Carmelo Pucci – Engineer and designer

Carmelo Pucci from Montecatini was the designer of several significant reinforced concrete works built mostly in Tuscany in the period between the 1950s and the 1980s.

His studies began in 1936 when he enrolled in the two-year preparatory course at the Faculty of Engineering in Florence and ended only after the long war period when he graduated in engineering at the University of Pisa.

In addition to the Palazzo in Via Toti, Pucci also contributed to the construction of many other buildings in the city.

He was also responsible for the structural part of the new Montecatini Terme bus station built in 1955 (most likely date) by the Lazzi brothers' company based on a design by Florentine architects Valerio Cresti and Cirano Fei. The building was built to cope with the growing flow of tourists linked to the spas, for which it became necessary to create a transport service from the spas to the city center and vice versa and a connection between the urban centers of the Valdinievole. The building consists of two reinforced concrete bodies with stone and plaster cladding that are connected by bus shelters. In 2012, the building was listed by the Superintendency as a building to be protected.

The engineer is also known in Montecatini, and not only, for the grandstand of the “Daniele Mariotti” Municipal Stadium built in 1970-1971. The structure, reduced to the essential elements in terms of resistance, combines the architectural form with an engineering solution: it is in fact a corrugated surface shell in 8 cm reinforced concrete whose stiffening ribs correspond to the trend of the stresses to which the shelter is subjected.

Carmelo Pucci also designed the two central chandeliers of the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta and the project for the fixed tensile structure roofing of the stalls of the Teatro Verdi located on the Viale of the same name.

In nearby Pescia, noteworthy are his Sforzini footbridge over the Pescia river from 1961-1962 and his Europa Bridge (1969) facing the flower market.

In the works of the Montecatini engineer we find elements that are very similar, and in some respects even “typical”, of the works of some great post-war designers, such as PierLuigi Nervi, Riccardo Morandi, Sergio Musmeci.