Villa Valguarnera, Bagheria

A journey into the great archetypes of textile art, through a fusion of techniques and suggestions: passion and knowledge of textile art generate a great variety of expressive intuitions, colours, yarns, and weaves. The fabrics of the Dedar collection take shape in the most sumptuous of Sicilian villas, built in 1712 by the architect and Dominican friar Tommaso Maria Napoli. Commissioned by princess Anna Gravina as a gift for her husband Giuseppe del Bosco Sandoval Prince of Cattolica, Villa Valguarnera rises on the top of a flat mountain in Bagheria - a holiday resort for the aristocrats of Palermo in the 18th century, known as "the city of villas" - from which it is possible to admire a luxuriance of parks and the immense blue of the gulfs of Palermo and Cefalù. The complex is a rare testimony of Sicilian historical and cultural identity, in which neoclassical rigor, baroque scenography and Islamic influences coexist in harmony. Many illustrious representatives of the Enlightenment thought have been welcomed and protected within the walls of the villa and the architectural structure has been admired by Goethe, Schinkel and Dufourny. | Photo credits: Andrea Ferrari