The Florio were the richest family in Sicily: tuna fisheries, ships, Marsala wine, sulphur. At the end of the nineteenth century they commissioned Ernesto Basile to build a villa in their Palermo park, and in 1899 the work began: what came out was one of the manifestos of Italian art nouveau, with a turret, irregular windows and stone worked as though it were soft.
What to see
The building plays on different volumes fitting into one another: a cylindrical tower, a block with a loggia, sloping roofs, windows never the same shape twice. The materials are deliberately mixed, stone, brick, iron and wood, following the taste that in those years wanted to break the regularity of nineteenth-century architecture.
In 1962 an arson fire destroyed the interiors and part of the structure. The villa stayed for decades a fenced-off ruin in the middle of the city, and was restored much later: today it can be visited and is used for events, but the original furnishings are lost and what remains is the architecture.
Visiting
The villa is in viale Regina Margherita, in the Olivuzza area, ten minutes from the Teatro Massimo; opening is tied to guided visits and events, so it is worth checking. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Walk right round it looking at the details: the brackets, the railings, the plant motifs carved in the corners. Then remember that this was a family home inside a private park as large as a district, and that of that park there remain today the streets and the buildings put up in its place.