“Picture 300 of America’s wealthiest citizens showing off their finest dresses, jewellery and dance moves right here,” smiled Karen Filippo, resident guide at The Breakers, as she waved me towards the palatial Great Hall. Stepping across the threshold, I was taken aback by the 15m-high ceiling with its impossibly realistic blue-sky fresco. I also had a feeling of déjá vu - was I back in one of Genoa’s Palazzi dei Rolli?
I was in fact touring the USA’s smallest state, Rhode Island. We were in a Renaissance-revival historic mansion that was little over a century old and I was left pondering why anyone would make such a grandiose architectural statement in a small New England town.
“This was America’s Gilded Age showing off at its finest,” explained Karen as she began the tour with a narration of the peculiar era that incubated The Breakers.
The Gilded Age, a term originally coined by Mark Twain for one of his lesser-known novels, refers to the economic boom that swept the USA roughly between 1877 and 1900. It was the period during which the Second Industrial Revolution reached North America, giving birth to a nouveau riche oligarchic class of banking, mining and railroad magnates, all impossibly hungry for social legitimacy and grandeur.
“The Second Industrial Revolution gave birth to a nouveau riche oligarchic class in North America”
Rhode Island’s oceanside town of Newport would become the holiday playground for this newly minted elite, a dramatic showcase and stage for their extravagant lives and society dramas.
“This was once the world’s most sought-after resort area,” beamed Mark Brodeur, a walking Rhode Island encyclopaedia and state tourism official. “Anyone from across the USA who wanted to be seen in society needed to summer in Newport - even coming in from as far out as San Francisco.”
The summer ‘season’ here typically lasted for six weeks, I was told, shocked that they would build all this grandeur for
