Designed between 1900 and 1905 in Taormina by the English painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson, Casa Cuseni was declared an Italian National Monument in 2023 and listed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage register. Managed by the non-profit Robert Hawthorn Kitson Foundation, led by director Francesco Spadaro, the complex includes the main Arts and Crafts villa (official Fine Arts and Grand Tour Museum since 2015), an annex that served as the home and studio of American painter Henry Lawrence Faulkner, and a historic garden facing Mount Etna.
What to see
The main building features stacked geometric cubes, a Palladian colonnaded entrance, and local construction materials, inspired by drawings by Sir Frank Brangwyn held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and architectural concepts by James Arthur Stratton. Its interior preserves original period furnishings and a dining room created between 1905 and 1910 by Brangwyn and Sir Alfred East—the only surviving interior by Brangwyn in the world and a rare example of the Arts and Crafts movement outside Great Britain. This room houses a concealed mural illustrating a 1908 homosexual love story and adoption in Taormina, kept hidden for over a century until its public opening in 2012. The property holds over 2,700 items with 200 on permanent view, including Grand Tour watercolors by Kitson, Brangwyn, East, and George Clausen, alongside Persian carpets, Islamic glassware, Greek and Roman artifacts, and historic Sicilian ceramics. The villa's library contains rare first editions reflecting the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris. Outdoors, the historic landscape garden (1905–1930), laid out by Kitson, Brangwyn, East, and Cecil Arthur Hunt to frame the Ionian Sea and Mount Etna, features geometric floral motifs added in March 1915 by Futurist artists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero.
Visiting
Visitors tour the preserved rooms of the house-museum and the tiered garden layout. The house historically welcomed figures such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henry Moore, Ernest Hemingway (who wrote his short story "The Mercenaries" on site), D. H. Lawrence (who translated Giovanni Verga's "Mastro-don Gesualdo" here), Ezra Pound, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who drafted early ideas for the Russell-Einstein Manifesto while staying here. Inherited in 1947 by Kitson's niece Daphne Phelps (author of "A House in Sicily"), the villa went on to host Tennessee Williams, Greta Garbo, Roald Dahl, and historian Denis Mack Smith. During World War II, local residents hid and preserved the entire art collection while the building served as a Fascist headquarters, a German post under Field Marshal Albert Konrad Kesselring, and later a British base, returning all items to Kitson in 1946.
Our editors' tip
Examine the unique wall painting by Sir Frank Brangwyn in the dining room, which remained hidden for over a century to protect its creators' reputations before being opened to the public in 2012.