Ischia nel secondo dopoguerra: una modernità “imprevista”

In the Fifties of the 20th Century, Ischia became a popular destination for artists, intellectuals and famous personalities. On the one hand, this phenomenon was partly due to the presence of the tycoon Angelo Rizzoli, who was publisher and film producer, and on the other hand, this was due to the fact that they were looking for a genuine and remote place. This search was connected with the “Mediterranean image” of the island. The architecture of villas and hotels in the Fifties and Sixties reflected perfectly – with just few exceptions – this image of a typical Mediterranean island. Some architects, such as Sandro Petti, Ugo Cacciapuoti and Federico Zollinger, tried to give a modern face to architectures which were also not too far from the tradition. In the Pre-War years, some travelling architects had already been interested in the topic of Mediterranean architecture, thinking especially of the gulf of Naples. It was actually difficult to distinguish the traditional architectural elements of Ischia from those present in the rest of the gulf, even though some scholars saw a difference in the availability of the building materials. Anyway, this is a problem every modern architecture after the Second World War had to deal with, especially in the Naples area, and Ischia could be an appropriate place to experiment this fusion between tradition and modernity.