History

In the final years of the nineteenth century, Palermo was the unlikely capital of Italian Art Nouveau. The Florio family — owners of tuna fisheries, shipping lines, and Marsala wine — were its most extravagant patrons, and Villa Igiea stands as their most lasting architectural gift to the city.

Ignazio Florio Jr. acquired the Acquasanta property from a retired British admiral and initially envisioned converting it into a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients — the villa’s name alludes to Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health. The plan changed: instead of a clinic, the family resolved to build a grand hotel capable of receiving the European aristocracy and business elite who were beginning to circuit the Mediterranean in increasing numbers.

Ernesto Basile, the Palermo-born architect who would define the Liberty idiom in southern Italy, was commissioned to transform the existing structure. Between 1898 and 1900 he designed the interiors in full bloom — sinuous ironwork, painted ceilings, tiled floors, and the dining salon that would bear his name. Basile collaborated with the Palermitan craftsman and furniture-maker Vittorio Ducrot, whose workshop produced the hotel’s carved woodwork, and with the painter Ettore De Maria Bergler, whose allegorical frescoes of the Floralia — goddesses, garlands, and Sicilian flora — remain intact in the Sala Basile to this day.

The hotel hosted royalty, diplomats, and industrialists through the early twentieth century. Its fortunes fluctuated across the decades that followed the Florio family’s financial decline, and the building fell into disrepair in the mid-twentieth century. In more recent decades it was restored and returned to operation as a luxury hotel. Rocco Forte Hotels assumed management and carried out a major renovation; the Sala Basile was carefully conserved throughout.

Villa Igiea is listed among Sicily’s protected architectural heritage. The De Maria Bergler frescoes in the Sala Basile were confirmed as works of significance by the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Empedocle Restivo in Palermo, which holds related works by the same artist dated 1899.