A garden is born in the heart of Palermo which is also a museum. The new cultural center, named after Santa Rosalia, is promoted by the Sicilia Foundation as a museum wing of Palazzo Branciforte. It was designed by the MCA - Mario Cucinella Architects studio, which conceived it as a "transparent display case, open to the community and in dialogue with the surrounding neighbourhood, surmounted by a hanging garden inspired by the Arab-Norman ones".
The hanging garden will host fragrant and colorful plant species in different seasons: it will therefore be a small urban oasis with shade plants and fruit trees.
The project was presented by Raffaele Bonsignore, president of the Sicilia Foundation, as an operation which, in addition to regenerating and redeveloping a neighbourhood, "has a strong symbolic value: greenery, culture, sustainability finally replace concrete and decay". The Foundation has recovered a property abandoned for years in Piazza Guzzetta which will become a new exhibition space following the recent approval in the city council of a variant to the general master plan.
The project responds, it has been underlined, to a dual need: to expand the museum area of Palazzo Branciforte to be used for temporary exhibitions and, at the same time, to create a cultural hub open to the city and the neighbourhood.
"It is important for us to embrace the new museum complex - says the mayor Roberto Lagalla - because it proposes to enrich the historic center of Palermo with a contemporary sign of urban regeneration. We have thus managed to materialize a new profitable relationship between public and private".
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