The Liberty style in Sicily will now have a “home”: the Art Nouveau Museum is born

PALERMO – The Liberty style, so widespread in Sicilian architecture, will now have a “home”. “It was a commitment that I had made with the Sicilian parliament and with all the Palermitans a few days ago during the examination of the financial maneuver at the ARS. Today, that commitment has been respected. The regional government has in fact allocated three million euros for the establishment, in Palermo, of the “Regional Museum of Liberty – Villa Deliella” and the Art Nouveau itinerary ». This was announced by the president of the Region Nello Musumeci, after the green light of the council to the proposal of the councilor Alberto Samonà, which will see a synergy between the departments of cultural heritage and infrastructures.

Precisely on the occasion of the recent financial session in Sala d’Ercole, after a similar provision presented by the deputy Marianna Caronia had been removed, in fact, the governor had expressed the intention of the government to arrange an administrative act as soon as possible the procedures relating to the birth of the Museum and a great connected cultural itinerary.

«Today is a particularly important day – underlines the councilor for Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity, Alberto Samonà – because a wound inflicted over sixty years ago in the city of Palermo and in Sicily is healed. The decision to create the Liberty Museum is a strong political act that achieves a double result: it gives the right visibility to an architectural style that marked a memorable period in Sicily and reimburses the entire Sicilian community morally and culturally for the violence suffered. . The decision of the Musumeci government is, in fact, a strong and not only symbolic signal of the restoration of that culture of legality, violated for too many years by the predominance of political-mafia business committees ».

Villa Deliella, located in piazza Francesco Crispi (piazza Croci) in Palermo, was built in 1905 on a project by the architect Ernesto Basile, one of the greatest protagonists of the Sicilian Liberty season. The villa was demolished in 1959, as part of that great building speculation operation, which took place between the 1950s and 1960s, which went down in history as the “sack of Palermo”. The area, however, in spite of those who had demolished the Villa, remained unbuilding and, for many years, was used as a parking lot.