If Villa Valguarnera is the most spectacular manor home in town, this is certainly the creepiest. It's known around the world as the "Villa of Monsters;" when Goethe came here on his grand tour, he was extremely put off by its "bad taste and folly." It was built in 1715 by Tommaso Maria Napoli for Francesco Gravina, prince of Palagonia, yet it was eccentrically decorated by the prince's oddball grandson, the hunchbacked Ferdinando Gravina Alliata. He commissioned a series of grotesque statues to be inserted along the top of the wall in front of the facade. Goethe described this pageant of hideous figures as "beggars of both sexes, men and women of Spain, Moors, Turks, hunchbacks, deformed persons of every kind, dwarfs, musicians, Pulcinellas;" he described the animals as "deformed monkeys, many dragons and snakes, every kind of paw attached to every kind of body, double heads and exchanged heads." So repulsive were the statues that pregnant women steered clear of the area, fearing that they would bear similar creatures. Less than 60 of the original 200 remain today.

The reason for such bizarre decor was dictated by revenge: Knowing that his wife had a bevy of lovers, Ferdinando ordered artisans to make monstrous caricatures of these men to mortify his wife and her paramours. He also created an eccentric interior not unlike a haunted house, with spikes hidden under elegant velvet seats and sets of rare Chinese porcelains purposely broken and glued together. A Hall of Mirrors was built into the walls to distort the figures of visitors -- thus, the hunchback got his revenge on those who stood tall and straight, often making them seem as if their legs had been cut off. When he died, in a final act of self-pity, he ordered that the villa be painted over in black. Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí fell in love with the place when he visited and wanted to buy it and turn it into his atelier, but that never happened.