In via Oslavia in Rome there is a house which is also a artistic experimentation laboratory incredible. It is not only full of works of art, but it is completely painted and decoratedincluding all the ceilings and floors, doors and furniture: it is House Dancerthe residence of the artist Giacomo Balla and his family, as well as his study. Balla was a painter, sculptor, scenographer and prominent exponent of the Futurismand over 30 years he has transformed his home into a work of art.
We are in via Oslavia 39b, in the Roman district of Vittoria. It is the summer of 1929 when the Balla family moved to the fourth floor of a common building, inside a normal apartment: in addition to the artist, his wife Elisa Marcucci and the two daughters light and propeller are also painters. The home though it wouldn’t have stayed for a long time one of the manybecause he would soon fill up with vivid wall paintingsbut also of self-construction tools, paintings and sculptures, dressed and sewn clothes in the house, decorated dishes and tiles and many other unique and colorful objects.
The house, which became the intellectual living room for many personalities of art and culture, embodied the ideas expressed in “Manifesto on the futurist reconstruction of the universe” Signed in 1915 by Balla himself. In this colorful house he lived until his death, in 1958and transformed it through his art into a symbol of the movement, for this reason the house is often seen as a “Futurism Temple”.
House Balla is open? It will be possible from September 22, 2025 Thanks to a long a recovery process implemented in recent years. The home closed its doors in the nineties, with the disappearance of the Lordine Balla. Declared of cultural interest by the Ministry of Culture and bound, the house had temporarily reopened to the public Between 2021 and 2023on the intervention of the MAXXI Museum of Rome. A permanent reopening in the coming months will be guaranteed, given that The property has gone to the Italian state for a figure between the 6 he is 7 million euros.