House of Ludovico Ariosto (Casa di Ludovico Ariosto)

The house that Ludovico Ariosto had built for himself in the Mirasole district of Ferrara (now Via Ariosto 67) at the age of 50, after definitively returning to his homeland after his arduous experience as governor of Garfagnana, is still well preserved today, despite some building works that have slightly altered the original rooms. It now houses a small museum dedicated to the great poet. The building was most likely built to precise instructions provided by Ariosto himself (any reference to active designers in Este Ferrara in the early 16th century, such as Girolamo da Carpi, is purely conjectural and lacking in concrete evidence), which helped to redefine the typology and expressive values ​​of one of the many houses built in the area of ​​the Addizione Erculea on the model of the house that Biagio Rossetti had built for himself along the Via della Ghiara in the early 16th century.

The discreet and well-measured character of the Ariosto residence is evident both from the well-proportioned layout of the interior rooms, arranged over two floors, with a passageway on the lower level, a simple staircase leading to an upper floor, where a large room with five windows facing the public road and two bedrooms overlooking the garden can be found. On the façade, along the terracotta string course, the famous couplet is carved: Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non / sordida, parta meo, sed tamen aere domus (The house is small but suitable for me, clean, not burdened with royalties and purchased only with my money), which is almost certainly not the work of Ariosto, but composed by Dionigi dell’Aquila for Bartolomeo Cavalieri, i.e. for the previous owner of the house. Above the central window there is a square plaque with a second epigraph:  “Sic domus haec Areosta propitios Deos habeat olim ut Pindarica” ​​(“Thus, this house of the Ariosti family has propitiated the gods as, once upon a time, did the house of Pindar”). At the rear of the building, near an unspecified “loggia”, which no longer exists, another poem by Ariosto was originally visible, the De paupertate, which invited guests to appreciate the sobriety of the place. The back garden is a modern development and does not correspond to the vegetable garden that the poet personally tended when he visited the house.