Description
The Palazzina Cinese is an Oriental-style royal residence in the Parco della Favorita, in Palermo, at the foot of Monte Pellegrino. It was the country residence of King Ferdinand of Bourbon, who had it transformed with a pagoda roof.
The building has a square plan and three floors, and the central body is crowned by a pagoda roof resting on an octagonal drum. On the ground floor, porticoes with pointed arches open out, and on the sides stand two turrets with spiral staircases.
Around it are the curious details: the little bells on the entrance gate, the carved wooden beams of the terraces, the scalloped edges. At the top is a large octagonal terrace covered by a pagoda roof, with a decorated ceiling.
Inside, the fantasy changes style on every floor. In the basement, the ballroom and the little audience room, decorated by Giuseppe Velasquez; on the first floor the Chinese-style reception hall, with painted fabric panels, and the king's bedroom with its Chinese vault.
The most famous room is the dining room, with Marvuglia's mathematical table: an ingenious mechanism that lifted the dishes from the kitchens on the floor below straight onto the table.
On the second floor was Queen Maria Carolina's apartment, with two small reception rooms and the bedroom. The garden at the back, laid out in 1800, has a little Chinese temple and white marble basins with Chinese-style grottoes.
In 1798 Ferdinand fled Naples, overwhelmed by revolution and Napoleonic troops, and took refuge in Palermo. He fell in love with the countryside north of the city and in 1799 founded the Real Tenuta della Favorita, a hunting reserve and agricultural experiment station.
To live there he bought a Chinese-style house from Baron Benedetto Lombardo. The architect Venanzio Marvuglia, who had already built it, kept the Oriental taste and added Louis XVI and Pompeian elements, with Turkish-style and Herculanean rooms. After Italian unification it passed to the Savoys, then to the State and finally to the city.
The building has a square plan and three floors, and the central body is crowned by a pagoda roof resting on an octagonal drum. On the ground floor, porticoes with pointed arches open out, and on the sides stand two turrets with spiral staircases.
Around it are the curious details: the little bells on the entrance gate, the carved wooden beams of the terraces, the scalloped edges. At the top is a large octagonal terrace covered by a pagoda roof, with a decorated ceiling.
Inside, the fantasy changes style on every floor. In the basement, the ballroom and the little audience room, decorated by Giuseppe Velasquez; on the first floor the Chinese-style reception hall, with painted fabric panels, and the king's bedroom with its Chinese vault.
The most famous room is the dining room, with Marvuglia's mathematical table: an ingenious mechanism that lifted the dishes from the kitchens on the floor below straight onto the table.
On the second floor was Queen Maria Carolina's apartment, with two small reception rooms and the bedroom. The garden at the back, laid out in 1800, has a little Chinese temple and white marble basins with Chinese-style grottoes.
In 1798 Ferdinand fled Naples, overwhelmed by revolution and Napoleonic troops, and took refuge in Palermo. He fell in love with the countryside north of the city and in 1799 founded the Real Tenuta della Favorita, a hunting reserve and agricultural experiment station.
To live there he bought a Chinese-style house from Baron Benedetto Lombardo. The architect Venanzio Marvuglia, who had already built it, kept the Oriental taste and added Louis XVI and Pompeian elements, with Turkish-style and Herculanean rooms. After Italian unification it passed to the Savoys, then to the State and finally to the city.