Villa Signorini is in Ercolano, at via Roma 43. It was built in the mid-eighteenth century in a style recalling the architecture of Domenico Antonio Vaccaro and, after changing hands several times, in 1911 it was bought by Paolo Signorini, owner of the Cirio company, from whom it takes its name.
What to see
The villa has a square plan, a rusticated piperno portal and windows adorned with Baroque stucco. On the main floor open a central loggia and two corner ones, originally facing two square terraces; in the early twentieth century two symmetrical staircases were added to link the main-floor terrace to the garden. It is one of the few eighteenth-century Vesuvian villas that keep their original volumes almost intact, without nineteenth-century additions.
The rooms of the main floor are richly decorated, some with original eighteenth-century frescoes of illusionistic architecture, as in the Royal Palace of Portici and in Villa Campolieto. The garden, which borders the park of the Royal Palace, has Italian-style flowerbeds, citrus groves, a piperno fountain with a statue of Leda and two square arched pavilions with majolica domes.
Visiting
Today the villa hosts events, gatherings and receptions and is a luxury hotel: visiting possibilities should be checked with the hotel.
Our editors' tip
In the same year, 1911, Paolo Signorini also bought the nearby Villa Granito di Belmonte, at the corner of corso Resina and via Roma, which is therefore also known as Villa Signorini II or «di Sopra»: its staircase of two symmetrical flights, closed towards the sea by a belvedere loggia, is its most striking feature.
