Favara

Favara is an Arabic word: fawwāra, the spring that gushes up bubbling, the jet of water. And it is not only the name that is Arabic here: the heart of the old town is a cluster of seven small courtyards with little palaces of Arab derivation, and it is exactly there that since 2010 a local notary, Andrea Bartoli, and his wife Florinda Saieva have set the Farm Cultural Park, an art gallery and residence for artists that has made Favara a European case — an open-air gallery born where abandonment was feared. The thirteenth-century castle, begun as a hunting residence and passed in the fourteenth to the Chiaramonte, keeps watch over the square.

But to grasp what that rebirth means you have to know where this town comes from. In the seventeen hundreds the first industries appeared, sulphur and tanneries; in the eighteen hundreds the sulphur mines — some twenty of them — were Favara's real wealth, and in ten years the population went from seven thousand to twenty thousand. Then American sulphur, extracted by another method and sold for much less, made the Sicilian mines uneconomic, and for about thirty years they have all been closed. The bill can be read in the mines' names: at the Falsirotta, in 1869, fourteen workers died when a gallery collapsed; at the Salamone, in 1979, six men died of sulphur dioxide asphyxiation. At Easter the town turns sweet with its lamb of almond paste and pistachio, the pride of its pastry shops; and the Valley of the Temples is a quarter of an hour away.