Italianate Homes in Massachusetts

What is an Italianate?

The Italianate is the romantic city house of the Victorian era, built across Massachusetts from about 1840 to 1890. Picture an Italian country villa on a New England street: tall arched windows, a low roof, deep eaves trimmed with carved wooden brackets, and sometimes a small cupola on top. The boom years ran through the 1850s to 1870s, when new mill and railroad money wanted handsome houses.

Why it’s special

The Italianate arrived as the country tired of the plain, columned Greek Revival. Pattern books by Andrew Jackson Downing (1842 and 1850) sold the idea of a house that feels like a villa in the Italian hills. The signature is the bracket: pairs of carved scrolls holding up wide, shady eaves. Windows are tall and narrow, often arched and set in pairs, and on the grandest houses a square tower or cupola rises from the center. New steam-powered saws made the trim affordable, so for one generation ordinary families could own a house that looked like a small palace.

What it’s like to live in one

These houses are built for height and light, with tall ceilings, long windows, and gracious rooms. In Massachusetts they cluster in the cities. Boston’s South End is the country’s largest Victorian brownstone neighborhood, full of bay-fronted rows from 1855 to 1875, and the mill cities of Worcester and Fall River hold the most ornate examples. Going in, budget for upkeep: brownstone fronts crumble, the carved brackets need care, and many original cupolas were removed when roofs leaked.

Is it the real thing?

A genuine Italianate dates roughly 1840 to 1890, and the brackets give it away: paired scrolls under deep eaves, tall arched windows, a low roof. The closest look-alike is the Second Empire, which shares the brackets but wears a steep mansard roof. This site files a house as Second Empire when the mansard is the star, and as Italianate when the roof stays low.

Boston has two Italianate neighborhoods dense enough to merit their own pages: the South End Italianate brownstone rows, and the grander Back Bay Brownstone houses on filled land. When a build date matters, the state’s historic inventory (MACRIS) is the place to confirm a house’s age.