Seminars and company events
Villa Smeraldi hosts conferences, business meetings and receptions for up to 80 people seated in its former ballroom, the salone delle feste on the main floor. The villa stands in a nineteenth-century park at Bentivoglio, in the countryside north of Bologna, and is home to the Museo della Civiltà Contadina, the museum of rural life run by the Metropolitan City of Bologna, which rents out its rooms for events.
The ballroom has frescoed walls and a frescoed ceiling and comes with the main technical equipment for a meeting: a video projector, a sound system, an overhead projector, a screen and a flip chart. It suits a training day, a study day, a press conference or a half-day seminar with a presentation. Two smaller salons, also frescoed, serve as antechambers to the main room. They can be set for a coffee break, a working lunch served as a buffet, an aperitif or a cocktail, or used as the organizers' registration and secretariat desk.
Weddings and receptions
Weddings are part of the official offer. Part of the English park is made available for outdoor moments, receptions with drinks and food, and wedding celebrations, and the frescoed rooms can host the reception or a seated meal for a smaller group. Couples request a quote for a wedding at Villa Smeraldi from the museum secretariat by email.
Rooms and capacities
The salone delle feste seats 80 and is the main event room. The two frescoed salons next to it have no published capacity and are used for catering or for the secretariat. The park area offered for events is used for open-air receptions. The museum also offers birthday parties for children in its spaces, but these are a separate offer.
Catering
A catering service is available for events. Rooms are rented for a fee set by the board of the Istituzione that runs the museum, which covers utilities, staff and extra services, and the fee is paid at least 48 hours before the event. Quotes are given on request.
History and setting
The villa has a long line of owners whom the museum presents one by one. Count Giovanni Zambeccari, Francesco Zambeccari (1752 to 1812), the builder and pilot of hot-air balloons, and his heir Livio Zambeccari (1802 to 1862), a naturalist, cartographer and member of the Carbonari, are among them. The agricultural entrepreneur Gaetano Zucchini followed, then Rigoberto Smeraldi (1879 to 1942), born in Pieve di Cento, who had emigrated young to South Africa and gave the villa its present name. The house was badly damaged during the war and stood unused for several years before its new life as a museum.
The park was laid out by the Zucchini counts in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the villa was enlarged. It follows the romantic English style of the time: irregular groups of trees and shrubs, slopes, winding paths, hedges, mock ruins, statues and a pond crossed by a bridge. Horse chestnuts stand in front of the villa around the old icehouse and the dovecote. Today the park stands out as a block of green in the flat farmland of the plain.
Getting there
Villa Smeraldi is close to Bologna and easy to reach from the motorway, and it has a large car park for guests. The museum secretariat answers event requests by email and the museum phone line is listed on the official site.
