The design of Riflessi Acireale begins with a simple gesture: you look up. A decorated ceiling returns in the mirrored walls of the bathroom, while the pattern of the floor runs on around contemporary surfaces. In this restored palazzo in Acireale, in the heart of the old town, home to Riflessi Acireale Palace Suites, an everyday detail becomes an encounter with the building.
In Italy, palazzo does not mean palace. It is the word for a substantial town building of some age: rooms set around a staircase, high ceilings, floors laid in patterned tiles. Many have been divided into flats or offices. A few, like this one, have become places to stay.
We chose Riflessi for this idea of hospitality: six suites and a project that leaves room for the character of the palazzo. A house for travellers who want to meet the town in the rooms where they sleep, too.
The rooms, between decoration and mirrors
In several rooms the bathroom is a volume set inside the room, built to leave the original floors and ceilings untouched. Mirrors clad part of its surfaces and bring the decoration down to eye level. Around it, contemporary furniture takes its place beside the patterns of the preserved rooms.
It is the old dilemma of every Italian historic building: a modern bathroom needs pipes, walls and tiles, and an old floor does not forgive. Here the bathroom was built inside the room, not through it.
A thought, a butterfly, the moon
The rooms carry English names, and each one keeps a small episode of the project. Mind is where everything started: the room on which the first thoughts were focused, the first reflection of what the house would become.
In Butterfly, the mirrors suggest the name: in the reflections, shapes appear that recall a butterflyโs wings. Light takes its name from the light of its gilded decoration.
Moon takes the story outside: its name comes from the moon, watched from its private terrace. In the evening you can step out and look for it.
Materials, and a scent of Sicily
In the bathrooms, custom finishes in raw lava earth and copper add texture beside the mirrored walls. Lava is at home on this coast: just below the town, the cliff of La Timpa was built by lava flows laid one over another some 200,000 years ago. Finishes and reflective surfaces give the interiors a character you notice up close: the edge of a mirror, the line where it meets a wall, a decoration that slips into the reflection.
The toiletries bring another echo of Sicily. The fragrance created for the house brings together prickly pear, caper, bergamot and manna, the sugary sap of the ash tree that Sicily still harvests by hand in the Madonie mountains.
Breakfast on the rooftops
The indoor breakfast room and the shared terrace give you a pause outside your own room. In the warmer months breakfast moves up to the rooftops of Acireale: a table, the sky and the outline of the houses for the start of the day. In a Sicilian summer the morning is the gentlest hour, before the heat settles on the streets.
Acireale beyond the front door
Piazza Duomo and the Basilica of San Sebastiano belong to the walk through the old town. The basilica took its present form between 1699 and 1705, after the earthquake of 1693, and its faรงade carries a frieze of fourteen cherubs holding garlands. Along the streets, wrought-iron balconies and carved faรงades invite you to stop on the details; a pause in the piazza can give the day a slower rhythm.
Acireale is known across Sicily for its Carnival, with floats in papier-mรขchรฉ and others covered in flowers. It keeps a museum of the Opera dei Pupi, the Sicilian puppet theatre recognised by UNESCO as intangible heritage. And in its bars, lemon granita has a local version of its own, corโi cani.
La Timpa and the fishing village of Santa Maria la Scala add another perspective: the lava escarpment, the coast and the sea of the myth of Acis and Galatea. To continue in the area, you will find more in our selection for Catania and the Baroque Coast and in our guide to where to stay between Catania, Acireale and Mount Etna.
To choose your room and see the services, visit the Riflessi Acireale Palace Suites page.
