This village was designed on a drawing board and built from nothing at the end of the nineteen-thirties, complete with everything a village ought to have. Today fifty-one people live here, and mostly in summer. It is one of the rural villages sown in those years across the Sicilian countryside to fix the peasants of the great estates to the land, and it is among the best preserved.
What to see
The layout is the typical one of these foundations: a single square, with the public buildings around it, and the settlers' houses arranged to a regular plan. It did not grow by additions like real villages, it was delivered finished, with the streets already traced and the services already in place.
It stands on a low hill near the sea, along the main road that runs down the southern coast, some ten kilometres from Ribera. In Sicilian they still call it Santu Petru. In most cases these villages did not work: the peasants did not move there in sufficient numbers, and many stayed half empty or emptied out altogether.
Visiting
You get there from the main road, and you walk about freely: there is no ticket and no timetable, because it is a village, not a site. In winter you find it almost deserted. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Stop in the middle of the square and read the plan. From there you see at a glance everything somebody thought necessary to make a community exist: a building to pray in, one to administer from, one to study in, one to post a letter. It is a theory of what a village is, drawn by people who had never lived in one.