Villa Palagonia

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.

This series of grotesques, created from 1749 by Francesco Ferdinando II Gravina, Prince of Palagonia, aroused the curiosity of the travellers of the Grand Tour during the 18th and 19th centuries, for instance Henry Swinburne, Patrick Brydone, John Soane, Goethe, the Count de Borde, the artist Jean-Pierre Houël or Alexandre Dumas, prior to fascinate surrealists like André Breton or contemporary authors such as Giovanni Macchia and Dominique Fernandez, or the painter Renato Guttuso.

In 1885, the villa was bought by private individuals, whose heirs are still in possession, and is partially open to the public.

[1][2] Palagonìa and Mineo are a rocky area rich of caverns escaved and adhibited to be funerary tombs.

Palegraphic studies of the funerary public inscriptions are the unique available methodology to date Sicilian tombs back to the VII century BC.