PALERMO.- For more than 40 years, the Palazzo Butera stood unloved and unsellable above the Gulf of Palermo, a painful reminder of a grand aristocratic way of life in Sicily that had long disappeared.

Then two outsiders with big plans swept in. Massimo Valsecchi was born in Genoa, Italy; his wife, Francesca Frua de Angeli, in Milan. They had long lived in an elegant apartment in London. He had taught at a university in Milan, and the two had run an art gallery there. They had no Sicilian roots.

But when they discovered the crumbling palazzo during their first visit together to Palermo in 2015, they knew they were destined to stay.

“At first, I tried to resist,” Valsecchi said. “But Francesa insisted, saying, ‘You can fulfill all of your dreams here.’ In fact, the magic of life comes from making strong choices, even when you feel like an idiot. But I like idiots.”

The palace complex was first built in the 18th century as the residence of Palermo’s most illustrious family. Stretching along the 16th-century city walls on the edge of Kalsa, the old Arab neighborhood, it was considered the finest palazzo in the city visible from the sea.

The couple, now in their early 80s, decided to transform it into a repository for the eclectic and largely unseen artworks they had collected over 50 years.

Their goal was to jumble their fine and decorative art together in a museum open to the public and create residences for art scholars. They would also make the palazzo their home.

An Ambitious Project

The first challenge was to seal the deal — with 27 of the palazzo’s princely heirs. The sale was so complicated that it took a day that started at 9 a.m. and spilled past midnight just to read aloud the 260-page deed of the sale with their complicated names, as required by Italian law.

Then, making the renovations to the palazzo complex — which covers 75,000 square feet of floor space — ended up being much more involved than the Valsecchis had imagined.

The complex history of the renovation is told in a 224-page book in Italian with lush color photographs and architectural drawings that is sold at the museum.

Permissions to make changes had to be obtained from competing and often overlapping planning and heritage authorities. The walls of the huge state rooms could not be moved. Partitions and false ceilings hid frescoes and elaborate moldings that needed to be preserved. And more than a dozen ceilings needed to be built or restored.

“You couldn’t touch anything,” Valsecchi said. “We had to consult an archaeologist every time we wanted to dig. Every day was a negotiation. We had to take everything apart. But that was the magic of the project.”

To ease their entry into Sicilian society, and benefit from traditional local craftsmanship, the Valsecchis hired and housed dozens of expert artisans and builders from the mountains around Palermo. The couple also added about 20 workers from the Kalsa neighborhood itself.

Among their dozens of projects: They commissioned oxidized iron gates to separate the entrance from the main courtyard; lined a modern ticket entry hall with conceptual art; put thousands of 18th-century documents about the principality on display in a museum archive and bookshop; linked an iron and glass walkway to four ground floor exhibition halls; demolished the interior walls and exposed the stone floors of the carriage house; and opened a small modern cafe and restaurant with access to Palermo’s seafront.

Rather than patching the original floors with old stone, they installed new floors with polished “calcestruzzo,” a composite of gravel, cement and sand, with a heating system underneath.

Tile workers re-laid 45,000 handmade white and green Sicilian tiles on the 120-yard-long terrace facing the sea. The couple did much of the gardening themselves, planting palm trees, bougainvillea, jasmine and rambling rose bushes on the terrace.

An 18th-century red marble staircase was restored, while the spaces it connected — double-ceiling galleries on one end and semiprivate spaces on the other — were rebuilt.

Renovations brought discoveries. When the builders removed the floor of what had been the boiler room, they discovered an underground rainwater drainage system lined with richly decorated ceramic tiles. In search of water, an old jacaranda tree had stretched its roots through the building’s thick stone wall into the drainpipes.

“The worker said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s a root, and I’ll cut it,’” Valsecchi said. “I said, ‘Absolutely not!’”

Giovanni Cappelletti, the architect for the project, designed a new floor inset with a reinforced glass trail to show off the tangle of roots along the tile-lined drainpipes.

The story of the renaissance of the Palazzo Butera, which opened to the public as a museum in 2021, is as passionate as the love story between its owners.

Brave New World

The couple had met once in Italy through family connections, but fell in love in London in the 1960s. She was married to an English businessman with whom she had a daughter; he was working in a short-lived insurance venture with her brother and husband. Guilt-ridden, unhappy in his job, Valsecchi fled to Italy; she followed.

“It was an impossible situation,” Valsecchi said. “Our passion for art led us into danger. I thought it best to disappear.”

