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*English
Designed between 1900 and 1901 by Ernesto Basile, commissioned by the Florio family, Villino Florio all’Olivuzza was considered a delight pavilion immersed in a park with romantic and fairytale-like spots. The type of construction, that is Modernist, constituted a divertissement, which, along with the animal menagerie, the pond, the greenhouse for orchids, the Sicilian-Norman kiosk and the neoclassical temple, was to represent to the astonished visitor the greatness of the family that had commissioned it.
The villa has three floors and was enriched with furniture designed by Ernesto Basile, who coordinated the intervention of all the other artists who took part in it: the painters Ettore De Maria Bergler and Giuseppe Enea for the murals and frescoes, Salvatore Gregorietti for the stained glass windows, the Muccoli and Golia, Ducrot, Florio and Caraffa companies for wood and ceramics, and finally the Trinacria Society for electrical installations.
In 1962, between the 23th and 24th of November, both the Villino interior and part of the exterior were destroyed by arson.
In the same year someone began to think about saving Villino Florio but only in 1995 it was agreed that the aforementioned cottage had to be “used as a museum of the Belle Epoque as well as a museum of itself, as an example of the housing typology of Palermo’s entrepreneurship era. “
Since then, a slow but fruitful restoration has preserved the monument from neglect, an interesting attempt has been made to reproduce the decorative parts that could be documented and another attempt to recreate philologically a work of art in which it was still perceivable the applied architectural rule along with imagination which had inspired those who designed a new architecture in the Art Nouveau style.
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