In 1875, the Swiss industrialist Napoleone Leumann was searching for a place to build his new cotton mill. He had abandoned his previous factory in the small market town of Voghera for Turin, lured by the latter’s growing population, railway network and large industrial base. He settled on a then-uninhabited patch of land outside the city and began building.
But Leumann had grander ideas than just a cotton mill.
In tandem with the factory, Leumann dreamed up an adjoining village — a refined and orderly community where workers and their families could live with dignity, far removed from Turin’s overcrowded and polluted areas.
This was the beginning of the company town era, a brief period of paternalistic capitalism where business tycoons from West Virginia to West Yorkshire sought to create idealistic communities for their workers based around their factories. Leumann was among the most enlightened of this new generation of bosses, and the planned community he envisaged would eventually take his name: Villaggio Leumann.
A marriage of paternalism and idealism
There are two things which make Villaggio Leumann stand out from other company towns.
The first is the level of thought and care that went into it. Workers and their families had their own houses and gardens. There would be parks, a free medical center, a gymnasium and showers. There would be a school, church, post office, theater, shops and even a tram stop on the old Turin-Rivoli line, allowing residents to visit the city whenever they liked. The village’s urban layout and network of social and welfare services formed an organized system where the primary aim was enhancing the quality of life for workers, both in their professional roles and in their everyday lives.
The second was who Leumann asked to build it.
In a roguish move, Leumann turned to Pietro Fenoglio, the enfant terrible of Art Nouveau, for help designing this workers’ utopia from scratch. Fenoglio — responsible for some of Turin’s most dazzling, voluptuous palazzos — seemed like an odd choice. At the time, Art Nouveau was seen as amusement for the bourgeoisie (an image that persists today, to some extent). But Leumann clearly believed it had value, an architectural style so joyful and elegant that it could instill a sense of pride and wellbeing in his employees. His was a curious mixture of paternalism and idealism — an industrialist’s belief that happy workers made good workers, combined with the Art Nouveau conviction that beauty and the built environment mattered deeply to human life.
Of course nothing Fenoglio built here has the wild, free-form abandon of, say, his Casa Fenoglio-Lafleur in central Turin. How could it? For one, he was designing an entire village from scratch for workers who needed housing fast. But the result is still something remarkable.
Between 1892 and 1912, around 60 houses were built, subdivided into 120 units. Each resembles a small chalet or cottage, complete with its own garden. Fenoglio infused them with subtle charm: wrought-iron balconies, decorative brickwork, stained-glass dormer windows, delicate stucco panels and the occasional tower. Look closely and you’ll spot mosaics, ornate cornices and even trompe-l’œil frescoes — playful illusions that blur the line between painting and architecture.
Other grand buildings include the village school (still functioning), the old medical clinic (now a Bassetti household linen shop), a hotel where visiting clients stayed (now a library), a leisure center, and a post office. The old tram stop, meanwhile, is preparing for a rebrand; it will soon become Leumann station on the extended Turin metro, which is slated to open in 2027.
The Leumann legacy
Fenoglio’s pièce de résistance is the village church, known as Sant’Elisabetta Vedova . It has been speculatively claimed as the only church in the world built in the Art Nouveau style. (Hmmm. I know a rather famous church in Barcelona that would disagree.) But it’s true that Art Nouveau was never used for churches in Italy, its whiplash lines and amoral spiritualism seen as too eccentric, even slightly scandalous, for a place of worship. Villaggio Leumann might have the only example this side of the Alps, though Fenoglio once again took a more restrained approach. The form is stoic and rather chaste, despite the sprinkling of caprices, most notably in the curvaceous central window and curly, wrought-iron crosses. In 2019, it was given over to the Romanian Orthodox Church, reflecting the changing demographics of Collegno, though not of Villaggio Leumann itself which, according to an elderly resident I spoke to, remains almost entirely Italian, with a population that includes descendants of the original factory workers.
In the 1970s, the cotton mill that gave birth to the village spun its last thread, though some related activities like dyeing and finishing staggered on until the early 2000s.
But by then, Villaggio Leumann was no longer a rural industrial colony on the outskirts of Turin. The city had grown around it, swallowing it into a sea of factories, warehouses and tower blocks.
Fortunately, the municipality of Collegno stepped in and bought the village wholesale. The cottages were turned into social housing — it’s yours until you die, and then it goes to the first person on the waiting list. But the textile industry could not be moneyed back into existence. Today the old cotton mill, restored and bookended by a pair of barmy, turreted chalets, is a clothing outlet store — a canny example of adaptive reuse. Another part of the factory has been heavily modernised to host a Lidl, though some amusing Art Nouveau trimmings still survive — the old decorative portico, now detached, which frames the Lidl from the roadside, giving it an odd, slightly pastiche sense of majesty.
Today, Villaggio Leumann stands as one of the very few planned communities in the Art Nouveau style. Comparable examples are rare — places like Colònia Güell outside Barcelona or the garden city of Hellerau in Germany echo aspects of its vision, while the company town of Crespi d’Adda in Lombardy offers a parallel story (previously covered in Italy Magazine’s Bellissimo) in a different architectural language.
Villaggio Leumann is a strange, semi-dormant Art Nouveau oasis, placed deep within the suburbs of Turin like an easter egg for later generations to find. It’s a living relic of a different Europe, a different world even. One wonders what Leumann and Fenoglio would make of it today.
If you go
From Torino Porta Nuova, take the 13-minute regional train to Collegno. From the station it’s a 15-minute walk to Villaggio Leumann.
In the future, this journey will be even easier. The extension of the Turin Metro Line 1 is expected to open sometime in 2027 and will include a Leumann station.
