Palazzo Donn'Anna sits at the water's edge on the Posillipo coast of Naples, just west of the Mergellina boat harbor. The original building, called La Villa Sirena, was probably built in the early fifteenth century by Dragonetto Bonifacio, on the site of the Rocks of the Siren. Anna Carafa, Duchess of Stigliano and wife of the Spanish Viceroy Ramiro Núñez de Guzmán, inherited it in 1630 and gave it her name.
Cosimo Fanzago redid it in the Baroque style in the 1640s, a grand building projecting directly into the sea. Her husband returned to Spain alone in 1644, and the unfinished palace was neglected.
By the early 1800s it was badly dilapidated, but it attracted artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A French family bought it in the early 1900s. Over time it was divided into smaller units, and part of it is still a ruin.
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