MARVUGLIA, Giuseppe Venanzio - b. 1729 Palermo, d. 1814 Palermo

Italian architect of the late Baroque and early Classicism. He studied in Rome from 1747 to 1759, and won the second prize of the Accademia di San Luca competition in 1758. In 1759 he returned to Sicily with a Neoclassical education.

He taught at the Università degli Studi di Palermo from 1780 to 1805, where he was the professor of “Practical Geometry, Civil Architecture and Hydraulic Engineering”, founded in 1779 within the Faculty of Philosophy.

Though much of Marvuglia’s work was in municipal architecture, two churches in Palermo are credited to him. He also designed two villas at the newly fashionable aristocratic enclave of Bagheria. As a teacher of architecture Marvuglia strongly supported the study of Sicily’s Greek temples, however, in spite of his later reputation as a Neoclassical architect he never applied to his own work the strict rules and proportions he found in his studies of ancient Greek architecture.

Exterior view

For early 19th-cemtury villa architecture, the most influential source was Palladio, with his clear, cubic structures. An example is the Villa Belmonte, high above Palermo on the slopes of Monte Pellegrino, built by the Roman-trained architect Giuseppe Venanzio Marvuglia in 1801-06 for Giuseppe Ventimiglia, Prince of Belmonte. With its stately proportions and grand articulation by a rusticated ground floor and strongly projecting centrepiece of raised Ionic columns, the massive villa is set dramatically against a rock face.