Tag: palazzo butera

Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: ‘Crazy enlightenment project’ bridges centuries

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Above: A contemporary overhead walkway sensuously links galleries in a recently renovated 18th-century palace, Palazzo Butera.

At first, I tried to resist, but Francesca insisted, saying, ‘You can fulfill all of your dreams here.’” 

Massimo Valsecchi, interviewed by Elaine Sciolino for an article published in The New York Times on September 26, 2024

We stayed in the Kalsa District, the old Arab quarter in Palermo, for a month in the spring of 2023. This meant we strolled upon a portion of an impressively long tiled veranda addressing the sea numerous times. However, we were clueless about the possibility of visiting the adjacent Palazzo Butera to discover the beauty contained within its walls.

Freshly renovated, the palace did not open its doors to the public as a museum until 2021 and, when we visited, still seemed the city’s best-kept secret. It certainly hadn’t made the guidebooks yet. The New York Times article quoted above nudged me to retrieve this postcard from the backlog of unmailed ones.

‘Everyone said we were mad,’ a serene Francesca Valsecchi admits with a smile as she recalls the decision she and her husband Massimo took in 2015, when they moved from an apartment in Cadogan Square in London to the colossal Palazzo Butera in Palermo…. what Massimo describes as his ‘crazy Enlightenment project.’”

Susan Moore, Apollo Magazine, August 30, 2022

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Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: Phillips’ passion for collecting left me entranced

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Above: Detail from “Curriculum Vitae XI,” Tom Phillips

The muses visit children in disguise with shrouded gifts ~ Terpsichore gives her a skipping rope ~ From Clio he receives old stamps of far forgotten colonies ~ Darkly to me Apollo and his team present the pnuema ~ the creative spark ~ all strife of art inside a filing clerk.”

Excerpt of text on Tom Phillips’ “Curriculum Vitae XI”

Last spring, we almost missed what emerged as our favorite museum in Palermo. Palazzo Butera was newly opened. Although we passed by it often, we didn’t see it in any guidebook or even resources online.

Word art by British artist Tom Phillips (1937-2022) so captivating it demands you stop in your tracks to slowly digest every morsel of poetry within each piece. But how could I absorb them all when we had a whole museum ahead of us?

The amazing part of this is his process. Most of his “Curriculum Vitae” series is composed in iambic pentameter, a form of traditional English poetry with ten syllables per line (Yes, I learned this through labels.). Yet, they are written, or carved as it were, somewhat on the fly.

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