From 1900 to 1905, in just five years, Ernesto Basile made a very significant parable in Palermo in the culture of the project of Italian modernism. It is a time frame between the design definition, also for the furnishings, of two prestigious mansions: the Villino Florio (1899-1902), the first mature and coherent example of Liberty in Italy, and the Villa Deliella (1905-1909), the first Sicilian manifestation of an academic review of modernism. Both houses, whose clients belong to the most dynamic and culturally internationalist component of the Palermitan hegemon class, are paradigmatic expressions of two dichotomo’s phases of the Sicilian derivation of the modernist principle of “integral design”. These two architectures, exemplary of the two different “image policy” guidelines of the wealthy owners, are an expression of a high level of elaboration of a “Silicon Way” to the modern reform of the culture of living of the late Belle Epoque. The correspondence between the compositional logics of the factories and the respective spatial relationships of the rooms and the configurations of the furnishings was, in reality, the point of arrival of a consolidated endogenous architectural culture, strong in a remarkable scientific-cultural humus and which dates back to the neoclassical period. It was now about to exhaust its mandate as interpreter of the more cultured, but still elitist, component of Sicilian society in the nineteenth century; a society which, despite the endemic contradictions, had experienced important social tensions and considerable proactive impulses, both entrepreneurial and cultural, but which was now turning towards a slow decline. The Villino Florio and the Villa Deliella, not least for the different conception of the furnishings, can therefore represent the extremes of that time frame which coincides with the apogee of this formidable period of Sicilian history of the Contemporary Age.
