Description
Villa Malfitano, on Via Dante, is the neoclassical villa of the Whitaker family, English merchants who came to Palermo in the 1800s. A small palace with drawing rooms and art collections and a park of rare plants: the home of a family that had made its fortune in Sicily, through Marsala wine and other business.
Giuseppe Whitaker and his wife Tina Scalia had it built between 1885 and 1889 by the architect Ignazio Greco, on a vast piece of land in the Malfitano plain, taking Villa Favard in Florence as a model. The villa has three levels and a basement.
On the raised ground floor were the reception rooms: a billiard room, a ballroom, a Louis XVI-style salon with a painted harpsichord and the Summer Room, frescoed by Ettore De Maria Bergler with plants and flowers so realistic they seem an extension of the garden.
Giuseppe collected everything on his travels, and it is the Whitaker collection that makes the villa special: furniture, paintings, corals, ivories, porcelain, sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, paintings by Francesco Lojacono and a pair of enameled little elephants from the imperial palace in Beijing.
Then the park, designed by Emilio Kunzmann: English-style on one side, with paths between asymmetrical spaces; Italian-style on the other, with geometric, symmetrical spaces around the villa. The entrance on Via Dante has a great wrought-iron gate.
Among the rare plants that arrived from Tunisia, Sumatra, Australia and South America, four monumental trees stand out: a dragon tree about 12 meters tall, a large Moreton Bay fig, a smoke-absorbing plant and a giant yucca.
Giuseppe's passion was birds: his collection of over 12,000 specimens filled a private natural history museum, in a building next to the villa, which housed the collection until 1976.
His daughter Delia Whitaker, who died in 1971, left the villa to the Whitaker Foundation, established in 1975. It is one of the official venues of the Sicilian Region.
Giuseppe Whitaker and his wife Tina Scalia had it built between 1885 and 1889 by the architect Ignazio Greco, on a vast piece of land in the Malfitano plain, taking Villa Favard in Florence as a model. The villa has three levels and a basement.
On the raised ground floor were the reception rooms: a billiard room, a ballroom, a Louis XVI-style salon with a painted harpsichord and the Summer Room, frescoed by Ettore De Maria Bergler with plants and flowers so realistic they seem an extension of the garden.
Giuseppe collected everything on his travels, and it is the Whitaker collection that makes the villa special: furniture, paintings, corals, ivories, porcelain, sixteenth-century Flemish tapestries, paintings by Francesco Lojacono and a pair of enameled little elephants from the imperial palace in Beijing.
Then the park, designed by Emilio Kunzmann: English-style on one side, with paths between asymmetrical spaces; Italian-style on the other, with geometric, symmetrical spaces around the villa. The entrance on Via Dante has a great wrought-iron gate.
Among the rare plants that arrived from Tunisia, Sumatra, Australia and South America, four monumental trees stand out: a dragon tree about 12 meters tall, a large Moreton Bay fig, a smoke-absorbing plant and a giant yucca.
Giuseppe's passion was birds: his collection of over 12,000 specimens filled a private natural history museum, in a building next to the villa, which housed the collection until 1976.
His daughter Delia Whitaker, who died in 1971, left the villa to the Whitaker Foundation, established in 1975. It is one of the official venues of the Sicilian Region.