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Located outside the city’s walls, in 1667 the building, which had once been the country residence of Francesco di Sangro, prince of San Severo, was donated by him to his son-in-law, Don Giuseppe Carafa. In 1717 the “palazzoed house” with its gardens and land was sold for ten thousand ducats to Ippolita Cantelmo Stuart, wife of Vincenzo Maria Carafa, V prince of Roccella.
This woman entrusted Luca Vecchioni, close collaborator of Luigi Vanvitelli, to renovate the edifice and its annexes. The transformation and expansion work continued for a decade, from 1755 to 1765, the year in which the building was by then converted in a true residential palazzo, rendered economically productive thanks to the building, along the main entrance road, of numerous annexes intended to be rented.
Vecchioni’s project, which was clearly inspired by Vanvitelli, was characterized by criteria of greater symmetry that give to the main entrance door and staircase absolute centrality and make the most of the side-construction coverings as second-floor terraces. Between 1765 and 1829 the third floor was completed and work on the fourth was started.
During those same years, Vincenzo Maria Carafa and his wife Livia Doria moved in: from the inventories it is possible to imagine an apartment composed of forty-five rooms adorned with lavish furnishings and possessing a picture gallery with over 130 paintings. In 1885 the opening of the new arterial road of Via dei Mille divided the building in two, destroying its covered atrium and isolating the rented annexes on the other side of the street.
Between 1950 and 1959 what was left of the original “garden of delights” added to the palazzo was definitively eliminated. The renovation work carried out in the sixties marked the complete loss of the historical-artistic elements that survived the great property losses the family had previously been forced to endure. In February 1998 the Municipality of Naples, which in 1984 had acquired the property and then began restoration work, established that Palazzo Roccella would be used as a Documentation Center for Contemporary Arts.
With its 6,000 sq.m. spread out on three floors, today Pan is the city’s first-ever location intended to host temporary exhibitions, a documentation center with archives, a library, and a media library, as well as highly experimental cultural and workshop activities.
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