Costantino Palace

entrance of 3 €, suggestive place. It is easy to stumble if you are running because the floor is uneven, be careful

Neglect, abandonment and an unspeakable destiny. Passed by a Roman real estate developer in 2000, together with the adjoining Palazzo Di Napoli, after some consolidation works with public funding, it is in a total state of neglect. The plan to transform it into a large hotel has failed. Thefts on commission (floors, over doors etc) and no maintenance interventions for several decades have relegated it to the oblivion of the ancient glories.

Unscheduled but very interesting visit, organized by the "Le vie dei tesori" association. The palace is almost always not open to visitors because it is in ruins and abandoned. Unfortunately there is not much to see anymore, but it is interesting to know its sad history. Strong point: the view on the 4 Canti.

Of the beauty of the building you can only have an intuition, looking at the wonderful structure and the few ceiling frescoes that still remain. Unfortunately the structure is in poor condition, some areas even unsafe. Someone should take care of restoring it to its former glory.

Noble residence of the eighteenth century built on a previous seventeenth-century structure. Inside, the state of abandonment and dispossession make it unattractive on an architectural and artistic level but it remains an important historical document for the city of Palermo; of the floors there are mostly traces of flooring subsequent to the original one, inside the rooms there are remains of decorations by great artists such as Gioacchino Martorana, Gaspare Fumagalli and Giuseppe Velasco: the roofs have frescoes by Gioacchino Martorana, except in one of the halls where the battle of Constantine by Giuseppe Velasco shows off. The style of the palace is Baroque, originally the halls and rooms were decorated in the Rococo style. Outside the façade was created by Venanzio Marvuglia and is the continuity with one of the sides of Piazza Villena, inside the large courtyard a double staircase divides the servants' rooms from the rest of the building while on the ground floor it is possible to see what remains of the stable. Interesting, even if sad, is to discover the signs of reuse in one of the rooms, in the Fascist period, with the walls covered with fabric and the roof repainted to cover the frescoes, in the school. The building is indeed devastated but still retains its history between the walls marked by time and the safety measures even if not recovery, proof is the lack of attention and inconsistency in maintaining the initial appearance of the building. Definitely worth seeing even just to be able to look out from one of the balconies on via Maqueda and piazza Villena, given that the opportunity is not certain in the future just as the future of the building is uncertain.

Visited by 6,000 people during the autumn edition of Le vie dei Tesori, Palazzo Costantino was reopened for the Christmas edition of the event. It is a sumptuous eighteenth-century palace in Baroque style, or rather, of what remains of a palace whose interiors, in fact, apart from the frescoes, are a disaster: a series of private floors of the majolica mantle, windows without glass, fixtures in decay, walls covered with sheets to prevent the falling of rubble, a crane in the courtyard since 2006, traces of different uses of the building, dust, rubble ... A hotel-museum must have been created there, but it is all left abandoned . And in all this, the eyes are raised and they are filled with the beauty of the frescoes, including the enormous "The Battle of Constantinople" by Giuseppe Velasco. Looking out over the Quattro Canti from a crumbling window of the Palazzo is, despite everything, magnificent