Room 1
On the second floor, visitors enter a gallery conceived as a historical palimpsest of the Palazzo’s past, where, after a destruction, an attempt is made to reconstruct a readable narrative.
The Entrance hall
On reaching the second floor, you come into a large entrance hall. Before the restoration, this hall was split into four rooms running off a single corridor. Clearing out these rooms and accompanying lowered ceilings, revealed a large fresco with the entire central section ripped out. It is sure that it depicted an angel holding a coat of arms. Elsewhere in this hall, the restoration brought to light other paintings by Fumagalli, a late seventeenth century wall frieze and four monochrome over-doors painted using ashes, by Benedetto Bonomo in 1784. The hall contains various decorative fragments from different eras that tells the story of the building’s history. On the right of the entrance to the hall is a late eighteenth century lantern most likely made for a gazebo on the terrace.
The Princes’ Estates
Also on show here are ten paintings depicting the ten cities that formed the Princes of Butera’s Sicilian properties. Originally they were above the doors and windows of the first floor entrance hall.
Palace Life
Gaspare Vizzini’s paintings of around 1780, portray daily life in Palazzo Butera.