10 Hotel Esplanade

Texts by Rodolfo Huber

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Hotel Esplanade was built in 1913 by incorporating the former Mirabella villa built in 1870 in the middle of a large park. The new hotel was financed by the Italian pharmaceutical company Chini SA and was characterized as a sanatorium, as a "Kurhotel," in which guests could enjoy the healthfulness of the hillside climate of the pleasant resort overlooking Lake Maggiore.

The clinic was directed for many years by Locarnese physician Luciano Bacilieri. Over time the hotel function then prevailed. World War I caused a crisis and the hotel with the attached clinic went out of business. The hotel reopened in the early 1920s thanks to Locarnese hotelier Alfredo Fanciola. The hotel was recently closed in the fall of 2016.

During the 1925 Peace Conference, the Esplanade Hotel hosted representatives of the German delegation headed by Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and Chancellor Hans Luther. The German diplomats preferred to stay in a different place than the representatives of the Entente nations who stayed at the Grand Hotel in Muralto. At the beginning of the Conference, the success of diplomatic negotiations was not a foregone conclusion, and there remained important differences in views among the countries gathered in Locarno.

Perhaps the choice was also determined by security reasons: an attack by German nationalist extremists was feared. The fear seemed to be confirmed on October 6 when the meeting scheduled for the morning had to be postponed because of an indisposition on the part of Stresemann, at first attributed to poisoning, but later found to be a harmless illness. For his part, the foreign minister diplomatically explained to the press that the Hotel Esplanade had been chosen because the Grand Hotel had sold out.