Palazzo delle Poste
Fichera’s neo-baroque post office on Via Etnea, an ornate rebuttal to the rationalism rising across Italy in the same years.
At a glance
Catania’s main post office rises at the edge of the Giardino Bellini, where Via Etnea opens out into one of its widest stretches. Francesco Fichera (1881–1950) designed it in 1919, though it was completed only a decade later, in a deliberately rich neo-baroque idiom that refused the stripped severity of the rationalist architecture going up elsewhere in Italy at the time. Almost a century on it still works as a post office, its ground floor open to anyone who walks in to buy a stamp.
Key facts
- Architect: Francesco Fichera (1881–1950)
- Designed: 1919; completed 1929; inaugurated 1930
- Style: neo-baroque, with Liberty metalwork
- Location: Via Etnea, at the corner of the Giardino Bellini
- Function: central post office, still in use
History
Fichera was, with Paolo Lanzerotti, one of the two architects who gave early-twentieth-century Catania its character, and he taught architecture in the city as well as building in it. The post office was a state commission of the 1920s, a decade when Italy was covering its cities with new civic buildings. Where many of those buildings turned to the bare geometry of rationalism, Fichera went the other way.
Fichera designed the building in 1919, but it was completed only in October 1929 and inaugurated in May 1930 by King Vittorio Emanuele III. He gave it an unusual plan of two concentric rings, the outer one open to the public and the inner one wrapped around a courtyard for the mail-sorting offices. It is a confident, almost theatrical pile of carved stone, and it reads as Fichera’s argument that ornament still had a place in public architecture even as fashion moved against it.
What you see
At street level a row of arches carries keystones marked with grotesque masks. Above them, convex balconies are framed by pilasters that rise into tympana with broken pediments, and tall glazed doors sit behind delicate frames. The corner gathers the building’s decorative invention: cornucopias, motifs that resemble complex starfish, a shell flanked by fish.
The one note that points forward rather than back is the metalwork. The grilles carry a clean Liberty design, a reminder that the same architect could speak both languages.
Practical information
- Open during normal post-office hours; the public hall can be entered freely.
- The facade is best read from the Giardino Bellini side, where the avenue is widest.
- A few minutes is enough unless you want to study the corner carving.
Getting there
The building stands on Via Etnea beside the Giardino Bellini, a short walk north of Piazza Stesicoro and the Roman amphitheatre. Buses along Via Etnea stop nearby, and it is about fifteen minutes on foot from Catania Centrale.
Nearby
- Giardino Bellini, immediately alongside
- Villa Zingali Tetto, further north on Via Etnea
- Teatro Sangiorgi, off Via Antonino di Sangiuliano
Sources
- “Palazzo delle Poste, Catania”, Wikipedia (en)
- “Liberty a Catania”, Wikipedia (it)
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