“In the end, I made the decision,” Frua de Angeli said. “I left everything. I left my husband. I left my home. I left all my money. I just wanted him.”

Eventually, they married.

Both were grounded in art collecting. Frua de Angeli learned about art from her grandfather Carlo Frua de Angeli, a textile magnate, who used part of his fortune to become a renowned Italian art collector. His collection was sold or given to his heirs, who dispersed it. Valsecchi started collecting contemporary art when he was a teenager. The couple built their collection freed from family ties. “We began buying contemporary art from artistic friends,” Valsecchi said. “We bought old masters when it was not fashionable. We were investing in ourselves.”

The idea behind the Palazzo Butera project had been germinating for decades. In the 1970s, Valsecchi had opened an experimental art space in Milan with contemporary artists like the French duo Anne and Patrick Poirier. He dreamed of creating a permanent multidisciplinary museum there but was defeated by bureaucratic barriers, he said.

Palermo offered a brave new world. “It was different from any other place we knew — Paris, New York, London, Milan, they all have the same look in fashion, in restaurants,” Frua de Angeli said. Her husband finished her thought, adding, “Sicily is a place of migrations, of layers, of mixing of cultures — Phoenician, Greek, Arab, Norman. We are in a friendly place here.”

Touring the spaces, the couple showed the breadth of their collection, displayed without labels on the artworks or geographical and chronological order. Visitors decide for themselves what they like and what connections to make.

“This is a laboratory of ideas,” Valsecchi said. “It isn’t about individual art objects. It’s about how can you put all these things that are totally different into a dialogue.”

The collection includes Zulu and Japanese vases, Italian Renaissance and 19th-century Orientalist paintings, Gilbert & George artworks, decorative and everyday objects, a Chinese table. An Andy Warhol here, a Gerhard Richter there.

In the Pink Room, one of the museum’s fresco ceiling state rooms, 19th-century Arts and Crafts furniture coexists with Italian old master paintings.

Delicate folded white floor and table lamps designed by Issey Miyake illuminate some of the spaces.

The Gothic Room — part of the Valsecchis’ private apartment and open on guided tours for special groups and by reservation — was created in the early 19th century. Redone by the Poiriers with a huge, rounded carpet with inscriptions in Latin and made in Nepal, and colored glass panels with inscriptions in ancient Greek, it evokes Sicily’s layered multicultural history.

In one glass vitrine in the room, masks from Papua New Guinea, one made with palm leaves, another with shells, sit next to Tiffany, Venetian and Austrian glass.

The bulk of the Valsecchis’ permanent collection of furniture, art objects, paintings, photographs and sculptures fills 20 galleries open to the public on the museum’s top floor.

“The collection was put together by two voracious people with great eyes for wonderful things,” said Xavier Salomon, the chief curator of the Frick Collection. “You enter and find yourself in a beautiful candy store of a palazzo. And it’s the fusion of the candy store itself and what’s inside that makes it so special.”

The couple are so down-to-earth that they didn’t mind inviting a guest into their high-ceiling bedroom next door. The bed was covered in a simple white bedspread, the un-air-conditioned room hot and still on a sun-broiled September afternoon.

Continuing the Dialogue

The Valsecchis said they have begun to forge relationships with several art institutes in Europe and are currently building accommodations and research spaces for visiting artists, curators and scholars.

They are charmed by the chaos of their location on the old main street of the Kalsa, which takes its name from the Arabic word al Khalisa, which means “the chosen one.” It was one of the first planned Arab settlements in Europe, under Arab rule until the Normans conquered it in 1072. Heavily bombed during World War II, it still has winding, narrow streets as it did in the 11th century. The neighborhood is much safer than it was a few years ago but retains its gritty feel. Gentrification has brought some new restaurants, wine bars and restored palazzi, which coexist with crumbling residential buildings and abandoned churches.

“We are part of La Kalsa’s regeneration,” Valsecchi said.

The couple insist that they have no favorite artworks in their collection, but late in the tour, in one of the galleries, Valsecchi stopped in front of a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It is a 1873 portrait of Charles Deschamps, Tadema’s art dealer, and his wife, which the painter gave to them as a wedding present. In the portrait, they are together, looking intently at the painting.

“This is Francesca and me,” Valsecchi said. “This is us, absolutely. What you see here is who we are. Continuing the dialogue.”

He seemed to be echoing what his wife had said earlier that day: “Life is a constant search.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.