Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi: An Aristocratic Residence in Lecce
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Italian, Kingdom of Naples, Spanish
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page12 sections
History
Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi is an aristocratic residence in Lecce, Italy, built in the mid-sixteenth century with a late-Renaissance layout and later reshaped through nineteenth-century neoclassical and Art Nouveau work. Its residential history connects the palace with several prominent families, the Jesuits, literary activity, political movements, and the public life of unified Italy.
Origins and the de’ Giudici period
Giacomo Mele built the palace in the mid-sixteenth century over an ancient underground olive press, which was later converted into a semi-basement. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, ownership passed to the Genoese de’ Giudice family, present in Lecce since the Late Middle Ages. Cola Maria de’ Giudici enlarged and embellished the residence, and contemporaries referred to it as a sumptuous palace.
The building was the setting for a family tragedy on 13 July 1636. Beatrice Moccia, the only daughter of Giovanni Simone, lord of Colle d’Anchise, and Laura Cicala, was staying with Lucrezia de’ Giudici Bonvicino. Beatrice’s husband, Don Fulvio di Costanzo, governor of the province of Terra d’Otranto, found her writing a love letter and fatally stabbed her. It was later discovered that she had written the letter on commission and was innocent. The incident may have influenced Lucrezia, who had no direct descendants, when she bequeathed the palace to the Jesuits that same year.
Jesuit occupation and the Capece inheritance
The Jesuits, a Catholic religious order founded in the sixteenth century and known for education, missionary work, and institutional administration, occupied the palace for approximately fifty years. The Amalfi-origin Staybano family later acquired the residence and sold it in 1693 through a notarial deed to Isabella Capece.
Isabella was the daughter of Francesco, Baron of Surbo, and Caterina Paladini. She was married to Raimondo Natale, a poet and man of letters. During their occupation, the palace probably hosted meetings of the Accademia degli Spioni, a learned academy or literary association active in the late seventeenth century.
The Paladini family
Inheritance subsequently brought the palace to the Paladini family, an aristocratic family of intellectuals and politicians with feudal holdings and residences in Terra d’Otranto and Lecce since the fifteenth century. Terra d’Otranto was a historical territory in southeastern Italy broadly corresponding to Salento and nearby areas. The Paladini lived in the residence from the first half of the eighteenth century until after Italian unification.
The family was also associated with the Jacobins of the Parthenopean Republic of 1799. That short-lived republic was established in Naples during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic period. The brothers Angel’Antonio, Guglielmo, and Pietro Paladini were prominent among its Jacobins.
The Tamborino transformation
Achille Tamborino of Maglie purchased the palace in the summer of 1879 and made it his Lecce residence. He commissioned consolidation and restoration work that gave the building much of its present character. The engineer Antonio Guariglia and the Neo-Mannerist architect Luigi Morrone were involved in the late nineteenth-century reworking, which combined eclectic, neoclassical, and Art Nouveau elements. Achille’s great-nephew Vincenzo Tamborino later completed the refurbishment, restoration, and furnishing. The Cezzi family descends from the Tamborino family through the maternal line.
The palace also entered the ceremonial life of late nineteenth-century Lecce. In 1889, during the visit of King Umberto I and Crown Prince Vittorio Emanuele, Francesco Crispi dined there as a guest of Senator Achille Tamborino and his wife, Duchess Maria Luisa Frisari. The royal visit coincided with the inauguration of a monument to Vittorio Emanuele II and the Marcelline boarding school.
Remains
Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi rises approximately 40 metres and combines a late-Renaissance plan with nineteenth-century architectural perspectives. The surviving complex includes the earlier entrance halls and service areas, reception rooms and private apartments, upper-level attics, a decorated urban garden, and a collection room overlooking the garden.
Interior arrangement and decoration
Ground-floor rooms and porticoes
The ground floor retains the former stables and apartments. Its large rooms have star vaults decorated with sculpted flowers, fruits, and mascarons. The nineteenth-century arrangement added lowered halls with segmental-arch entrances, an open atrium with a view toward the gallery, porticoes, columns, and capitals. Large Serlian windows occupy the upper part of the gallery. A Serlian window has a central arched opening flanked by two narrower openings, a Renaissance architectural motif.
Two antique carriages remain in the ground-floor porticoes. One was manufactured in France and another in Naples, both in the mid-nineteenth century. A third vehicle is a cherry-wood calèche made by craftsmen from Salento.
Principal floor and upper levels
A marble staircase leads to the principal floor, where the reception rooms occupy one part of the residence and a separate wing served the family’s private life. At the turn of the staircase stands a statue of a young African woman created by Angelo Antonio Paladini, who also supplied ceramics and terracottas for the palace. Luigi Guacci installed bronze works, while the painter Domenico Battista produced the tempera paintings. The brothers Peluso of Tricase contributed polychrome mosaics and lithocement work, a decorative cement-based technique.
The second floor contains attics, some retaining eighteenth-century origins and structure. These upper spaces look over the roofs of Lecce’s historic centre.
Garden and collection room
The urban garden
Inaugurated in 1883, the garden is a Salentine urban garden with Rococo-inspired styling. Flower beds and paths made from dry-laid stone occupy a slightly raised, irregular, roughly circular enclosure. The garden served the family as an outdoor sitting area and an open-air kitchen.
The garden is reached through the sixteenth-century entrance halls and former stables. It extends toward a rusticated exedra, a curved terminal structure, fitted with a large cast-iron grille. Achille Tamborino’s monogram appears above the entrance gate.
A centuries-old medlar tree stands in the lawn. A thunbergia with violet-coloured flowers and a bougainvillea climb toward the first-floor balconies. Lemons, mandarins, limes, and oranges grow on both sides of the entrance. Other plantings include Californian palms, cypresses, jacarandas, nasturtiums, calla lilies, acanthuses, lantanas, yellow and orange tree daturas, climbing roses, and irises leading toward a more secluded garden area. That area contains an old fountain, acacias, and alocasias, also known as elephant ears, and bamboo groves surround the garden.
The Wunderkammer
A sixteenth-century room on the first floor overlooks the garden and houses the Wunderkammer, or “Room of Wonders.” This historically styled collection room brings together varied household and family materials, including clothing, linens, sacred furnishings from the palace chapel, family portraits, books and magazines, art newspapers, rural maps, and maps of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The latter was the Bourbon-ruled state that encompassed southern Italy and Sicily before Italian unification.
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