Palermo’s Villa Tasca: A Case Study in Tourism, Television, and Architectural Preservation

Nicholas Berrettini, M.A., MPhil

Focusing on Palermo’s Villa Tasca, the project examines how restored and protected architecture functions as a model of the past. Recent televisual displacements, most notably The White Lotus Season 2 (2022), refashion Villa Tasca into a consumable fantasy, dislodging it from its real-world context and aligning it with a simulacral logic of tourism. Archival research in Palermo documents the villa’s history of remodeling and situates the findings within broader debates on preservation, simulation, as well as the cultural consequences of modeling in Italy’s heritage economy.