Casina delle Palme
A Liberty pavilion on Trapani’s historic waterfront
Casina delle Palme is a Liberty-style pavilion on Trapani’s harbourfront, designed by Francesco La Grassa in 1922 as a café and entertainment venue.
Key facts
Site type:
Comune:
Café and entertainment venue
District:
Historic centre
Designed by the Trapani architect Francesco La Grassa in 1922, the Casina delle Palme was created as a leisure and entertainment venue on Viale Regina Elena, facing the Port of Trapani. Originally known as Chalet Fiorino, it appeared during a period in which the city was seeking to modernise its harbourfront.
The two-storey pavilion was built in reinforced concrete and combines enclosed rooms with terraces and verandas. Its Liberty architecture incorporates floral decoration, polychrome ceramic tiles and wrought-iron details. Its most distinctive feature is the palm tree incorporated into the building itself, rising through an opening in the roof. The terraces and outdoor spaces reflected its original role as a caffè-concerto, with areas for music and seasonal entertainment beside the harbour.
The Casina became a summer meeting place for the city and continued in this role until the late 1960s. Restored after the Second World War in 1946, it subsequently experienced periods of more limited use. The Comune di Trapani reopened the building in 2016, returning it to cultural use. Today it continues its long association with public entertainment as a venue for performances, exhibitions and other cultural events.
Photo: Elymian Atlas
Explore further
A new waterfront for Trapani
The Casina delle Palme was created during a period in which Trapani was seeking to modernise the appearance of its waterfront. The port remained central to the city’s commercial life and its connections across the western Mediterranean, making the seafront an important public face of the city.
Francesco La Grassa was directly involved in plans for its transformation. From 1920 he developed proposals for the Comune di Trapani concerning the city’s fronts towards the sea, including a scheme for the renewal of the Marina. In 1922 he drew up the Piano per l’avanzamento dei fabbricati di Viale Regina Elena, intended to give greater architectural coherence to this section of the southern waterfront.
La Grassa regarded Viale Regina Elena as Trapani’s calling card for those arriving by sea. The Casina delle Palme, built on the same waterfront during this period, can therefore be understood within a wider attempt to give the port-facing city a more modern architectural identity.
Francesco La Grassa
Francesco La Grassa (1876–1952) was born in Trapani and trained as an engineer in Naples. In 1906 he joined the Municipality of Rome as an engineer, where his work on public buildings and urban projects brought him into contact with modern construction techniques, including reinforced concrete.
After returning to Trapani, La Grassa combined engineering and architectural design in buildings that helped shape the city’s early twentieth-century architecture. His work included additions to Villino Nasi, the Palazzo delle Poste and the Casina delle Palme. He developed a particular interest in reinforced concrete, using its structural possibilities to create forms difficult to achieve with traditional construction.
His architecture evolved from the decorative vocabulary of Liberty towards increasingly simplified forms. At the Casina delle Palme, reinforced-concrete construction is combined with Liberty decoration, open terraces and spaces designed around the building’s recreational function.
Architecture and entertainment
The Casina has an irregular, two-volume plan adapted to its harbourfront setting. Flat and pitched roof sections are combined with accessible terraces, while enclosed rooms open onto verandas and outdoor spaces overlooking the port.
The building was conceived not simply as a café but as a place of public entertainment. Originally known as Chalet Fiorino, its outdoor spaces included a caffè-concerto and a palchetto della musica, with terraces providing space for gatherings and summer performances.
This relationship between architecture and entertainment remained central to the Casina’s identity for several decades. Following its reopening by the Comune di Trapani in 2016, the pavilion once again became a setting for cultural events, continuing a use closely related to the purpose for which La Grassa designed it.
Sources & further reading
Explore the official documentation and research used to trace the history and architecture of the Casina delle Palme, Francesco La Grassa’s work and the transformation of Trapani’s early twentieth-century waterfront.