Palazzo Butera was the Palermitan residence of the Branciforti family, Princes of Butera and one of the most influential and powerful houses of the Sicilian aristocracy. From 1721 onwards, the palace became their primary residence, undergoing massive expansions that defined its monumental character. My research stems from one of its halls, which houses ten paintings originally conceived as overdoor panels (sovrapporta) for a state room. These oil canvases, executed in the mid-18th century, are vedute depicting the family’s ten Sicilian feudal towns. The purpose of these images was not to show the Sicily regulated by the rhythms of wheat—from which the patrons drew their wealth—but rather to place guests at the center of a "mappamondo" (world map), upon which was projected a representation that preceded both their visit and the actual construction of some of those towns. The guests thus became protagonists of a project in progress: maps construct reality because they precede direct experience in the world; they are, therefore, instruments of control because they are performative (Performative Mapping, Cosgrove and de Lima Martins 1999). On the stretchers that support these views, numbers appear which seem to indicate the position of each canvas in the original sequence of the entrance doors. I chose to focus on the towns of Mazzarino (5), Butera (10), Grammichele (11), and Niscemi (5) because I first encountered their reproductions in the catalogue of the XVII Milan Triennale (Le città Immaginate – un viaggio in Italia – nove progetti per nove città, 1987), accompanied by a text by Professor Maria Giuffrè, who distinguishes the first two as "monument cities" and the latter two as "new towns" of foundation. I sought to understand the contemporary meaning of these painting-maps, which today hang suspended from the ceiling in the center of another of the palace's halls. The relationship between guests and paintings has been inverted: one can no longer spin the mappamondo with a finger, but must instead walk around it following a broken line. The totality of the ten images is no longer captured by spinning on one’s axis, but by tracing its circumference: an invitation to verify reality through one’s own direct experience. In this new symbolic configuration, the mappamondo has lost its weight and reveals—naked and perhaps fragile—its structure: the frames, the back of the canvas, and the enigmatic double numbering. Between the ancient centripetal interpretation, with man at the center, and the new peripatetic vision of the Branciforti world map, I felt the need to look slowly into the margins of those four towns, amidst existing traces and beyond what was represented. I recovered and reinterpreted the etymological idea of the map as a table napkin (mappa): a scrap of cloth brought from home, containing the traces of the world it came from, and intended to hold the remnants (the traces) of the food offered at the banquet. For this reason, I brought with me my 4x5 inch napkin-negatives and gathered what remained of the imaginary banquet with the palace's new princes: the margins of the mappamondo, the superfluous yet necessary images of a way of inhabiting what remains of the Branciforti world.