Today I’m reliving my trip to discover Italy’s strangest treasure, a crumbling baroque palace buried deep in the backstreets of Bagheria, a town 12km from Palermo. It’s also almost as puzzling to find as it is to learn its bizarre history, especially if you don’t know Palermo well or speak Italian.
It’s also often randomly closed, so a visit here means risking your time. Somehow, though, after a lot of searching and conversations about directions in broken Italian, we managed to find it on our last day in Sicily – and it was open!
Looking at these photos, I know what you might be thinking: what is she talking about? Villa Palagonia doesn’t look strange at all. It looks positively dreamy and romantic in its faded Baroque glory, I would like to live here!
I thought the same at first, so I agree wholeheartedly. That beautifully faded pastel-yellow facade, the sweeping staircase, the palm-filled garden… really, it looks like something plucked out of a nostalgic Italian film. Then I looked more closely at the details and learned the story and felt a little differently.
Villa Palagonia stands out from other Italian villas and palaces, for its garden walls and entrances crawling with bizarre figurines – dragons, serpents, gargoyles, contorted human figures. Take these statues by the entrance above for example. On first glance you might think, well it is a palace after all, and palaces have grand entrance gates and statues, right?
Look closely. Not the most inviting, are they? Especially the one on the left with its deformed face, goat head and body of a… soldier? I can’t quite tell but it looks creepy. This leads us to the story behind these mysterious figurines, which for decades have had people puzzling over the reclusive prince who designed them.
The story behind Villa Palagonia
The palace was built for the 5th Prince of Palagonia, but the tale starts with his successor, the supposedly mad, reclusive, 7th Prince of Palagonia. He was born in Palermo in 1722, into huge wealth and entitlement, yet lived in reclusive misery, an outcast of society, often described as the ugliest man who ever lived in Sicily. One day, though, he surprised everyone and married Maria, the beautiful and sociable daughter of nobility, and lived a popular and joyful life, albeit for a short time until he discovered her cheating.
It’s at this point some say he went mad. To vent his feelings of resentment, he hatched a plan to punish Maria and stop her leaving by surrounding the palace with grotesque features, including caricatures of her lovers. He hired an imaginative architect called Tommasso di Napoli to carry out his dirty work.
The result is these 200 bizarre figurines set atop the palace’s outside wall that took five years to carve. The mad ugly prince’s plan worked, because no one saw the couple after that.
The palace and its fantasy decorations became well-known during the era of the ‘Grand Tour’. Between the 1890s and the 1940s, wealthy sophisticated travellers, with adventurous spirits, plenty of time and – of course – money packed their Louis Vuitton trunks and embarked on months-long world ‘grand tours’ in search of cultural wonders.
It attracted literary visitors such as Germany’s greatest literary figure, Goethe, French novelist Alexander Dumas and later, surrealist artists such as Andre Breton. No doubt their accounts have embellished the story of the prince. For example, in 1787, Goethe described the bizarre exterior:
To convey all the elements of the madness of the Prince of Palagonia, here’s the list. Men: beggars of the two sexes, Spaniards and Spaniards, Moors, Turks, Humpbacks, Deformed of all kinds, Dwarves, Musicians, Pulcinella, Soldiers dressed in the old fashion, Gods and Goddesses, Ancient French costumes, Soldiers with pouches and men, beings mythological with comic additions (…) Beasts: isolated parts of the same, horses with human hands, human bodies with equine heads, deformed monkeys, numerous dragons and snakes, extremely varied legs and figures of all kinds, splits and exchanges of heads.
On first look, it’s easy to be taken in by the palace’s charms, until you find out the story of the doomed couple and the mysterious statues, and a little shiver descends the spine. Just what kind of a prince was he? We’ll never know… Around one corner we find a clue people still live in it today, a lovely cacti-covered garden table in a perfect shady spot I can imagine sitting at and sipping an early evening Aperol spritz.
I don’t ponder this scene for long, though, as I really want to sashay up the ornate staircase, onto the balcony and through the grand entrance where we emerge into a large, quiet and cool hallway. Inside, the atmosphere is shady and cool and silent, and there are a few rooms open to explore, all empty without furniture, which exposes the features. S
mall windows and vaulted ceilings protect the place from the hot summer sun, while every inch of the interior wall surfaces are decorated with classical motifs, pediments, entablatures, niches, pilasters, busts and domes that offer clues to the villa’s past glory. It’s a feast for the eyes and senses. We walk around in mesmerised silence taking photo after photo.
The main room known as the Gallery of Mirrors is arguably the most mind-blowing. With its incredible ceiling of antique mirrors, which have been painted over in the corners with majestic birds and coats of arms.
When the prince died, he left all his money to the poor, and Maria died shortly afterwards. At this point though, it’s hard to find out much more history about Europe’s strangest palace. According to one account, in the 19th century, the locals tried without luck to have the statues legally removed and in the 1950s, it was used as an apartment building. Today, it has a private owner who has opened it to the public.
Find Villa Palagonia at Piazza Garibaldi, 3, Bagria, Palermo, 90011
