Natoli Palace

The palace occupies two main floors and follows a tight urban plan set along a steep lane that runs up to the church of SS. Salvatore. The narrow street forced the main doorway to be located at the end of the façade, where the carriageway opens into a small widening behind the church. The building presents itself as an 18th-century Baroque town house raised above an earlier, lower structure; the upper register of the central three window axes belongs to the later palace, while the lower two storeys beneath them are the older, simpler work.

The street-facing composition centers on a monumental entrance portal set within a facing wall of yellowish tuffstone framed by pilasters. The projecting doorway is flanked by columns and topped by a large decorative mask (a sculpted human face) that bears the date 1765 and an inscription giving Vincenzo Natoli’s name. A triglyph frieze runs above the portal and supports a continuous balcony on the upper floor. On the first-floor façade three floor-to-ceiling windows open onto that balcony; the two outer openings are capped with triangular pediments and the central opening displays a broken pediment containing an ornate cartouche (an ornamental shield-like panel) carved with the Natoli coat of arms. The dynastic device carved on the façade shows a battlemented tower, a flag and a lion rampant.

Inside, a broad two-flight staircase rises from the entrance to the piano nobile (main floor for reception), where the principal representational rooms are located. A very large entrance hall leads into richly painted salons and chambers finished with stucco work that narrates episodes tied to the family’s deeds. Ceiling decorations include several large fresco cycles by Gioacchino Martorana, among them an Assumption, an Adoration of Saint Vincent Ferrer, an oval depiction of the Virgin and Child with Saint Vincent Ferrer, and an expansive Assumption scene populated with angels and archangels that covers the ceiling of a principal hall.

The building has undergone conservation and adaptive reuse. It was examined by the regional Superintendency and entered in the local risk-mapping project, then restored in the 2000s and divided into private apartments. The conserved fabric and decorative program survive in situ and the palace now functions in a private, hospitality-oriented use, while retaining the external inscriptions and heraldic elements that record its eighteenth-century origin.