Ragusa Guide Italy

Historical buildings and monuments

Historical buildings and monuments

All the Baroque palaces that are included in Unesco’s World Heritage List:

• Palazzo della Cancelleria – The Chancellery
  This palace, built in the 18^th century, was later bought by the Borough council and turned into a chancellery. The façade includes a balcony, a tribune and large windows on the side.
  
• Palazzo Vescovile Schininà – The Bishop’s Palace
  Two large entrance doors, decorated with natural limestone elements, lead to the palace’s two wings, one of which still belongs to the Schininà family. The other wing belongs to the Clergy.
  
• Palazzo la Rocca
  This palace was built in 1765 on the wishes of Baron La Rocca who set up his residence there. The façade has several balconies that are held up by different sized brackets and some interesting anthropomorphic figures. The rooms on the first floor contain some authentic eighteenth-century furnishings.
  
• Palazzo Bestini
  This palace is famous for the disturbing masks sculpted onto the principal façade: The head of a deformed, ragged beggar, the head of a aristocratic Sicilian and the head of a Oriental personage with a turban.
  
• Palazzo Cosentini
  The decorations on the balcony brackets are particularly interesting: masks sculpted into the stone representing deformed, grotesque faces, some of which hold horrid, poisonous animals such as scorpions and snakes between their teeth.
  
• Palazzo Sortino Trono
  This palace was built in 1778 according to the wishes of Don Ignazio Sortino Trono, on the foundations of some houses that previously belonged to the family that had been destroyed by the earthquake in 1693.
  
• Palazzo Zacco
  The brackets that hold up the five balconies on the side facade are interesting: a musician playing the maracas and a disturbing mask that sneers at passers-by.
  
• Palazzo Battaglia
  This palace, located in Ragusa Ibla, was built in 1724 and later expanded (1748). It became even more majestic than the first architectural plan.
  

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