Palazzo della Prefettura

The building embodies a crucial passage: the birth of a united Italy, when Brindisi returned to being what it had always been, a frontier port, a hinge between the Mediterranean and the European Levant. The prefecture was created to administer this post-unification reality, in an eclectic 19th-century language that does not give up Apulian restraint.

The rhythmic regularity of the windows conveys the order and representation that the unified state wished to transmit: neither the sumptuousness of a noble palace nor the greyness of an anonymous office, but a discreet authority. Brindisi has always had a special relationship with central power, Romans, Normans, Swabians and Aragonese all wished to leave their mark here; the Prefecture is the latest of these gestures.