Description
Via Roma is a long straight street in Palermo, linking the Central Station to the Politeama Theater and cutting the historic center in two. It was opened between the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s and is the city's great "modern" artery, with eclectic and Liberty-style buildings.
Along the street you pass the Palazzo delle Poste, the Teatro Biondo, the Palazzo del Banco di Sicilia and Palazzo Moncada di Paternò. It also goes through Piazza San Domenico, where the church of the same name stands, the pantheon of illustrious Sicilians.
The character of the street is its façades: tall buildings, of banks and offices but also private palaces, in eclectic or Liberty style. They were taller than the low houses around and hid the poverty of the neighborhoods they crossed: a celebratory street more than a practical one.
After Unification the city wanted to become modern, like the Paris of Baron Haussmann. It needed a great straight boulevard from the new Central Station toward the new city and the port. Felice Giarrusso's plan, from 1894, cut it through the old city.
To do it, noble palaces, churches, convents and entire working-class districts were torn down, including the Conceria. When the demolitions reached the Vucciria area they laid bare a poverty that the middle class of the day did not want to see.
In 1906, right after the demolition of the Olivella garden, the works were shifted a few meters toward the sea, at the level of the Jesuit convent, and the perfect straight line was no longer so. A scandal broke out.
Giarrusso resigned, thousands of protests arrived and two commissions of inquiry: the first chaired by the mayor himself, the second appointed by the government in 1908, which limited itself to handing out reprimands. The route was then completed in stretches, up to the monumental entrance of Piazza Giulio Cesare in front of the station.
Beyond Piazza Luigi Sturzo, the street's ideal continuation is known to Palermitans as Via Roma Nuova.
Along the street you pass the Palazzo delle Poste, the Teatro Biondo, the Palazzo del Banco di Sicilia and Palazzo Moncada di Paternò. It also goes through Piazza San Domenico, where the church of the same name stands, the pantheon of illustrious Sicilians.
The character of the street is its façades: tall buildings, of banks and offices but also private palaces, in eclectic or Liberty style. They were taller than the low houses around and hid the poverty of the neighborhoods they crossed: a celebratory street more than a practical one.
After Unification the city wanted to become modern, like the Paris of Baron Haussmann. It needed a great straight boulevard from the new Central Station toward the new city and the port. Felice Giarrusso's plan, from 1894, cut it through the old city.
To do it, noble palaces, churches, convents and entire working-class districts were torn down, including the Conceria. When the demolitions reached the Vucciria area they laid bare a poverty that the middle class of the day did not want to see.
In 1906, right after the demolition of the Olivella garden, the works were shifted a few meters toward the sea, at the level of the Jesuit convent, and the perfect straight line was no longer so. A scandal broke out.
Giarrusso resigned, thousands of protests arrived and two commissions of inquiry: the first chaired by the mayor himself, the second appointed by the government in 1908, which limited itself to handing out reprimands. The route was then completed in stretches, up to the monumental entrance of Piazza Giulio Cesare in front of the station.
Beyond Piazza Luigi Sturzo, the street's ideal continuation is known to Palermitans as Via Roma Nuova.