Tra antichità e medioevo: viaggiatori, architetti e intellettuali in Sicilia fra gli anni venti e trenta dell’Ottocento

When Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc reached Sicily in April 1836, he was a very young teacher of the Ecole de dessin de Paris on the verge of starting a travel which, for many of his precursors had become a compulsory stage of the grand tour in Italy for several decades.However, the thirties of the nineteenth century were a decisive moment in the development of architectural debate on medieval architecture, not only for Sicily. For this reason, it is very significant that the French architect reached the island in that period. Indeed, with the publications of Jakob Ignaz Hittorff in 1835, Henry Gally Knight and Domenico Lo Faso Pietrasanta, Duke of Serradifalco, in 1838, Sicilian medieval architecture found an editorial space with a significant international dissemination. This allowed to increase debate’s results that on the island lied very far back in the past and in the previous decade had been getting more and more consistency.