Casa de Pilatos

Where it sits. The Casa de Pilatos fills a whole block on the small Plaza de Pilatos, in the quiet San Ildefonso and San Esteban quarter about ten minutes' walk east of Seville Cathedral. From the street it announces itself with a single marble portal of 1529, carved in Genoa and shipped in pieces, set into an otherwise plain whitewashed wall. Inside is the largest and finest private palace in the city, still owned by the House of Medinaceli and run by their foundation — which means real furniture, real family portraits and a lived-in quality that the state-run monuments nearby lack.

The story behind it. Building began in 1483 for Pedro Enríquez de Quiñones, Adelantado Mayor of Andalusia, and his wife Catalina de Ribera. Their son Fadrique Enríquez de Ribera, first Marquis of Tarifa, transformed it after a long journey to Jerusalem and Italy between 1518 and 1520. He came back with a taste for the Italian Renaissance and with an idea: the Via Crucis he established in Seville began at his front door and ran to a shrine outside the walls, at a distance said to match that from Pilate's praetorium to Calvary. That devotional conceit gave the palace its popular name. The building that resulted is the clearest surviving statement of a distinctly Sevillian synthesis — Mudéjar carpentry, Nasrid-derived plasterwork and tile, and Italian marble sculpture and proportion, executed side by side by Muslim, Christian and Genoese craftsmen for the same patron.

What you actually see today. The main patio is the set piece: an irregular square of arcades on marble columns, with a fountain of 1529 in the centre, four ancient statues in the corners — Athena among them — and twenty-four busts of Roman emperors and figures set into niches around the walls. Below them runs a skirting of azulejos from the Pulido workshops of Triana, dated to the 1530s and among the richest tile ensembles anywhere in Europe; above, a plasterwork frieze and coffered ceilings. From the patio you pass into the Salón del Pretorio with its artesonado ceiling, the small chapel of the Flagellation with Gothic vaulting, and out into two gardens where the family's collection of Roman sculpture, much of it dug from Italica, stands among orange trees, jasmine and a loggia. That collection is itself historically significant: the first Duke of Alcalá assembled one of the earliest antiquities cabinets in Spain here in the sixteenth century, buying and excavating classical marbles at a time when most of them were still being burned for lime, and the busts ringing the main patio came from that enthusiasm rather than from any ancient connection to the house. The grand staircase, roofed in 1537 with a golden half-orange dome of interlaced woodwork, leads to the upper floor, still the ducal apartments, visited by guided tour: paintings, tapestries, and a ceiling painted in 1603 by Francisco Pacheco, Velázquez's teacher and father-in-law, showing the apotheosis of Hercules.

On screen. Location scouts have used the palace repeatedly, because it offers Moorish and Renaissance interiors in one building with no modern intrusion. David Lean filmed here for Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, when Seville supplied the film's Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem interiors; Ridley Scott used it for 1492: Conquest of Paradise in 1992 and again for Kingdom of Heaven in 2005, where its courtyards and tiled halls stand in for Jerusalem; and at the end of 2009 Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz filmed sequences of Knight and Day in the patio and on the surrounding streets. The palace has become a fixed point of Seville's film map, alongside the Alcázar four hundred metres away and the Plaza de España across the river gardens. What makes it attractive to productions is also what makes it rewarding to visit out of season: the rooms are compact, the transitions between styles are abrupt, and a camera — or a visitor — can move from a Mudéjar tiled hall to an Italian garden in a dozen paces.

Getting there and timing. The nearest tram stop is Puerta de Jerez, about a kilometre away, and the metro's Prado de San Sebastián station is a similar distance; most visitors walk from the cathedral through the Santa Cruz lanes. Tickets cover either the ground floor and gardens or the full house including the guided upper floor, and unlike the Alcázar the palace rarely sells out — it is the most reliable way to see a great Sevillian interior on a busy weekend. It opens daily with a single continuous timetable, and there is free admission for European Union citizens on Monday afternoons. The ground floor and gardens are broadly level, though thresholds and old paving make progress bumpy, and the upper floor is reached only by the staircase.