A 16th-century house, a 20th-century collector, and floors from Roman Itálica
Most of Seville's great houses were shaped by centuries of one family. The Lebrija Palace was shaped mostly by one person in 13 years. When Regla Manjón bought it in 1901, she was already collecting Roman antiquities, and she rebuilt the ground floor so the house could hold them.
The result is half Sevillian mansion and half private museum. The bones are 16th century. The floors are Roman, from the 1st to the 3rd centuries. The tiles, ceilings and screens come from at least three other Andalusian buildings.
The house begins as a mansion of the Sevillian nobility, first linked to the Paiba family. It sits in the commercial heart of the city, a few streets from the church that is now El Salvador.
The house is rebuilt in the classic Sevillian layout: rooms around an open central patio, a summer floor below and a winter floor above. The street façade you see today, with its two-tier marble doorway, dates from this period.
The house passes to the Counts of Corbos and later the Counts of Miraflores, and is remodelled and extended over the next two centuries. By 1900 it is tired and in need of work.
Regla Manjón Mergelina, Countess of Lebrija, buys the property. The same year she acquires the geometric mosaic that will pave the Octagonal Hall.
With the architect José Sáez y López she rebuilds the ground floor as a setting for Roman mosaics from Itálica, and adds tiles from the ruined Convent of San Agustín and a coffered ceiling from a palace in Marchena.
The great mosaic of Pan and the loves of Zeus, found at Los Palacios on the Countess's land above Itálica's amphitheatre, is laid in the central patio.
Already the first woman academic of Seville's Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Santa Isabel de Hungría, she joins the provincial Commission of Historic and Artistic Monuments.
Regla Manjón dies. Her will names her nephew, Pedro Armero Manjón, Count of Bustillo, as heir, and the house stays in the family.
After the death of the last Count of Lebrija in 1999, the family opens the house to the public. It is still privately owned and still rents its patios for concerts and events.
The building mixes three layers that are easy to tell apart once you know to look: Roman work on the floors, Mudéjar and Islamic-influenced decoration on the arches and ceilings, and Renaissance Seville in the tiles and the façade.
The mosaics date from roughly the 1st to the 3rd centuries AD. The patio mosaic, with Pan, Galatea and the loves of Zeus, is figurative; others, like the Octagonal Hall floor, are geometric. The entrance hall is opus sectile, a technique that uses cut slabs of coloured marble instead of small cubes. Columns, capitals, busts and amphorae fill the rooms.
The patio arches carry carved plasterwork (yesería) over marble columns, and the staircase is crowned by a gilded wooden ceiling with eight-pointed star patterns, the same geometry you see in the Alcázar. Upstairs, Arab-style and Persian rooms show the Countess's interest in the Islamic world.
The street front is a typical 16th-century Sevillian façade with a two-tier marble portal and pilasters. Inside, the tile dados are Sevillian Renaissance work brought from the Convent of San Agustín after the 19th-century confiscations of church property. A coffered ceiling came from a 16th-century palace in Marchena, and a Renaissance frieze runs through the ground floor.
Like other Sevillian houses, the palace was lived in vertically by season. The cooler ground floor around the patio was used in summer; the upper floor, with its carpets, tapestries and smaller rooms, in winter. That is still the division of the visit: Roman downstairs, family life upstairs.
Regla Manjón Mergelina was born in 1851 and grew up between Sanlúcar de Barrameda and Seville. She wrote poetry (her best-known collection is Agua pasada), travelled widely, and became one of the most serious collectors of classical antiquities in Spain.
Her focus was Itálica, the Roman city outside Seville. Farmers there regularly turned up mosaics and statues, which were sold or broken up. She bought land, excavated, and bought what others found. The patio mosaic came from her own olive grove at Los Palacios.
She was the first woman elected to Seville's Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Santa Isabel de Hungría, was later named a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, and from 1922 served on the provincial Commission of Historic and Artistic Monuments. She also wrote a guide to her own house, the Descripción.
Was she rescuing Itálica or stripping it? Both views exist, and modern archaeologists would not dig the way she did. What is certain is that many of these floors would not have survived without her.
Visitors on the joint Lebrija and Pilatos tour often mention that guides frame the morning around the women who shaped both palaces. At Lebrija, that is the Countess; at Casa de Pilatos, Catalina de Ribera, who started the house in the 1480s.
Itálica is 9 km from the palace, and its amphitheatre stands below the hill where the patio mosaic was found. Itálica tours from Seville →
The ground floor is free on Friday mornings. The rest of the week, it's €15 with the upstairs guided visit included.