Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri

The story

The Steri, from “hosterium”, was begun in 1307 for Manfredi Chiaramonte, head of one of the most powerful families in 14th-century Sicily. The wooden ceiling of the Sala Magna, painted between 1377 and 1380 by Cecco di Naro, Simone da Corleone and Pellegrino Darena, is one of the largest secular cycles of the European Middle Ages.

After the fall of the Chiaramonte the palace became the seat of the viceroys and then, from 1600 to 1782, of the Spanish Inquisition tribunal. In the cells, prisoners left drawings, prayers and verses on the walls: graffiti rediscovered by Giuseppe Pitrè in 1906 and restored in recent years.

Today it is the rectorate of the University of Palermo and houses Renato Guttuso’s Vucciria.

Why it is worth it

The ceiling of the Sala Magna is a medieval comic strip: knights, Bible stories, scenes of love and hunting, to be read with your head tipped back. Then you go down to the cells, and on the walls you find the hands of those locked up there: maps, saints, lines in dialect, a ship. It is one of the most intense places in the city, and the contrast with the square outside makes it stronger still.