Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi

The palace retains a late-Renaissance layout organized around a sequence of reception and service spaces, with original 16th-century stables and ground-floor apartments still part of the plan. Ground level rooms display large vaulted ceilings with star patterns, which are carved and painted with floral and fruit motifs and feature decorative mascarons, or sculpted faces. The ground floor porticoes open onto the interior, and two mid-19th-century carriages of French and Neapolitan manufacture, together with a cherrywood caleche made in Salento, remain under the covered circulation space.

A broad marble stair leads up to the piano nobile (main reception floor), where formal salons and a private family wing are arranged. On the first floor a 16th-century room that opens directly onto the garden houses a Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), containing preserved household items and archival material. Above, second-floor attic rooms set beneath mansard roofs include structural elements dating to the 18th century and provide views over the historic roofscape.

Nineteenth-century alterations introduced neoclassical and eclectic features integrated with the earlier fabric. Entrance halls were reshaped with low segmental arches, where a segmental arch is an arch with a shallow curve, and an open atrium with a gallery overlooks inner circulation. A series of porticoes, columns and capitals were added, and the gallery is pierced by large Serlian windows, a Palladian window type consisting of a central arched opening flanked by two rectangular openings.

The garden occupies a slightly raised, roughly circular plot reached through the entrance halls and the older stables, and it terminates at a semi-circular exedra, a recessed architectural niche faced in rough-cut stone blocks known as rusticated ashlar. A large cast-iron gate bears the monogram of Achille Tamborino and frames the transition between street and garden. Plantings include an ancient loquat, climbing wisteria-colored Thunbergia and bougainvillea, several citrus trees, Californian palms, cypresses, jacarandas, and a variety of shrubs, flowering plants and an intimate fountain corner; bamboo groves form a planted boundary.

Surface finishes and decorative works added during the restorations remain in place. Polychrome mosaics and poured cement surfaces were executed by the Peluso brothers of Tricase, tempera paintings were contributed by Domenico Battista, and a number of ceramics and terracotta sculptures, among them a figure of a young African woman positioned on the stair landing, were made by the sculptor-ceramist Angelo Antonio Paladini. Bronze elements placed by Luigi Guacci complement these works. Materials visible across the building include the marble stair, the rusticated stone of the exedra, the cast-iron gate, multicolored mosaics, litocement, terracotta statuary and bronze fixtures, many of which survive following the late-19th-century consolidation and decorative program.