This palace waited forty years before it had a municipality to house. It was built in the mid nineteen-twenties, to a design by Giovanni Giordano, when Acquedolci was a brand-new town born on the coast after the landslide that struck San Fratello, up in the mountains. It became the town hall only in 1969, when the town obtained its autonomy.
What to see
The front is eclectic, with a loggia and a three-light window, and looks to late Renaissance palaces: a nineteen-twenties building dressed as a sixteenth-century one, as was done then. It stands at the centre of piazza Vittorio Emanuele III, a large open space with the circular fountain of dolphins at its middle, stylised in the taste of the period.
On the crest is the Gaipa bird with the motto SPERO, taking up the emblem of the Gravina, the family that in the eighteenth century governed the fief of San Fratello and Acquedolci. A town only recently born took the old barons' emblem and put it on its front.
Visiting
The palace is the seat of the municipality of Acquedolci, on the Tyrrhenian coast of the Messina province; you go in during office hours, while the square and the fountain can be seen at any time. A quarter of an hour.
Our editors' tip
Read that motto bearing in mind who was reading it. SPERO, I hope, in the mouth of a family of barons was one heraldic formula among many. On the front of the town hall of a place founded by people who had lost their houses to a landslide and had to start again by the sea, the same word says something different.