Description
The Parco della Favorita, at the foot of Monte Pellegrino, is Palermo's green lung: about 400 hectares, the city's largest garden and the fourth largest park in Italy. Born as a royal estate of the Bourbons, today it is a city park.
Two long avenues, named after Hercules and Diana, cross it in parallel. Built for strolling, today they are very busy roads that lead all the way to Mondello, the seaside resort of the Palermitans.
Viale d'Ercole ends with a nineteenth-century neoclassical fountain, with the statue of the hero at its center. Viale Pomona, named for the goddess of fruit and gardens, crosses them at a right angle.
The curiosity is the Palazzina Cinese, the king's residence, in an Orientalizing style: the palace even had an ingenious elevator to carry food from the kitchens straight to the dining room. In the neighboring building, in the same style, is the Pitrè Ethnographic Museum.
In the park you will also find Villa Niscemi, a residence rich in antique furnishings and works of art. Look out for the Patriarch of the Favorita, a thousand-year-old olive tree, perhaps planted in the Arab-Norman era: the longest-lived in Palermo, with a trunk over eleven meters around.
In 1798 Ferdinand of Bourbon fled Naples before Napoleon's troops and took refuge in Palermo. He fell in love with the countryside north of the city and, perhaps out of nostalgia for the palace of Portici, in 1799 he expropriated the lands of several families and created the estate.
The Favorita was everything at once: a hunting reserve, with pheasants, partridges and rabbits, a field for agricultural experiments with citrus and olives, a cool refuge in sultry summers. In the canals of the marsh they even held fishing contests for mullet and eels.
In 1860 it passed to the House of Savoy, who opened it to the public. Then it saw all sorts of things: in 1918 the airship field for the dirigibles of the Great War, between 1937 and 1940 four editions of the Targa Florio and, in 1971, Black Sabbath's first Italian concert.
Two long avenues, named after Hercules and Diana, cross it in parallel. Built for strolling, today they are very busy roads that lead all the way to Mondello, the seaside resort of the Palermitans.
Viale d'Ercole ends with a nineteenth-century neoclassical fountain, with the statue of the hero at its center. Viale Pomona, named for the goddess of fruit and gardens, crosses them at a right angle.
The curiosity is the Palazzina Cinese, the king's residence, in an Orientalizing style: the palace even had an ingenious elevator to carry food from the kitchens straight to the dining room. In the neighboring building, in the same style, is the Pitrè Ethnographic Museum.
In the park you will also find Villa Niscemi, a residence rich in antique furnishings and works of art. Look out for the Patriarch of the Favorita, a thousand-year-old olive tree, perhaps planted in the Arab-Norman era: the longest-lived in Palermo, with a trunk over eleven meters around.
In 1798 Ferdinand of Bourbon fled Naples before Napoleon's troops and took refuge in Palermo. He fell in love with the countryside north of the city and, perhaps out of nostalgia for the palace of Portici, in 1799 he expropriated the lands of several families and created the estate.
The Favorita was everything at once: a hunting reserve, with pheasants, partridges and rabbits, a field for agricultural experiments with citrus and olives, a cool refuge in sultry summers. In the canals of the marsh they even held fishing contests for mullet and eels.
In 1860 it passed to the House of Savoy, who opened it to the public. Then it saw all sorts of things: in 1918 the airship field for the dirigibles of the Great War, between 1937 and 1940 four editions of the Targa Florio and, in 1971, Black Sabbath's first Italian concert.