ISOLART
  GALLERY

Villa Trossi stands on Livorno’s seafront boulevard. Commissioned and personally overseen in 1889 by the English noblewoman Louise Coventry, Marchesa Santasilia, it was built in the Neo-Renaissance style and ranks among the earliest sea-view villas along the Tuscan coast. In 1910, Italian textile magnate Carlo Trossi acquired the property, adding a double-arched portico facing the sea and a network of winding paths that wove the villa together with pines and holm oaks to form a Romantic garden. In 1927, the estate passed to his only daughter, Corinna Trossi, who—together with the painter Dino Uberti, her devoted partner—converted the sea-view hall into a private studio and a salon for musicians, regularly welcoming prominent European artists. In 1953, Corinna stipulated in her will that upon her death the entire villa be donated to the municipality for art education; in 1959, the city founded the Fondazione Culturale d’Arte Trossi-Uberti. Its garden fountain, created by the Carrara sculptor Valmore Gemignani, rests on a base of Alpine white marble carved as twin satyrs bearing a sea fish, with water issuing from the fish’s mouth—an allegory of “the spring of art nourishing the public.”

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For more than sixty years, the site has served both as Livorno’s only year-round private art academy—training hundreds of students annually—and as a permanent venue for international exhibitions and scholarly forums, witnessing the evolution from Tuscan Realism to contemporary intermedia art. Today, accompanied by a century of sea breeze and the murmur of sculpted waters, it welcomes artists and audiences from many countries for “Medusa: The Aphasia of the Monster,” interlacing history, myth, and contemporary thought beneath the same Mediterranean sun.