A few kilometers from the hotel, in Marcellise, there is a unique villa of its kind, one of the many jewels of Italian architecture that it is hard to believe dates back to the 1930s. Built by the engineer Angelo Invernizzi between 1929 and 1935, it is an Art Nouveau building with an undoubtedly futuristic design. Its inventor, devoted to the cult of the sun, translated the ambitious ideas of the futurist movement of the time into a futuristic construction.
The villa was able to rotate on itself by making a rotation of 360 ° following the movement of the sun. The mechanism allowed the house to rotate by 4 millimeters per second, completing a complete revolution on itself in 9 hours and 20 minutes. The mechanism was driven by an engine placed in the lower part of the structure, in the “engine room” as if it were a cruise ship; the slow rotation was moved and allowed by a central pivot that moved the building on rails.
Thanks to this mechanism, the house was always exposed to the sun (hence the name Villa Girasole): a project as ambitious as it was a precursor of modern energy saving technologies!
Some interesting videos
The video of the operation
(3D simulation)
