Sicilian palace returns to former splendor
Princess Carine Vanni Mantegna di Gangi had tears of joy when reminiscing the Dolce Gabana fashion and jewellery show held in her palace in July 2017. In the space of a few days, her family mansion in Palermo was revived to its former splendor. Hundred of candles glowed, the slowly melting wax was imprinting the event on the chandeliers, the skillfully tiled floor was soiled again by a thousand steps, and the buzzing noise of people chatting and gossiping competed with the orchestra to fill up the air. Life was back in full flow. For Princess Carine, it was like a firework, a consecration, the joyous reward for the arduous conservation work she has been undertaking for a quarter of a century. Her palace had not seen such a revival since 1963 when the great film director, Luchino Visconti, filmed the Leopard there. It was another unforgettable moment for the Gangi palace and a photograph of Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale waltzing in the golden ballroom is displayed on the family’s grand piano to prove it.
But the Princess is no child anymore. She is a mature woman who must know that such moments, suspended in time, are exceptional. The rest of the year, her palace is inhabited by the ghosts of the past whose spirits remain alive in houses, Sicilian people believe. Carine de Gangi has learnt to live with these ghosts even if she is not Sicilian herself but French. She grew up as a common girl in the French mountain village of Saint-Gervais in Savoie and worked in the luxury industry until she married her princely husband and moved to Sicily. She had known him since she was 12, he was a friend of his parents who regularly visited the family. When she talks about their encounter, the little girl who dreamed of marrying a prince is still alive in her eyes and voice, even though reality has taken over and she is overloaded with responsibilities. She embraced her new life as a princess but not Sicily. She is overtly critical of the endemic corruption in the region and needs to regularly escape to the French Alps for some vital oxygen intake. “ I wouldn’t survive otherwise. When I can’t take it anymore, I go back to France for a few days,” she says.
In Palermo, her world is her palace; understandably so as it represents a world in itself. Of the many extravagant baroque palaces hidden behind a decrepit façade in the Sicilian capital, very few equal the Palazzo Gangi for its grand interior. Passed down into the family since it was built in the 17th century, it has remained intact, almost miraculously so, resisting the passage of time, the turning of generations and recurrent political turmoil. Each generation has added to the palace or preserved it instead of dispersing the collection. Today, Carine and her husband are the owner and curator of hundreds of art pieces and collectables ranging from paintings, sculptures, and antique furniture to porcelain, silverware and curiosity objects. She has a mental record of every single item and would notice immediately if one was gone. In her sleepless nights -she suffers from insomnia- she counts them to help her fall asleep. When that doesn’t work, she mentally goes through the renovation work, room by room, wall by wall, corner by corner.
The restoration of the palace has been her and her husband’s war battle since they inherited it from his mother in the early 1990s. A total of 8,000 square metres of interior space, with rooms as large as a modern appartment and a ballroom the size of a family house, not to mention the attractive terrace overlooking the piazza. All of that with no financial help, a titanesque task. The family is relying only on itself, hosting prestigious events and dinners and opening it to the public for exclusive guided tours, which Carine di Gangi insists on hosting herself. She is not afraid of work, with her common background she has worked all her life. For visitors, it is a chance as no one else could introduce them to the palace with such engagement and passion. She keeps it alive even if she doesn’t sleep there (she prefers to live with her own family in their house by the sea where she can cut off from what has become the job of her lifetime). Every day, she welcomes visitors, guiding them room by room with the story of the family across centuries, and details of the restoration work done. She physically took part in it and learnt a great deal, surrounded by the best craftsmen and renovators of Europe, each of them expert in their own field. The result is astounding. Missing tiles were replaced by hand, broken wooden statuettes on a cabinet were carved again by the same experts in the same German town where they were originally made, the stucco on the ceiling was repaired by the same Sicilian workshop who originally made it, and so on. What we see is a unique baroque jewel which can no longer be seen anywhere else in Sicily or Europe. Even the stately palaces turned museums cannot compete because they lack this mix of intimacy and grandeur which makes the Palazzo Gangi so special. Visconti and the Dolce Gabbana partners were no fool to choose it as a set.
The palace’s conversation room next to the ballroom (seen on the above still picture of Visconti’s scene in the Leopard), which she calls her own Gallery des glaces and which she says she would not swap for the one in Versailles, is the most beautiful period room I have ever seen, and I have visited numerous mansions and palaces all over Europe. Already the floor, made in Vietri tiles and featuring an exotic nature scene with leopards, is a masterpiece in itself. Artisans from Vietri, a small town on the Amalfi coast, worked on location to recreate and hand-paint the missing tiles to complete the picture. The ceiling is of equal amazement. Alone, it captures the style, colours, spirit and excesses of the late Baroque. All curves and volutes, it has a double depth with niches carved inside it and decorated in trompe-l’oeil to emphasise the effect of depth. I had never seen a ceiling of this kind before. In fact, it is the only remaining example in Europe. There used to be another one in the Nancy opera in eastern France, but it was destroyed in a fire. Hanging from that same ceiling is a coloured Murano glass chandelier, probably one of the largest in the world, made by the one Murano glass artist who had learnt to colour glass in Bohemia and consequently made a small fortune for himself back in Venice. On the other side of the ballroom, is the dining room painted in white and gold with a white porcelain dining service on display. “And here we are in France!”, exclaims Carine di Gangi with a glowing smile (we can guess that she misses her country of birth). The plates laid on the table come the Manufacture de Sèvres, one of Europe’s most prestigious porcelain workshop established in the 18th century under king Louis XV. The service is priceless, like the many other objects contained in the palace. She says she doesn’t even want to know their price, as for her, the value is elsewhere. It is in the amazing heritage and savoir-faire these artefacts represent and the care taken by the family to preserve them against all odds. She must have been chosen by the Sicilian ghosts of the past, as no one else would have given so much of her energy and life to this palace, which now stands out amidst the decrepit aristocratic mansions of Palermo.
