Why western Sicily is Italy’s emerging arts hub

Palermo’s Via Maqueda thrums with tourists, but number 206 — the arched doorway marked by a blackened stone cross — guards a quieter reinvention. Convento dei Crociferi, abandoned for 30 years, has been taken on by Andrea Bartoli and Florinda Saievi and will reopen as the Museum of World Cities at the end of February.

Inside, a cloister with scalloped porticoes frames a courtyard of palms and banana trees, and marble-floored rooms house an exhibition about urban change; as Bartoli puts it, “Cities change because people make them change.” The museum is one strand of Farm Cultural Park’s work across western Sicily.

The organisation began in Favara in 2010, when the couple turned a warren of crumbling palazzos into studios, galleries and cafés and helped revive a town hollowed out by the closure of its sulphur mines. The impact has been clear: before Bartoli and Saievi came along there was one six-room hotel in Favara; now the town offers 600 tourist beds.

Italy, western Sicily

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