Duke of St. Stephen's Palace
It was an integral part of the second city walls. Built between the end of the fourteenth century and the first years of the fifteenth century, it is a masterpiece of the Gothic Sicilian art, which persisted being anchored to the Arab-Norman style. The arab-norman permanences are remembered by the decoration on the Palace's top ( a wide frieze in lava stone, alternate with rhombus-shaped wedges in white stone from Syracuse, which runs, forming a magnificent lace of inlays, along the eastern and northern fronts) and by the square tower crowned with swallow-tailed merlons.
It has three storeys with an area of 100 square metres apiece and it's adorned with four very precious elaborated mullions (windows with two lights): pierced roses and three-lobed little arcs with a triplex cordon in the acute arcs' jambs. Two drawbridges allowed to go on the upper floors .
The staircase which from the groundfloor leads to the first floor was built in 1700.
In the garden there is still the well used for the rain water's harvest.
The original look of a strengthened construction was relieved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the insertion of decorative elements, just when there lived the Spanish De Spauches family, Dukes of Saint Stephen of Brifa and Princes of Galati.
Today it is center for the Mazzullo Foundation and it lodges, in addition to many works of the genial sculptor, archaeological finds, which date back to the third and second century BC.