Casa Cuseni (Cuseni House), Taormina

Casa Cuseni (Cuseni House) is the museum of fine arts and the Grand Tour of the city of Taormina. Casa Cuseni was built in the early twentieth century by the English painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson.

In 1948, his heiress, psychiatrist and writer Daphne Phelps, transformed the house into an artist's residence and museum house , modeled on historic English villas. A plaque at the entrance to the monument reads: Casa Cuseni, built by Robert Kitson, preserved by Daphne Phelps.

In this house Ernest Hemingway wrote his first short story, Lord Bertrand Russell won the Nobel prize for literature, Sir Frank Brangwyn, Sir Alfred E. East, Cecil A. Hunt and Sir George Clausen painted the Sicilian landscape, Sir Arthur Lasenby Liberty, Pablo Picasso, Henry Faulkner, Denis Mack Smith, Roald Dahl, Jocelyn Broke, Tennessee Williams and many others found an ideal place to write, paint, contributing to the knowledge of our island in the world.

Operated today by the Robert Hawthorn Kitson Foundation, it is a permanent, not-for-profit institution . The museum specializes in paintings of the English Grand Tour in Sicily and in the land of the East and houses the collections that belonged to the British painter Robert Hawthorn Kitson and the writer Daphne Phelps.

Since 2016 it has been the city museum of the City of Taormina (Municipality of Taormina, prot. 17677 of 09.07.2016 Casa Cuseni, Museum of Fine Arts and the Grand Tour of the City of Taormina).

The main building was built between 1900 and 1905 on preparatory drawings by Sir Frank Brangwyn , now kept in London, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and for a long time erroneously attributed to the design of a building, never built, the Kyoraku Tokyo Art Museum . Casa Cuseni is a set of stacked cubes and double cubes, with a colonnaded front in the Palladian style , built using local materials. The plan of the building recalls the design of a House by the Sea (a house on the sea) by the London architect James Arthur Stratton , with a Palladian colonnade, loggia and a garden facing the sea(garden facing the sea) , modified by Robert Hawthorn Kitson and Sir Frank Brangwyn.

The collection of Robert Hawthorn Kitson and Daphne Hawthorn Phelps” pertaining to Villa Cuseni, made up of over two thousand specimens (Dining-room, furnishings, paintings, watercolours, drawing notebooks, photographs, negatives, sculptures, ceramics, prints, lithographs, furnishings and various objects, crib figures and dressed statuettes, clothes and carpets is under historical and artistic constraint, DDS n ° 441 Sicilian Region, Department of Cultural Heritage and Sicilian Identity of May 2021 ).

The entire collection is usable. Some collections can only be used by advance booking at least seven days in advance.
Only 200 objects are on permanent display which maintain the typical display order of the House-Museum.
During theSecond World War all the objects of Casa Cuseni have been secured by the local community. The house first became the fascist headquarters, then the German headquarters with the presence of Field Marshal Albert Konrad Kesselring and then the English headquarters with the presence of the mayor of the city of Taormina. In 1946, when Robert Hawthorn Kitson returned after the end of the war, the citizens of Taormina handed him back all the objects they had kept and hidden for six years.