Sicilian Baroque - Legacy

Legacy

Sicilian Baroque is today recognised as an architectural style, largely due to the work of Sacheverall Sitwell, whose Southern Baroque Art of 1924 was the first book to appreciate the style, followed by the more academic work of Anthony Blunt.

Most of the Baroque palazzi continued in private ownership throughout the 19th century, as the old aristocracy either married middle-class money or fell further into debt. There were a few exceptions and some of these retain the ancestral palazzo still today. Thanks to the continuing religious devotion of the Sicilian people many of the Sicilian Baroque churches are today still in the use for which they were designed.

However, much of the blame for the decay and ruinous state of preservation of so many palazzi must fall not just on owners unwilling to accept change, but the political agendas of successive socialist governments. Some of the finest Baroque villas and palazzi, including the Palermo palace of the Prince of Lampedusa, are still in ruins following the United States bombing raids of 1943. In many cases, no attempt has been made to restore or even secure them. Those that survived the raids in good repair are often sub-divided into offices or apartments, their Baroque interiors dismantled, divided, and sold.

The remaining members of the Sicilian aristocracy who still inhabit their ancestral palazzi are unable to make opening their houses to tourism a major source of income, unlike some Northern, especially English, counterparts. The local equivalent of the National Trust is very small, and there is much less local interest among the general population. The Princes, Marquesses, and Counts of Sicily still living in their houses dwell in splendid isolation, surrounded often by beauty and decay. It is only today both owners and the state are awakening to the possibility that if action is not taken soon it will be too late to save this particular part of the Sicilian heritage.

As Sicily now becomes a more politically stable, secure and less corrupt environment, the Baroque palazzi are slowly beginning to open their doors to an eager paying public, American and Northern European as much as Italian. In 1963, when the movie The Leopard was released the Gangi Palace ballroom was almost unique in its status of having been a film set, but today long unused salons and ballrooms are hosting corporate and public events. Some palazzi are offering a bed and breakfast service to paying guests, once again providing impressive hospitality to visitors to Sicily, the purpose for which they were originally intended.

In 2002, UNESCO selectively included Baroque monuments of Val di Noto into its World Heritage List as "providing outstanding testimony to the exuberant genius of late Baroque art and architecture" and "representing the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe.