A nineteenth-century municipal building in Arzignano, Italy, has gained new life as the Caffè Nazionale following an ambitious renovation by local architecture studio AMAA. The café occupies a prime position beneath the town hall's colonnade, creating a seamless transition between civic space and daily social life. Visitors enter directly from the public square through a dramatic portal that continues the rhythmic arcade pattern into the interior. The design thoughtfully preserves the building's historic character while introducing contemporary elements that serve modern café culture. This project demonstrates how sensitive architectural intervention can activate underutilized heritage spaces for community benefit.
The entrance features a striking pivot door crafted from burnished iron panels arranged in a diamond pattern on both sides, creating a strong material presence that stands out against the historic stonework. Artist Nero, also known as Alessandro Neretti, collaborated with the architects to design a distinctive door handle carved from green serpentine marble sourced from Valmalenco, adding a tactile artistic element at hand level. An open kitchen occupies the corner position at the start of the colonnade, making food preparation visible to arriving guests and integrating culinary activity into the social atmosphere. This transparency between kitchen and dining areas reflects contemporary preferences for open, interactive food experiences. The strategic placement allows the kitchen to serve both the interior space and the outdoor colonnade seating.
Inside the main hall, AMAA has curated a sophisticated interplay of textures and historical layers that reveal the building's evolution over time. A folded and perforated stainless steel wall stretches across part of the space, serving as a contemporary veil that offers partial views toward the arches facing an interior courtyard. This metallic surface holds illuminated posters by illustrator Stefan Marx, whose graphic fragments evoke public interior aesthetics from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, visible through the precisely engineered perforations. Beneath this installation, a finely detailed polychrome mosaic floor spreads across the room, its intricate patterning providing a historic counterpoint to the coffered ceiling constructed from layered wood panels engineered for both light distribution and acoustic control. The architects deliberately avoided concealing older finishes, allowing multiple phases of occupation to remain visible and contribute to the rich spatial narrative.
The interior courtyard functions as an outdoor room rather than a separate destination, featuring a birch grove that maintains visual connection to the surrounding landscape while providing an intimate garden setting. Custom furnishings designed by AMAA in collaboration with Nero/Alessandro Neretti demonstrate meticulous attention to detail and proportion. The integrated system of wooden tables and benches, developed through full-scale prototyping, adapts consistently across different zones of the café. Deeper within the main room, rectangular tables accommodate longer dining experiences, while smaller round tables near the square facilitate casual conversation and extend outward beneath the portico. The furniture draws references from utilitarian to minimalist typologies, translated into solid timber elements with visible joints that align with floor patterns and structural rhythms. A large pivot door within the steel wall opens toward a vestibule that marks a deliberate pause in the spatial sequence, with shifting light and scale preparing visitors for the courtyard experience.
This renovation project exemplifies how contemporary architecture can honor historical context while creating vibrant new community spaces. By maintaining the colonnade's public character and extending it inward, AMAA has blurred boundaries between interior and exterior, civic and commercial, historic and modern. The café serves as both a social gathering place and a subtle architectural education, where visitors experience thoughtful design through materiality, light, and spatial flow. The collaboration with artists and careful craftsmanship elevates the project beyond typical commercial renovation, positioning Caffè Nazionale as a model for sensitive heritage adaptation. As communities worldwide grapple with activating historic buildings, this project offers a compelling blueprint for preservation through purposeful contemporary use.
