.
The seventy\u2011three exiles, aged between six and twenty\u2011one, suddenly found themselves in a small rural town whose mentality and material conditions were very different from those of their places of origin. Yet, divided between hours of study and hours of work, their time in Nonantola became a positive period, rich in experiences and relationships woven with many of the town\u2019s inhabitants, and Villa Emma proved to be a temporary but safe refuge. After 8 September 1943, however, with the arrival of German troops in Nonantola, the youths were forced to abandon the villa; some were temporarily hidden in the episcopal seminary, while others found shelter in private homes. When the idea of taking the group south to meet the Allied forces became unfeasible, the most viable option was to lead them to Switzerland, which they reached\u2014through an adventurous journey\u2014in October 1943. After spending some time in various reception camps, the group was reunited and, once the war had ended, left by ship from Barcelona, arriving in Palestine on 29 May 1945.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the Villa Emma youths survived, with the exception of fifteen\u2011year\u2011old Salomon Papo and the DELASEM official Goffredo Pacifici.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"BeL-davanti-a-villa-Emma-passaggio-muro-esterno-c-Bianchini-e-Lusiardi-associati\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The context<\/strong>
The intervention area\u2014consisting of a partially wooded, L\u2011shaped plot on which two masonry rural buildings once stood\u2014is located in the southern part of the municipality of Nonantola, in the province of Modena. The site is bounded on the west by Via Mavora, which separates it from the park of Villa Emma; on the south by Via Donizetti; while to the east and north it borders private areas developed from the 1960s onward, characterized by small apartment buildings and semi\u2011detached residences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project<\/strong>
Two rural buildings dating back to the late nineteenth century, long abandoned and known as Case Sacerdoti<\/em>, originally stood on Prato Galli. The decision\u2014far from obvious\u2014to demolish them and construct a new building from scratch stemmed both from the functional rigidity of the existing structures and from the awareness that the interventions required to meet current structural and environmental standards\u2014such as energy\u2011efficiency performance and seismic\u2011safety regulations\u2014would have compromised the character of the farmhouses and constrained the design choices in relation to the objectives set by the competition brief. However, what have been described as \u201cthe stones that witnessed\u201d the lives of the youths remain as a tangible trace of history: the salvaged bricks will be reused as cladding for the wall that guides visitors from the exterior area to the building\u2019s entrance.

In our conception of the memorial, the building and the town\u2019s landscape together form the place of memory, and the pairs \u201cinside \/ outside\u201d and \u201cnear \/ far\u201d served as the guiding principles of the project. From these premises, it became clear that the space could only be imagined as a single\u2011level environment, a place with \u201cuncertain\u201d boundaries in continuous dialogue with its surroundings. This idea was developed through three main themes: the rarefaction of boundaries; the reference to the countryside as a space of discovery; and the reference to the Jewish sukkah<\/em> as an archetype of temporary shelter\u2014one that welcomes and protects during a journey. The memorial\u2019s plan is drawn on an orthogonal grid disrupted by symbolic axes corresponding to the physical routes and human relationships that shaped Nonantola during the period when the group of youths lived at Villa Emma, as well as by the ideal line connecting the villa to Israel.

The walls and glazed surfaces that define the building envelope support the flat roof, punctuated by both fixed and operable skylights. While the portion of the roof corresponding to the interior consists of an opaque slab, the exterior areas near the entrances are covered by laminated glass panels that provide protection from the elements while allowing natural light to filter through. A unifying feature of the roof\u2014visible both outside and inside\u2014is a system of vertical louvers: metal on the exterior and wood on the interior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"BeL-davanti-a-villa-Emma-assono-est-c-Bianchini-e-Lusiardi-associati\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Functional programme and internal layout<\/strong>
From the exterior grounds, visitors are guided to the building\u2019s entrance along a covered walkway flanked by the wall clad with bricks salvaged from the pre\u2011existing structures. The entrance area provides access on one side to the exhibition space and on the other to the group welcome room, which is adjacent to the cloakroom and service block. The Foundation\u2019s offices have been designed to ensure flexible use and have an independent entrance on the building\u2019s eastern fa\u00e7ade; the multipurpose room, located to the north, can likewise be used for presentations and conferences independently of the memorial\u2019s opening hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Structural aspects<\/strong>
The choice of material for the load\u2011bearing structures and the roof slab fell on wood, a material capable of offering excellent structural and thermal performance and well suited to prefabrication.
The walls will be built using CLT (Cross\u2011Laminated Timber) structural panels; the load\u2011bearing panels, composed of five layers of cross\u2011laminated boards, will have thicknesses of 100 and 160 mm. This construction technology makes it possible to complete the structural work in a shorter time than with more traditional systems and allows most of the fabrication to take place in the workshop, leaving only assembly operations to be carried out on site.
The roof slab consists of a framework of beams measuring 12 \u00d7 32 cm, with timber boarding on the upper surface. The foundations are reinforced\u2011concrete raft foundations with perimeter beams supporting the CLT walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exhibition design<\/strong>
The exhibition design is currently under development. In general terms, the competition proposal envisioned the exhibition route as composed of audio\u2011video contributions, objects, prints, and texts, with a significant role assigned to the oral testimonies of those who witnessed the events\u2014creating a multi\u2011voiced narrative. The project also proposed dedicating the boundary walls and the exterior partitions to images providing historical context for the story of the rescued youths, while the central spine\u2014which also serves as a structural element of the building\u2014would host the narrative of the days the youths spent at Villa Emma and, more broadly, of their relationship with the territory of Nonantola.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distributed artistic itinerary<\/strong>
In addition to the design of the Memorial, the competition brief required a proposal for a symbolic element capable of identifying the route connecting the houses and gathering places frequented by the youths during their stay in Nonantola.
The sign we chose\u2014a small chair, symbolizing welcome and hospitality\u2014refers to the most human and emotionally resonant dimension of this story: the network of homes, workshops, and shops that opened their doors to the group of Villa Emma youths.
The chairs we designed will be cast in bronze, a material with a centuries\u2011old sculptural tradition which, in this context, elevates an everyday object into something extraordinary. The backrest of each chair will bear the logo of the new center and a reference to the stages of the itinerary, while the seat may be engraved with a short phrase recalling the role that specific place played in the story being told.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Near Modena, a 800-square-meter museum made of timber, designed by Bianchini & Lusiardi Associati architects<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5932,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-architecture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4293"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6073,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4293\/revisions\/6073"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bianchinielusiardi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}