Canicattì

Canicattì is the capital of the Italia grape: the tableland of vineyards around it produces the table grapes that leave from here for the markets of Europe, and at the end of summer the town lives on the harvest. Before the grapes there were almond trees. The town proper is born of a permission: in the fifteenth century the lord of the fief obtained from the king of Aragon the licentia populandi, that is the faculty to widen its boundaries, bring in people and administer justice. Then came the Bonanno — barons, then dukes, at last princes of the Cattolica — who built palaces and fountains here and held it until the eighteen hundreds. Of the rock the Arabs made a stronghold, the Normans a castle and the feudal lords a palace, ruins remain in largo Castello; the armoury that was kept inside, famous throughout Sicily, is now at Capodimonte, in Naples.

But the most improbable thing about Canicattì is the Accademia del Parnaso, founded in 1922: a company that mocked power in verse, and whose founders were an innkeeper who declaimed his poems inside his own inn, a Fascist, a philosopher, a socialist pharmacist, an eccentric and much-travelled baron, a lawyer who during a trial asked for a psychiatric assessment of his client for having chosen him as counsel, a poet, a tailor and a grain merchant. Its members included Pirandello, Marta Abba, Marinetti and Sciascia, and Adriano Tilgher called it the most audacious satirical academy in Italy. Here in 1952 was born Rosario Livatino, the «boy judge» killed by the mafia in 1990 and beatified in 2021: he rests in the church of Santa Chiara, and the house he grew up in, in viale Regina Margherita, is a museum today. The clock tower and the Teatro Sociale mark the centre, among eighteenth-century churches and the palaces of the families of grain and wine.