Villa Igiea

The hotel provides the public with little information about its history. Our team researches the hotel's past, from the very beginning, verifying its exact opening date and providing an overview of its history up to the present day. If you have any useful information and would like to share it, please send it to archives@famoushotels.org. Thank you This is what we know so far (attention: unverified history!): For more than one century the Grand Hotel Villa Igiea, one of the most famous spots in Sicily and in Italy, has stood looking out over the sea of Palermo. Commissioned by the renowned Florio family at the end of the 1800s, at the height of the Belle Époque period, this building, with its characteristic form of a castle, takes its name from Igiea, the Greek nymph of health. Created as an exclusive health resort in a location renowned for its health benefits, it was soon transformed into an elegant hotel, preferred by cosmopolitan high society due to its sumptuos environment and refined hospitality together with the mild Sicilian climate. The Liberty style rooms, with decorations, terraces and balustrades overlooking the sea and the garden with century old trees, have hosted the most important European royal and bourgeois families. The Grand Hotel Villa Igiea , projected in 1908 by Ernesto Basile, one of the greatest exponents of the Liberty, keeps intact its original structure. Basile, superimposed it, at art, to one construction already preexisting, inspired to the 400 siciliano previously belonging to an English gentleman, named Downviller. No visitor to Villa Igiea can shut his eyes to the finery of the halls, nor fail to be enchanted by the decorations and Liberty furnishing laid out in 1898 by the architect Ernesto Basile. Exceptional is the Lounge Basile, with a fresco made by the painter E. De Maria Von Bergler.