Palazzo Nicolaci di Villadorata

In January 1693, a devastating earthquake demolished esteemed towns across southeast Sicily, including the stunning ancient city of Noto. Livelihoods and legacies were reduced to dust, but the resilient Sicilians, with their fighting spirit and aesthetic sense, responded to the horrific natural disaster by making their region even more enchanting.

Local architects, some of whom had been trained by baroque masters in Rome, were given fresh opportunities to re-create a majestic city. Resourceful families—like the bourgeois Nicolacis— benefited as well, through new land ownership. In fact, all of Noto was new land. Rebuilding an ancient, glorified metropolis had been deemed unwise (due to wreckage and potentially dangerous soil), so Noto as it was once known was re-created roughly 6 miles from its original site.

Such a blank slate gave eighteenth-century aristocrats an opportunity to one-up one another while creating bigger and more extravagant estates than their neighbors. The Nicolacis, evidently, excelled. Palazzo Nicolaci, their private home, added an enormous jewel to the new city.

Though still inhabited by a few of the Nicolacis, the palazzo was partially sold in 1983 to the government, who repurposed the ground floor as a municipal library that displays thousands of impressive volumes, including original folios, Latin manuscripts, and histories about an eerily similar neighboring town. The books are accessible to the public, or one can tour the rest of the palace, to admire its billiards room and wrought iron balconies, offering an exceptional vision into the breaks of Sicilian nobility.

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