The Fegotto
The image of an active, productive and avant-garde Sicilian entrepreneurial class has often remained hidden behind another depiction, of Cat’s-eye memory, which crystallizes Sicily in its reluctance to change that is not cosmetic.
Il Fegotto tells a different story, in which contemporaries can read the vivacity and intelligence of men dedicated to innovation and progress.
Everything at Fegotto testifies to the ingenuity and industriousness of the families who succeeded each other in ownership of the fief, making it a rich and articulate production center, at the forefront of both production methods and product marketing.
Around the manor house there is an architectural complex including work rooms intended for the most varied uses, from the extraordinary millstone-cellar to the granary and the oil mill, from the stables to the courtyards and workshops. A system of factories that, as a whole, constituted a functional and self-sufficient farm.
Alongside the work environments, perfectly integrated into the Fegotto complex were the buildings dedicated to social and religious life: the buildings where the settlers lived, the school, the church, the post office. Demonstrating the strategic role that the Fegotto has played for decades in the not only economic, but also administrative and cultural fabric of the territory.
The Italian garden, which preserves botanical collections of great value, adds another piece to this story: the taste for beauty and the aspiration to refinement, the other side of the coin of an entrepreneurial class that over time evolved its lifestyles and its social positioning.
The interiors of the house, preserved and restored in a manner entirely faithful to the original, close the circle and reveal the ending of this story. Villa Fegotto was, and still is, a place to inhabit. Not only a memory of the past, not only a testimony to an unprecedented aspect of Sicily, but also, and above all, a home for generations of inhabitants and today of visitors, where the design of the rooms has perfectly reconciled aesthetics and functionality, finesse and sobriety.