Casa Cuseni, Fine arts museum in Taormina, Italy

Casa Cuseni is a museum in Taormina housed in a former private villa built on a hillside with views toward Mount Etna and the sea. The building includes furnished rooms from the early 1900s and a surrounding garden with African plants, English roses, and local citrus trees.

Robert Hawthorn Kitson, heir to a British locomotive manufacturing fortune, had the house built between 1900 and 1905 as a winter home in Sicily. During his ownership, it became a meeting place for artists and collectors, and after his death it was preserved as a place open to the public.

The dining room is the only surviving interior by Sir Frank Brangwyn, a Royal Academy member, with hand-carved wood panels and painted ceiling sections that visitors can see today. The room gives a clear sense of how wealthy British collectors decorated their winter homes in Sicily at the start of the 1900s.

A visit generally requires booking in advance, as the property opens only for guided group tours held in several languages. The house sits on a slope inside Taormina's old town, so sturdy footwear is a good idea for the stairs and uneven paths.

The dining-room holds the only surviving interior by Frank Brangwyn anywhere in the world, with furniture he designed and a mural recounting a same-sex love story and a real event of 1908 in Taormina, the first homosexual adoption in the history of figurative arts. The mural stayed hidden for over a century because homosexuality was persecuted in Britain at the time.