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
Continue reading “Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: ‘Crazy enlightenment project’ bridges centuries”
