Palazzo Butera, also called Palazzo Butera-Branciforti or Villa Butera and popularly «U Palazzu», is the oldest of the villas of Bagheria. It was built in 1658 by Giuseppe Branciforti, prince of Pietraperzia and Leonforte, on the site of an earlier farmstead.
What to see
The villa was conceived as a residence far from the Palermo court, of which Branciforti had vainly hoped to become the regent. For this reason, on the entrance door of the crenellated tower through which the palace is entered, facing west towards Palermo, the prince had carved «O corte a Dio», that is, a farewell to the court. On the same front, over the portal, stands a marble epigraph in verse: in it he recalls the labours spent in the King's service and, a widower and a father, says he weeps among the lonely fields. On the eastern side, above the main door, another epigraph quotes a sonnet by Miguel de Cervantes from the «Galatea», and above it a Latin inscription records that Giuseppe Branciforti, prince of Pietraperzia and Leonforte, count of Raccuja and knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece, built this residence.
The northern front is the work of Giovanni Giglio (1769). The so-called Certosa, set as the backdrop of the villa, was designed by Vincenzo Fiorelli in 1797: it is a neoclassical building with a colonnaded portico and inner cells that, until the mid-twentieth century, contained life-size statues in straw and tow, with wax faces, of famous figures of the time dressed as Carthusian monks. The idea of gathering them was Ercole Michele Branciforti's, prince of Butera. On the upper floor, with a spiral staircase and wall decorations by Giuseppe Velasquez, stood the statues of a sacristan and of a monk ringing a small bell. In 1889 Princess Sofia of Trabia entrusted the villa to the Daughters of Charity, who turned it into a kindergarten.
Visiting
The palace is in Bagheria. According to the sources consulted it is today the seat of the Comune; the parts open to the public, hours and visiting arrangements must be checked.
Our editors' tip
In the cells of the Certosa were shown, among others, a Moorish slave serving lunch to Admiral Horatio Nelson and Queen Maria Carolina, the protagonists of Giovanni Pacini's melodrama «Adelaide e Comingio» (1817) and King Ferdinand I of Bourbon, who during a visit, seeing his own statue portrait, was greatly amused. Not to be confused with the Palazzo Butera in Palermo, in the Kalsa district, on the Foro Italico: it belonged to the descendants of the Branciforte until 2015 and has been open to the public as a museum since 2021.
