The Villa Siotto

Villa Siotto is a manor house of the early twentieth century, a valid example of "full farm" where olive oil, wine and a large variety of fruits were produced in the past, is composed of three elements: Villa, Garden and a Park of about 11 hectares.

The villa is located in the center of the village, not far from the residence that the family had previously occupied in the district of Santa Vittoria. Surrounded by a vast tree-lined park and adjacent rustic buildings, the building is under construction in the last decade of the nineteenth century to be completed in the years before the First World War in 1912. Originals are the Pertinences consisting of a series of connected buildings to the main activities of the company.

To emphasize is the location of the Villa: situated on a hillside, has a frontal facing towards the village. After the death of Giuseppe Siotto Pintor's last edeur, the Sarroch Municipality acquired the Villa, the belongings and the photographic collection belonging to Giuseppe Siotto Pintor, where family members and workers who were working on the farm were portrayed. On the top floor there is the photographic exhibition. There are 326 photos featuring Sarroch territory, moments of daily life of the Siotto family, their employees and citizenship of the country. The collection has a total of 1251 photos and all were purchased by the City of Sarroch.

The Villa is used as a representation office for cultural initiatives and is also chosen as a venue for wedding celebrations. (Sources: Fondazione Giuseppe Siotto, Comune di Sarroch).

HISTORY AND CHARACTERISTICS. The building, built at the beginning of the twentieth century - as evidenced by Giuseppe Siotto's letters kept in the archives of the Siotto Foundation in Cagliari - consists of a three-storey residential building surrounded by pre-existing buildings connected with agricultural activity, and a park that stretches for about ten hectares. The whole complex is currently administered by the Sarroch Municipality. From the second half of the 1980s, following the donation made by Vincenzina Siotto (1900-1989) in memory of his father, Giuseppe, the entire library fund, the family archive and a collection of photographs were given to the Giuseppe Siotto Historical Institute Foundation in Cagliari. The villa, which has lost all its original furnishings, has white marble fireplaces and niches, walls decorated with fake marble or embellished with fake wallpaper created with artistic techniques, in shades ranging from indigo to bordeaux, depending on the environments . The prestigious ceilings were painted between 1903 and 1907 - as is apparent from the documents in the archives of the Siotto Foundation - by Lorenzo Mattei and Oreste Parenti, two painters of continental origin, at that time domiciled in Cagliari, specializing in decoration interior. The first is not known origin, the second was Genoese. The two, who in the same years also realized the pictorial decoration of the facade of the Secondary Railways of the island's capital, agreed directly with Giuseppe Siotto - as a letter dated October 17, 1903 - about the typology of paintings to be performed on all ceilings and ceilings decorations of all the walls of the house in building in Sarroch. However, the sudden dissolution of the company Mattei-Parenti, due to financial-management problems between the two, caused the slowdown of jobs, presumably carried out at different times without a common agreement. Therefore, even in the absence of preparatory drawings, it is problematic to distinguish the two hands. In any case, these are works that are still affected by the eclectic taste widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the ceiling of the large lobby there are curious paintings depicted on a quadripartite white background: small centaurs are placed between four medallions containing portraits of illustrious characters, accompanied by tops in Italian and Latin; while the central part is embellished with flower garlands. Other ground floor environments are sometimes enriched with enclosed boxes small landscapes, flying swallows and flowered sertifics; while in the study hall of Luigi Siotto, as well as in the ceiling covering the entire stairway ramp, also decorated with pictorial inserts, there are linear decorations and floral decorations that are closer to the Liberty style. On the upper floor, walked from a gallery with walls decorated with friezing marbles and ceilings with large medallions depicting musical instruments and emblems of painting and sculpture, you enter a large salon whose pictorial decoration, made on the design of the Parenti (which claims it the paternity in a letter dated March 18, 1908), is distributed within cornices. There are some species of birds (including flamingos and herons), two feminine figures dressed in fashion of the time, one of them masked, shells full of flowers and grotesque scattered here and there; while in the center dominates a large blue box in which four chubby little pussys bear garlands and flutter a golden platter on their heads. One side of the hall is the emblem of the Siotto family, underlined by the motto "Servavi." It is worth mentioning another smaller room that hosted the library, whose plafond he puts in the middle a mappamondo, accompanied by a book and sheets with architectural drawings. At the corners are portraits of illustrious writers, among whom Dante Alighieri is recognized. The ceilings on the second floor, however, retain less interesting ornamental paintings, made in 1932 by Giuseppe Citta, a decorative painter of Piedmont origin, another author of the murals of the Municipalities of Villasor and Quartu Sant'Elena, and some of the buildings of Palazzina Merello in Cagliari. (Source: Sarroch - Storia, Archeologia e Arte, Comune di Sarroch, a cura di Roberto Coroneo)