It was the home of Pietro Manodori, philanthropist of Reggio Emilia. It looks out on the via Emilia and it is located on the west wing of S. Pietro's Church, on the corner of Campo Samarotto. It's built by two factory bodied on three floors, connected by a lower one, two floors with lodge. The facade was put in restoration, in 1819, by Domenico Marchelli, of the family of designers, very popular among the good customers of Reggio. The implant of the facade, that shows istelf to the passer-by, it's neoclassic and the image is coherently plain and structured. The central connecting block with the monumental lodge makes the bulk of the palace graceful. A continuous cycle of ashlar on the ground floor, smooth in the central body, rustic in the side, surrounds the perimeter of the building while the upper floors are simple plaster without decorations and with a few architectural elements such as a flat string course ribbon , on the first floor gabled windows with projecting architraves, supported by pairs of simple volutes. On the Via Emilia three large entrances to the ground floor, one for each body, without portals but simply recessed in the ashlar. Inside the lodge there's a monochrome frieze by Prospero Minghetti, attributable in a manner but not proven by documents. On the main floor there are five paintings in tempera of the school of Francesco Fontanesi: Group of trees, Landscape with watchtower, Caves on the lake, Bridge on the lake, The solitary tree. A long barrel-vaulted porch, naked and without decorations, number 42, leads to the inner courtyard with an architectural pre-existence of the fifteenth century that resides in a side colonnade on columns. three sides of the courtyard are closed by factory buildings, the fourth to the east instead houses a semi-covered space with five cross spans, narrow and long, with the front of round arches, mounted on columns, stone-covered material, with base and mixed capitals in late medieval stone, variously carved with leaves, inserts, festoons, veneers. Above the colonnade is housed a floor, on the opposite side a buffered lodge climb on a sequence of vaults of floor: in these cases the heights are homogeneous thing did not occur in all the other blocks of the building, There are several jumps in height already from the facade which is much higher than the other buildings. The idea that is derived from it is that of successive aggregations of different building bodies at different times although the architectural image turns to pleasantness and beautiful proportion. Next to the first cloister you can access a second courtyard. Under the cornice of the roof of the main courtyard runs a frieze painted in two-tone. The building is used as a private residence, has three different entrances not communicating with each other and houses some offices.
(card by the architect Rosaria Petrongari, December 2011)