Architecture and Urbanism in Early Modern Palermo

Palermo was an active participant in the global dynamics of early modernity, a role that shaped its remaking as the capital of the Habsburg viceroyalty of Sicily. Situating the sixteenth-century city within the broader landscape of Spanish colonialism, Elizabeth Kassler-Taub positions Palermo as a model for understanding how capitals at the edges of empire were made and imagined, inhabited and described. She introduces readers to monuments and sites absent from mainstream histories of early modern Italy and Spain, highlighting the experimental design models and building practices developed in response to, and defiance of, the city's entanglements across both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Kassler-Taub conceptualizes Palermo's capacity for change and adaptation as an index of its “elasticity.” She shows how the city's centuries-long colonial condition generated remarkable resilience. Palermo was able to withstand tension and to reshape itself without violating its basic form–its basic identity.