Glass Art Museum

The Glass Art Museum of Altare is housed inside Villa Rosa, a liberty style villa (art nouveau) of the early twentieth century and gather a collection of artistic and household, pharmaceutical and chemical objects, created between the late eighteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century by S.A.V – Società Artistico Vetraria (Artistic Glassmaking Society) as well as equipment used for the craftsmanship glassworking. Along the visit itinerary it is possible to deepen the history and tradition of glassmaking also thanks to multimedia support. In the garden there are two demonstration furnaces which, during certain periods of the year, host national and international master glassmakers.

The Glass Art Museum of Altare collaborates with artists and designers to show the public the most contemporary expressions of glass art.

The Museum, through workshops and laboratories, aims to bring schools, families and the adult public closer to the processing and knowledge of the glassmaking techniques and territorial tradition.

Research and study work is also essential and supported by the Specialist Glass Library inside the Museum, which is open to scholars and researchers. In this study perspective, the online magazine Alte Vitrie, an exhibition dedicated to everything that revolves around the world of glass, from Altare and beyond, and published on the Museum’s website, was also created.

Villa Rosa, the Museum location is a magnificent liberty style building owned by the Direzione Regionale Musei della Liguria (Regional Museums Directorate of Liguria). It was designed by the engineer Nicolò Campora from Savona, trained in Turin and attentive to technical and stylistic innovations in the international architecture field. Villa Rosa is part of a series of liberty style buildings that spread across the country at the beginning of the 1900s, largely still existing and is the most homogeneous and stylistically representative of all the liberty style creations located in Altare. Monsignor Giuseppe Bertolotti, curate of Altare for over sixty years, was the client of the work.

Inhabited since 1906, Villa Rosa was used as the summer residence of the Saroldi family, but as time passed it was used for shorter and shorter periods. Subjected to protection in 1986, the building was acquired by the Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali (Ministry for Cultural and Environmental Heritage) in 1992.

Villa Rosa, after a long period of renovation, was opened to the public in 2004 as the site of the Glass Art Museum of Altare.