Giovanni Battista Vaccarini was born in Palermo in 1702. He came from a family of artisans related to architects, studied the new Roman architecture and embarked on a religious career. During his experience in Catania, he brought his ideas to life through an innovative language. He merged the Baro...

The Platea Magna was the ancient square of Catania. One metre below current street level, it was filled with the remains of the rubble after the tragic earthquake. Before 1693, the Cathedral of Catania, the town hall, the Bishop's Palace, the Seminary of the Clerics and the city jail overlooked th...

The Quattro Canti are unique squares formed by the intersection of two main streets. The square is defined by the overlooking façades of the buildings, which seem to embrace the space. After the earthquake, a Quattro Canti square was also built in Catania. The first to be built were those in Pal...

Two elements, such as two road axes, are orthogonal when they cross one another to form an angle of 90 degrees (a right angle)....

The consequences of the earthquake forced the Spanish authorities, who ruled Sicily at the time to focus on this emergency. Giuseppe Lanza, Duke of Camastra, was appointed vicar general for the reconstruction of the Val di Noto. The decision was not accidental; the nobleman had already participa...

The origin of the name Catania dates back to the time of the Sicels, a population that inhabited Sicily before the Greeks. So the Sicels called their village "Katana", meaning grater, to emphasise the irregular and porous surface of the solidified lava. Afterwards, each population that occupied ...

In architecture, a central plan refers to buildings developed around a central point....

Trompe-l'œil is a painting technique used to simulate a realistic depiction of a landscape or other things using optical illusion....

The chimera is a mythological figure, considered the incarnation of the worst destructive forces of nature: storms and volcanoes. This monster has the head and body of a lion with a goat's head on its back, and a biting serpent for a tail. The chimera is a frightening figure and can be found in ...

The scholar Luigi Di Blasi suggested that it was Rosario Gagliardi who designed Palazzo Nicolaci, but not everyone agrees. According to Di Blasi, the fact that Gagliardi created all of the designs of the buildings in Noto, that there are some decorative elements typical of the Syracusan architect ...