Casa de Pilatos, Seville

La Casa de Pilatos (Pilate's House) is an Andalusian palace, which serves as the permanent residence of the Dukes of Medinaceli. It is an example of an Italian Renaissance building with Mudéjar elements and decorations. It is considered the prototype of the Andalusian palace.

The Casa de Pilatos has around 150 different 1530s azulejo (Spanish glazed tile) designs made by the brothers Diego and Juan Pulido, one of the largest azulejo collections in the world.

The palace is accessed through a Renaissance-style marble gate, designed by the Genoese Antonio Maria Aprile in 1529, and surmounted by a Gothic crest, possibly brought from the palace that developers were building in Bornos. The gate leads to a typical Andalusian courtyard with a fountain, and surrounded by twenty-four busts of Spanish kings, Roman emperors and other relevant characters collected from the ruins of the Roman colony of Italica distributed along the lower galleries of the courtyard. The courtyard, in turn, leads to two gardens with plateresque adornments.

A staircase to the top floor is decorated with azulejo tiling and a ceiling of Mudéjar honeycomb, made by Cristobal Sanchez. The rooms on this floor include major paintings dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including the Pietà by Sebastiano del Piombo.

In the room to the left wing of the Tower the ceiling displays frescoes painted by Francisco Pacheco between 1603 and 1604 showing the apotheosis of Hercules, and in the room that follows the Tower is a small painting by Francisco Goya of a bullfight, then a still life by Giuseppe Recco in the dining room and a table representing Mary Magdalene painted in the sixteenth century; in the library are three works by painter Luca Giordano. As with most palaces of the period, the Casa de Pilatos also has a chapel, designed in a fusion of the Gothic and Mudéjar styles, with antique decor and numerous manuscripts. The Casa de Pilatos is considered one of the finest examples of Andalusian architecture of 16th-century Seville. The house is open to the public year-round.

Film location

Several films have been shot in the Casa de Pilatos, including four Hollywood blockbusters: Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, Ridley Scott's 1492: Conquest of Paradise in 1992, and Kingdom of Heaven in 2005. At the end of 2009, Tom Cruise filmed the movie Knight and Day with Cameron Diaz at the palace.