Osterio Magno

At the corner of Corso Ruggero and Via Amendola, a tall house with a tower keeps Cefalù's most tangled biography. Tradition makes it the first residence of Roger II; documents hand it to the Ventimiglia lords; excavation uncovered a Roman cistern beneath its floors. Restoration revealed further layers of the building's history.

Why it matters

The Osterio Magno is the destination's principal surviving secular monument of the Middle Ages: almost everything else of consequence in Cefalù is a church. The name derives from the Latin hosterium, a fortified palace, and tradition has long transmitted the building as the Domus Regia, the first residence of King Roger II before the centre of Norman power moved to Palermo. What stands today is largely the work of the Ventimiglia del Maro family, marquesses of Geraci and princes of Castelbuono, who rebuilt it in the thirteenth century and used it as a winter residence. Sicily's regional tourism portal highlights its thirteenth-century mullioned windows and a fourteenth-century triple lancet as the visible signatures of that age.

What to notice

At the corner of the building, the high tower rises at the junction of Corso Ruggero and Via G. Amendola. The oldest identifiable core is the small bichrome palace: horizontal bands of light tufa alternating with dark lava stone, with two elegant twin-light mullioned windows still visible from Via Amendola. The corner tower was raised in the first decades of the fourteenth century over three storeys, though its projecting merlons, recorded in a sixteenth-century drawing found during restoration, are gone. Norman-era masonry survives at the base of the tower. Inside, the ground-floor room preserves the find that anchors the building in deep time: a large cistern cut into the rock, still perfectly visible, uncovered along with a Hellenistic-Roman dwelling complex during excavations directed by Amedeo Tullio at the restoration completed in 1988, which also brought to light a great jar holding bronze coins of the late fourth century BC.

Context and history

The documented life of the palace begins with the Ventimiglia, who held it until 1599, when Giovanni III Ventimiglia sold it to Simone da Fiore, a native of Cefalù. After Simone's death in 1605 his heirs passed it to the friars of the nearby convent of San Domenico, who leased it out in emphyteusis; successive tenants carved it into dwellings, shops and warehouses, and part even served as a prison. The sixteenth-century drawing recovered during restoration shows the complex with its tall tower between two large buildings around an open courtyard with a well, and an arch spanning the street towards the service kitchens opposite, where the tourist office now stands. A footnote of the same story survives across the street: the Osterio Piccolo, the family's lesser palace, has its tower with a mullioned window incorporated into the bell tower of the church of the Annunziata on Corso Ruggero. Studies have tried to date the whole complex more precisely, and no certain conclusion exists; the bichrome core is taken as the oldest fabric and the tower elevation as the last major phase.