Sixty monster statues on the boundary wall and a hall lined with mirrors: Baroque turning into nightmare.
Distance
Area
Bagheria
Visit
60 min
Entry
Ticketed
The story
Built from 1715 to a design by the architect Tommaso Napoli, the villa owes its fame to the grotesque statues commissioned by prince Ferdinando Francesco Gravina: deformed figures, hybrids, monstrous musicians and anthropomorphic animals set along the boundary wall. Inside, the mirror hall has a vault lined with glass panels. Goethe visited in 1787 and judged it very harshly.