Kardaky House
A Liberty summer house from Erice’s age of villeggiatura
Kardaky House is an early twentieth-century Liberty residence in Erice, rebuilt for a wealthy family from Egypt during the town’s development as a summer retreat.
Key facts
Site type:
Comune:
House
District:
Historic centre
Kardaky House stands on Via Antonio Cordici, between Piazza Prof. Antonino Zichichi and the former Dominican complex of San Domenico, now occupied by the Patrick M. S. Blackett Institute.
The house belongs to a period when Monte San Giuliano, as Erice was then known, was becoming established as a place of villeggiatura. Following Count Agostino Pepoli’s late nineteenth-century transformation of the Balio Gardens, the town developed increasingly as a place of leisure and summer residence. By the beginning of the twentieth century, wealthy industrialists, merchants and professionals were spending the warmer months here, including families normally resident in Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo and Alexandria.
Among them were the Kardakys, a wealthy family of industrialists living in Egypt. They acquired an existing house in poor condition and extensively rebuilt it as a summer residence. The architect is unknown, but the new building was conceived in the Liberty style, with its decorative treatment extending from the façade to the interiors, fittings and specially designed doors.
The Kardaky family retained the property until the 1940s or 1950s, when it was acquired by a family from Erice.
Photo: Elymian Atlas
Sources & further reading
The history of Kardaky House and its connection with the early twentieth-century development of Monte San Giuliano as a summer resort is documented by Matteo Tusa.