Villa Valguarnera

On the crest of a hill levelled by hand and explosives, Villa Valguarnera closes the northern view of Bagheria. Commissioned in 1712 from Tommaso Maria Napoli and completed in 1783, it tempers baroque geometry with neoclassical calm: an elliptical porticoed courtyard, an oval salone of family portraits, and hanging gardens looking towards two gulfs.

Why it matters

Where Villa Palagonia dramatises the baroque, Villa Valguarnera refines it — and then grows out of it. The estate belongs to the first generation of Bagheria's princely villas, but its long completion gave it a neoclassical face and an intellectual programme that made it, in the owner's account, an encyclopedia in stone: alchemy, botany, astronomy and Enlightenment culture staged through architecture on a flattened hill above the Conca d'Oro. It remains in the founding family's line, today the princes Alliata di Villafranca. Its walls carry the mark of the women who drove the project: the monogram of Maria Anna Valguarnera recurs on the portals, and her initials crown the gates recorded by the municipal portal.

What to notice

The approach is choreographed. An enormous iron gate rests on pillars of Aspra stone, and a long avenue runs up to a facade whose central concavity is filled by a granite staircase shaped like pincers — the scalione a tenaglia of the municipal description. Portals repeat the MAVP monogram, the A drawn as a compass entwined with a square. In the circular courtyard, count the thirty-six arches of the elliptical portico that the owner's architecture page credits with the golden proportion governing the whole monument. Upstairs, the piano nobile opens into the large oval salone frescoed with portraits of Valguarnera ancestors, and the ground-floor halls hold mythological cycles by Interguglielmi, Semerario, Velasco and the Fumagalli brothers, beneath a balustrade crowned with statues. A ceiling fresco on the ground floor reproduces the northern vault of the temple of Palmyra with planetary deities and zodiac signs in a room dedicated to Newton. Outside, the hanging garden — a terraced giardino pensile lined with statues and vases — carries the balustrade from which the municipal portal promises panoramic views; the owner's site extends the sightline to the gulfs of Palermo and Cefalù. On the Montagnola behind, a path of seven stations once traced the stages of the alchemical Great Work towards an octagonal belvedere of Urania, flanked by statues of Mercury, Neptune, Jupiter and Apollo by Ignazio Marabitti.

Context and history

The story begins in 1712, when Anna Gravina, princess of Gravina and Valguarnera, commissioned the house then called the Casina alla Bagaria from Father Tommaso Maria Napoli, the Dominican architect of Villa Palagonia and a pupil in the Bernini line of Carlo Fontana; the owner's history records the villa raised on the summit of a mountain flattened by arms and explosives. Work outlived its first designer, and the municipal portal attributes the finished palace of 1783 to drawings by the architect Sucameli, carried forward at the wish of Maria Anna Gravina. The founder's granddaughter Marianna Valguarnera and her husband Pietro then restated the monument in the emerging neoclassical manner, filling it with esoteric meaning under the influence of Count Francesco Algarotti's cultural project — the account the family's own architecture page gives. Since the late 1980s, Princess Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca, writer and first Italian translator of The Lord of the Rings, has worked to safeguard the family seat.