Raffaello Brizzi - Architect and engineer

Raffaello Brizzi was born in Montecatini Terme (PT) on April 4, 1883 to a family traditionally involved in the construction sector. Academician of the Academy of the Arts of Drawing since 1908 and former teacher of the Chair of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, he was one of the main architects of the Royal Higher School of Architecture in Florence: this, which had already seen courses active for some years, was officially inaugurated in 1931 and Brizzi took over the direction in March 1932.

Dean of the newly founded Faculty in 1936, Raffaello Brizzi held the position until his death in 1946.

Although he practiced a teaching that was in line with the tradition from which he came, his school produced a generation of innovative architects, such as Italo Gamberini, Nello Baroni, Leonardo Lusanna and Giovanni Michelucci who, guided by the latter, won the project for the railway station of S. Maria Novella; thanks to him, moreover, Giovanni Michelucci himself was called to the Faculty of Architecture in Florence, as professor of the Chair of Furnishing.

Raffaello Brizzi must also be remembered for his intense activity as a designer that took place mainly in Florence, in the Lucca area and in the Pistoia area.

The projects largely drawn up in collaboration with the engineer Righetti refer to this area, such as, in Montecatini Terme, the Palazzo Comunale (1913-1919), the new headquarters of the Banco di Roma, the competition for the new spa establishments and the numerous private villas. He is also responsible, again in cooperation with Righetti and again in his hometown, for the Monumental Fountain in Piazza del Popolo (then Piazza Umberto I), erected in 1926 at the behest of the municipality on the site where since 1834 there had been a quadrangular loggia used for agricultural markets and fairs, and the travertine basin built, again in 1926, in Piazza VII Settembre, then called Piazza del Salsero.

In the 1920s and 1930s he intervened in Viareggio, preparing the Master Plan; in 1932 he was entrusted with the management of the Technical Office for the development of the Versilia coastline: a series of projects for buildings, such as bathing establishments, shops and bars for private clients, which affected the Viareggio coastline and which are exhaustively documented in the Fund of drawings preserved by the Brizzi heirs, date back to those years. His activity was widespread in the areas of Lucca and Pistoia (with various creations also for public commissions), as well as in Rome.

In Florence, in addition to the never realized arrangement of the Lungarno del Tempio (1937-1938), we remember the creations of the Royal Police Headquarters of via Zara and the project for the arrangement of the New University Center, both from 1939. He also designed the stadium in Livorno (1933-1935).

He died in Florence on February 23, 1946.