Sicilian Baroque Architecture

Sicilian Baroque is the distinctive regional form of Baroque architecture that developed on the island of Sicily, then part of the Spanish Empire, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its full flowering came after the massive earthquake of 1693, which triggered a major wave of rebuilding across eastern Sicily and gave local architects, many trained in Rome, wide opportunity to apply the more sophisticated Baroque vocabulary of mainland Italy in place of the cruder, hybrid Baroque forms used on the island beforehand. By around 1730 Sicilian architects had developed a confident, highly localized interpretation of the style, marked by distinctive grinning stone masks and putti, flamboyant curving facades, wrought iron balconies, external staircases and decorated rustication often carved from volcanic lava stone. The style lasted barely fifty years before neoclassicism began to displace it from the 1780s, but it left a lasting architectural character across towns such as those of the Val di Noto, and mirrored a period when the island, nominally ruled by Spain, was governed in practice by a wealthy landowning aristocracy.