Via dei Palazzi (Station 2 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

The idea of this new quarter came from the then Podestà, Tommaso Lardelli (1818-1908), who also wanted to create a business card for Poschiavo to the south. Tommaso Lardelli commissioned the Italian architect Giovanni Sottovia with the planning.

Wolfgang Hildesheimer describes the palazzi of the returned emigrants with the following words:

"Above all, emigration to Spain has not been without architectural consequences. The first generation of returnees also built palazzi around 1850, which not only have the Spanish element, but also - a reminder of their career - the confectionery element. For example, we must not look for symbolism in the painting of the facades or their stucco work, which one would often be tempted to do by the excessive fantasticism of the details - no, it is icing transported in architecture, cake decoration al fresco. In addition, there are trompe-l'oeils, window dummies, whose meticulously precise foreshortening of perspective, however, only works on one side, which naturally makes them even more unreal from the other side.

Anyone who concludes from this description that these houses are ugly is mistaken. They are strange. But the proportions are "right". These are lovingly realized life goals, but in contrast to the settlement house, the realized and standardized dream - nightmare - of one's own four walls and one's own roof over one's head, these are strictly individual dreams of many walls and several roofs over the heads of an often large, now almost extinct or widely scattered family."

Source: Experience of the Unexpected, in Merian 14/8, 1961.