La Saracena, la Califfa, la Moresca and la Coatta: a review of Latium postmodernism

The Saracena, Califfa and Moresca villas that Moretti built in Santa Marinella from 1953 to 1981 can be seen as a funny summary of the confusion that plagued architectural criticism during the twentieth century in its constant attempt to pigeon-hole any design philosophy into precise trends. In fact very little was written about these playful holiday villas – the ultimate bourgeois models for their context, form and patronage – even discounting the ostracism visited upon Moretti’s work after the war due to his previously unwavering support of Fascism. Such reluctance is probably explained by their being examples of Mediterranean architecture’s resistance to reduction to any Modern trend, while on the other side they most clearly show the central role of architects’ creativity, or poetics, which certainly results from their culture and therefore from the context that produces it, as well as from something else that cannot be expressed in words, if not as a will to art.