Palazzina Cinese e Parco della Favorita

The story

In 1798 Ferdinand IV of Bourbon fled Naples, threatened by the French, and took refuge in Palermo. The following year he created the Favorita park at the foot of Monte Pellegrino, a hunting estate and farm, and bought a small Chinese-style house that he had Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia transform.

The Palazzina, completed in the early years of the 19th century, is a play of chinoiserie: pagoda roofs, little bells, rooms decorated with oriental, Turkish and Pompeian motifs, and a dining room where the table rose from the floor below already laid, so as to do without servants.

The former outbuildings house the Museo Pitrè, devoted to the Sicilian folk traditions collected by Giuseppe Pitrè: painted carts, puppets, ex-votos, costumes and objects of everyday life.

Why it is worth it

It is a royal extravagance that makes you smile: a king on the run building himself an imaginary China at the foot of a Sicilian mountain. The rooms are small and intensely coloured, each with a different theme; look for the mechanical table and the audience hall. Outside, the Favorita park, with its long avenues and the slopes of Monte Pellegrino, gives you the space the centre does not have.