Palazzo Maniscalco-Basile all'Olivuzza - Palermo

Rosario Torregrossa, an engineer from Palermo, conceived and realized the building for Barbara Schachowskoi, widow of George Wilding in 1847 .

This is 'façade' architecture, well harmonized with the building curtain to which the adjacent Palazzi Wirz and Palazzi Florio belong. A project dominated by a rare and captivating symmetry set to the centrality of the loggia on the first floor. It distinguished by the battlements of the attic floor; the suggestive geometric plays of the circular rosettes that crown the slender columns; the use of pointed arches, all elements capable of transporting a piece of the Venetian quest from the land/waters of the Doges to Sicilian soil.

And it is precisely in the refined central loggia that the remarkable point of the entire composition is realized, here between the constant and measured rhythms of the eight columns forged in cast iron and the refined molded inlay work of the upper rosettes at that icon of the artisan/ artistic history of Palermo that the Fonderia Oretea was between the 19th and 20th centuries, a passage literally engraved or perhaps it is better to say 'forged' and clearly visible in one of the seven upper rosettes.

Willem Vandenameele