Palazzo Vermexio: Syracuse’s Historic Senate and City Hall
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.3
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Italian, Spanish
- Site type
- Civic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page6 sections
History
Palazzo Vermexio is a historic civic palace in Syracuse, Italy, commissioned by the city government and built between 1629 and 1633 to replace the former seat of the Regional Chamber of Syracuse. Designed by the Sicilian architect Giovanni Vermexio, the building combines a Renaissance lower level with a more overtly Baroque upper section. After its completion, it became the seat of the city senate and municipal government, a role it still performs through the mayor’s offices and city hall.
Construction and civic use
The palace was conceived as a carefully ordered civic building for Syracuse’s government. Its design reflects Vermexio’s geometric approach, expressed in the original conception of the structure as a perfect cube divided at mid-height by a long balcony. This horizontal division also separates the two architectural styles used across the facade, with classical Renaissance treatment below and richer Baroque composition above.
The building’s civic function continued after its seventeenth-century construction. In 1763, an eighteenth-century Senate carriage was made for official use and later preserved inside the palace. Built according to the model of Austrian sedan carriages, it remains associated with the building’s history as the seat of Syracuse’s municipal authorities.
Alterations and later interventions
In 1870, an attic was added to house the technical office. The addition changed the proportions of Vermexio’s original design. Around the 1960s, a new structure was attached to enlarge the municipal offices. This intervention substantially modified the original project and led to the demolition of the former Church of Saint Sebastian and the Archbishop’s Library, founded in 1780 by Bishop Alagona.
Two graffiti at the right side of the facade, near the corner with Via Minerva, reproduce the facade of a church. A study published in 2016 interpreted the principal graffito as a representation of Syracuse Cathedral and proposed that soldiers guarding the palace had incised it with a bayonet. The palace also contains a later unfinished project in its inner courtyard. Stone blocks placed high on the courtyard walls were prepared to support a sculpture of the city’s coat of arms, but the project, dating from the 1970s, was never completed.
Remains
Facade and architectural composition
Palazzo Vermexio has two floors and was originally organized as a cube, with a long balcony dividing the facade into two architectural orders. The lower section follows classical schemes. Large windows with triangular pediments are set between rusticated Tuscan Doric pilasters, which are flat, wall-attached supports. Above them runs a formal classical frieze decorated with triglyphs and metopes, the alternating grooved blocks and intervening panels of that feature. Baroque touches appear in the mascarons and in the individually varied brackets supporting the windows.
The balcony opens onto the upper level, where Ionic pilasters alternate with windows and niches intended for statues of the Spanish royal family. The sculptural work was entrusted to Gregorio Tedeschi, but the statues were never completed. The only finished sculptural element was the double-headed imperial eagle. Abundant festoons run between the capitals, and the upper facade ends in a strongly projecting cornice.
Carriage, graffiti, and courtyard features
The Senate carriage is preserved in the atrium. Made in 1763 in the form of an Austrian sedan carriage, it provides a surviving object directly connected with the palace’s civic function. At the left corner of the cornice, a tiny carved gecko is known in the Syracusan dialect as scuppiuni. Tradition says that Vermexio placed it there almost as a signature, while the nickname was linked to the architect’s unusual height and thinness.
The two church-shaped graffiti occupy the right side of the facade at the junction with Via Minerva. The principal image has been interpreted as Syracuse Cathedral, with the proposed bayonet carving linking it to soldiers who guarded the palace. In the inner courtyard, elevated stone blocks were prepared for the unfinished sculpture of Syracuse’s coat of arms. Some stones incorporated into the palace are also identified as having come from the ancient Artemision, the sanctuary of Artemis in Syracuse.
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