"Coppo" is the name for tea lights in Sicilian dialect. The tea light design is a long preparation requiring infinite patience. Once the artisans know which design is to be made, they begin. First the sheets made at an old paper mill in Fabriano are coloured, then glued to form a cylinder. On...

His vast experience in Palermo around the mid-16th century is one of the reasons Giuseppe Giacalone was entrusted with creating the staircase. Giacalone worked on the most demanding phase of the construction of Via Toledo (today Via Vittorio Emanuele) and in the Porta Nuova construction site. His...

Luigi Sturzo was an important Italian intellectual who contributed actively to Italian politics. He was born in Caltagirone on 26 November 1871 and took his vows in the monastery of Acireale in 1883. Five years later Sturzo returned to Caltagirone. In 1894 he moved to Rome where he graduated in T...

Throughout the 17th century, floors had maiolica tiles with square decorative elements and a palmette motif, all in turquoise. But this was not the only one: there were three other types. Two of the three had a square or rectangular maiolica perimeter decorated with hexagonal or rectangular shapes...

The archaeologist Pietro Paolo Giorgio Orsi was born in Rovereto in 1859. As Inspector of Excavations of the Royal Superintendence, from 1888 onwards he conducted important archaeological investigations in Syracuse, Pantalica, the Hyblaean Mountains, Akrai and other areas in Sicily. His discover...

In 1904, the dome was built using the design and funding of the Knight Salvatore Sortino. It was clad externally in copper and built from reinforced concrete. The use of this material was an absolute novelty, so much so that the model of the dome, presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition, won a priz...

Cherubs are angels. Appearing in Jewish and Christian religion, they are figures with wings and the head of a blond-haired boy or girl of extraordinary beauty....

Francesco Battaglia was a Sicilian architect. He worked on the construction of the Benedictine convent in Catania with his son Antonino and the great architect Giovanni Battista Vaccarini. In 1768 he was declared the royal architect and became a point of reference for all other architects. In Cat...

Giandomenico Gagini came from a family of sculptors originally from Bissone on Lake Lugano. Part of the Gagini family was active in Northern Italy and another worked from the mid-15th century in Sicily and Calabria. Gagini immediately followed the family business working in the field of statuary...

An aedicula is an architectural structure. It consists of two columns or small pillars and is surmounted by a pediment. It is small in size and can be either an autonomous structure or rest on a larger structure. It can be used as decoration or to protect sacred images....