How the Valsecchi Collection found its home in Palermo — and a historic palazzo was reborn

It is the morning after a storm, and Palermo’s gutters are running with rainwater. The air is dense and humid. On the terrace of Palazzo Butera, wet bougainvillea drips onto geometric green tiles, creating Bridget Riley-like distortions in the vehement light. Inside, the sound of hammering forms a rough counterpoint to the shouts and trucks double-clutching on the street below. In the courtyard, a group of visitors gather in the shade of a large jacaranda tree. Everywhere, there is a sense of purpose — of things happening.

Palazzo Butera is one of the most beautiful villas in Sicily. Once owned by the Branciforti family, princes of Butera, it commands an elegant vista across the Gulf of Palermo. During the Enlightenment, the palace stood at the epicentre of intellectual life. Scientists arrived bearing marvellous inventions; Goethe wandered its rooms, contemplating Sicily’s role as a Mediterranean crossroads and gateway to Italy; hot-air balloons were released from the terrace, casting long, lazy shadows over the radial streets of the Arab quarter.

In the 20th century, the villa fell into disrepair — a consequence of neglect, corruption and war. Its resurrection began in 2015, when the art collector Francesca Valsecchi discovered the semi-derelict palace while on holiday. She and her husband, Massimo, were searching for a home for their extensive art collection. The façade was cracked, the shutters broken, and the interior disfigured by insensitive remodelling. Yet some Rococo ceilings had survived, their delicate arrangements of angels, fruit and flowers miraculously intact.

The purchase was completed following an archaic system of negotiations (no fewer than 27 heirs were involved). Over the next decade, the Valsecchis embarked on an ambitious programme of restoration with the architect Giovanni Cappelletti. Partition walls were removed, frescoes uncovered and — where planning regulations intervened — ingenious floating ceilings installed and painted in chalky tempera by the artist David Tremlett.

The first phase of the project is now complete, comprising 30 exhibition spaces across the ground, first and second floors, along with bedrooms for visiting artists and the Valsecchis’ private quarters. A second phase is currently under way, transforming the adjoining property into a research centre, archive and accommodation for visiting academics.

The couple describe the result as a ‘living system’ — they resist calling it a museum. ‘It is an interdisciplinary space: open, non-dogmatic,’ says the curator, Claudio Gulli. ‘Think of it as an atlas — a network of rooms containing paintings, sculptures and objects that span geographies, cultures and centuries, and that we hope encourages people to look at art and culture in different ways.’

A theme running through the palace — like the taproots of the ancient jacaranda tree discovered in the boiler room — is Massimo’s lifelong admiration for Fluxus. An early collector of works by the movement in the 1960s, he was drawn to the liberating conceptual shifts it championed, during an era of radical experimentation. The influence is evident throughout the galleries: artworks are propped against whitewashed walls, labels are absent, and visitors are encouraged to draw their own connections between works. Each room — from the wide, airy warehouse spaces on the ground floor to the denser galleries of the piano nobile — exudes an air of informality. ‘Things move around all the time,’ says Gulli.

Perhaps the artist who best embodies the Valsecchis’ vision is Tom Phillips, who died in 2022. A ground-floor gallery is devoted to his work and features his autobiographical text opus Curriculum Vitae. The British artist championed process over product and encouraged his students at Ipswich School of Art — including Brian Eno — to embrace randomness and chance.

If the ground-floor galleries possess a light, workaday aesthetic, the state rooms on the first floor have the unearthly beauty of an opera set. The Gothic Room is saturated with colour, as dense as a Persian carpet, while the Green Room is painted in a chalky viridian and crowned by a glorious pink Rococo ceiling. Interspersed throughout are works from the Valsecchis’ collection of fine and applied arts, ranging from 19th-century British Arts and Crafts furniture to Italian Old Master paintings.

Opening the collection to the public is a project that has been germinating for years. In fact, Massimo first conceived of the idea in the 1970s, while running a multidisciplinary art space in Milan. He envisioned a non-hierarchical environment in which interpretation and authorship could be contested. He says that Palermo’s Botanical Gardens serve as a guiding metaphor for the collection: ‘The species are drawn from all over the world and are allowed to develop organically. There are no fixed boundaries, no single author — it changes over time.’

Francesca acknowledges that many people said they were taking a huge risk by coming to Palermo. Yet she sees the city as uniquely placed for the arts. ‘People often talk about Palermo as if it were a problem to be solved,’ she says, ‘whereas we see it as a condition for creativity.’

This perspective is shared by many young artists currently living in Sicily. Since the island confronted the old Mafia structures in the late 1990s — the last chieftain, Totò Riina, was captured in 1993 — the anti-Mafia movement has continued to grow. Culture has been central to that struggle. The former mayor, Leoluca Orlando, who stepped down in 2022, has long argued that the arts are vital to the city’s regeneration.

Where once Sicily’s young artists felt compelled to leave in order to advance their careers, today many are choosing to stay. Collectives such as the activist art group Landescape, which runs an artist residency, regard Palermo as a more astringent and challenging ‘real world’ than the established art centres of London, New York or Paris. Increasingly, the international art community is seeing this, too. The gallery Hauser & Wirth was recently considering a space in Palermo, while the British film and video artist Beatrice Gibson moved to Palermo in 2020, recognising in its chaotic sprawl a key to Europe’s future. ‘The most exciting spaces of the imagination are often where you least expect to find them,’ she says. ‘There are endless possibilities here.’

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