This monumental entrance frames a door bearing the classic "lion's head" iron door knocker that leads to a large courtyard surrounded by a high wall.
The tall, majestic portal is embellished with a number of string courses and side pilasters, jambs, capitals and a stone arch. It is surmounted by a dovecote and, within the thick wall that supports it, there is a small room next to the entrance that was used as a guardhouse.
The property’s huge cobbled courtyard is dominated by a small, two-storey nineteenth-century building that does not alter its structure, which was built on an existing construction dating from 1554. The oldest part, the residential core, was commissioned by Monserrat Diana, as stated in an epigraph on the architrave of a portal, while the city-inspired palace was erected on the orders of the nobleman Raffaele Diana for his son Valerio to celebrate the latter’s marriage in January 1884.
Chronicles report that, at the end of the celebrations in honour of Saint Josephwhen the mass had been sung, the Diana family's vast courtyard welcomed a large crowd of beggars from the surrounding area who were offered boiled broad bean soup and a small portion of flatbread, in accordance with a 1709 bequest.
The custom fell into disuse in the years after Don Valerio’s death in 1943, by which time there was no longer the terrible poverty that had once been so widespread.
Adjacent to the building is the parish church dedicated to San Nicolò alongside which, in the past, there had been a cemetery.
