Bagheria

A fifteen-minute train ride from Palermo, Bagheria is the town Sicily’s aristocracy built for pleasure: a constellation of eighteenth-century villas where princes summered among mirrored halls, grotesque stone monsters and citrus gardens. It is the birthplace of the painter Renato Guttuso and the setting of the film Baarìa and half open-air museum, an easy day out from the capital.

Why visit

Bagheria compresses a surprising amount of Sicily into a modest frame. In the eighteenth century the great families of Palermo — the Princes of Palagonia, the Alliata, the Branciforti — raised country villas on these gentle slopes above the Tyrrhenian, and the town grew in their shadow. Several of those villas survive, and they are strange, beautiful places: one guarded by a stone population of monsters and caricatures that startled Grand Tour travellers, another planned on an esoteric scheme tracing a path from earth to heaven, a third sheltering an artificial cave against the sirocco wind. Add the Guttuso museum, a working fisherman’s quarter at Aspra, and a street life that remains thoroughly Sicilian, and you have an excursion that costs an hour’s travel and yields a day’s worth of interest. Cinephiles have their own reason: this is Tornatore’s Baarìa.

Character and history

The name is Arabic — Baarìa, the place of the rising sun — recalling the farmland the Muslims worked here long before the villas came. From the late seventeenth century the Palermo nobility began building summer residences on the plain, close enough to the capital for comfort, far enough for sea air and citrus groves. Villa Palagonia, begun in 1715, became the most talked-about house in Europe after travellers described its garden of rough-stone monsters, dragons and caricatures; legend blamed a vengeful prince, though the statues belong more plausibly to the eighteenth century’s taste for the grotesque. Villa Valguarnera followed, designed with symbolic geometry for the princes Alliata di Villafranca, and Villa Cattolica in 1736, its castle-like base holding a “room of the sirocco” dug as a cool cave. The painter Renato Guttuso was born here in 1911, and the town entered modern cinema through Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baarìa and Marco Bellocchio’s The Wedding Director. Dacia Maraini spent her childhood among the Alliata household.

What to see

Begin at Villa Palagonia, where the monster-flanked gateway, the double-flight staircase and the Hall of Mirrors explain two centuries of fame; the garden’s pietra d’aspra figures are the unmissable oddity. Then walk to Villa Valguarnera, whose oval hall was drawn by the architect Vaccarini and whose terraces look toward the sea — the villa has lately appeared on screen in a Dolce & Gabbana commercial directed by Tornatore with music by Ennio Morricone. Villa Cattolica houses the Museum Guttuso, where works such as Paracadutista and Fichidindia trace the painter’s career from social realism to late colour; his tomb, sculpted by Giacomo Manzù, sits in the garden. Keep time for the older Palazzo Butera, the town’s first stately residence, and, if the afternoon allows, the seafront village of Aspra with its anchovy tradition.

How to experience

Arrive by train from Palermo — the ride is short, cheap and drops you within walking distance of the villa quarter, making this the rare Sicilian excursion that needs no car. Do the villas in the cooler morning hours, then lunch in town on the local classic pasta with sardines or an anchovy-laden plate in Aspra. Read a little Guttuso before you visit his museum; the paintings carry the politics of postwar Sicily, and context changes them. If you can, come in mid-July, when the terraces of Palazzo Butera catch the Santa Rosalia fireworks that Palermo sends up across the bay. Photographers should shoot Palagonia in the low afternoon sun, when the aspra stone turns gold and the monsters’ shadows stretch. Pick up the municipality’s villa information from comune.bagheria.pa.it for current opening arrangements, which vary house by house.

Practical planning

Trains from Palermo’s main station run frequently and take about fifteen minutes; the walk from Bagheria’s station to the main villas is ten to twenty minutes, gently uphill. Opening hours and admission at the private villas change often, and Palagonia in particular has kept irregular schedules in recent years — verify on the Visit Sicily pages or by phone before going. Comfortable shoes help on the cobbled lanes, and summer visitors should plan villa visits early. The town has ample simple restaurants and cafés, and a half day here combines cleanly with Solunto’s archaeological site or the beaches of Santa Flavia for a full-day itinerary.

Nearby places

Palermo, the island’s capital, is the natural pairing, with its Arab-Norman churches and street markets. Cefalù up the coast offers a Norman cathedral and a golden beach. Termini Imerese, further along the same railway, keeps an ancient theatrical heritage in a working port town.