Villa Palagonia
Interesting facts
- The prince behind the monsters, Ferdinando Francesco II Gravina, was nicknamed 'the Necromancer', yet he served as chamberlain to the King of Naples.
- Among the surviving statues are horses with human hands, men with horses' heads, dragons, hunchbacks, Moors and Pulcinella figures.
- Accounts of the original interiors describe chairs with deliberately uneven legs, so that guests could not sit comfortably.
- A clock was reportedly housed inside a statue whose eyes moved back and forth with the swing of the pendulum.
- One bedroom was decorated with marble toads, frogs, serpents, lizards and scorpions, according to descriptions of the villa.
- Some busts were carved with a beautiful face on one side and a skull on the other.
- Goethe not only wrote about the villa but also sketched its floor plan during his 1787 visit.
- Salvador Dalí visited in the 1940s and wanted to acquire the villa as a holiday home.
- The villa appears in Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), Lattuada's Mafioso (1962) and Bellocchio's The Wedding Director (2006).
- For Baarìa (2009), Giuseppe Tornatore had the villa faithfully reconstructed as a film set.
Why it is worth it
Along the garden wall of Villa Palagonia sits a crowd of stone creatures: dwarfs, musicians, beasts with human faces and figures that belong to no species at all. They gave the house its popular name, the Villa of Monsters, and turned an elegant Sicilian Baroque residence into one of the strangest sights of the Grand Tour.
The villa was begun in 1715 for Ferdinando Francesco I Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, to designs by Tommaso Maria Napoli, a Dominican friar, assisted by Agatino Daidone; the main construction lasted until 1737. The plan joins two square blocks with a curved central section, and a double staircase with stone balustrades climbs to the main floor. It is one of the earliest examples of Sicilian Baroque villa architecture in the area around Palermo.
The monsters came later. From 1749 his nephew, Ferdinando Francesco II Gravina, filled the grounds with grotesque statues carved from local calcarenite stone; there were originally about 200, and 62 survive. Inside, he created a hall of mirrors whose ceiling and door surrounds were covered in mirrored glass that fractured and multiplied the room. Goethe visited on 9 April 1787 and was appalled, describing the place as madness without reason and noting that even the cornices tilted to unsettle the eye. Later visitors, including the Surrealist André Breton, saw it with more sympathy. The villa has been privately owned since 1885.
Bagheria grew in the 17th and 18th centuries as a summer retreat for the Palermo nobility, who built villas among the citrus groves east of the city.
Getting there
The villa is in the centre of Bagheria, about 15 km east of Palermo. Bagheria has a railway station on the line from Palermo along the coast. The nearest airport is Palermo Falcone–Borsellino (PMO), about 38 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- La Martorana (Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio), Palermo 13.6 km · church
- Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele 14.3 km · opera-house
- Palazzo dei Normanni 14.3 km · palace
- Catacombe dei Cappuccini 15.5 km · catacombs
- Grotta dell'Addaura 18.3 km · cave
- Cattedrale di Monreale 19.2 km · cathedral
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Villa Palagonia is a patrician villa in Bagheria, 15 km from Palermo, in Sicily, southern Italy. The villa itself, built from 1715 by the architect Tommaso Napoli with the help of Agatino Daidone, is one of the earliest examples of Sicilian Baroque. However, its popularity comes mainly from the statues of monsters with human faces that decorate its garden and its wall, and earned it the nickname of "The Villa of Monsters".
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