Partinico

In the Itinerarium Antonini, the list of the empire's roads, there appears a station called Parthenicum: it stood on the coastal route between Panormus and Lilybaeum, that is between Palermo and Marsala, passing through Hyccara — today's Carini — and the Aquae Segestanae. Local tradition places it here, and Roman remains have come to light in the plain. Partinico became a comune late, though, and quickly: on the nineteenth of April 1800 a royal decree recognised it as autonomous, and six days later gave it the title of city. In the same period Ferdinand of Bourbon bought land and a lodge here from the marquis della Gran Montagna and made of it the Real Podere di Partinico; for the wine he had the Real Cantina Borbonica built, the work of the royal architect Carlo Chenché with the collaboration of a local man, Giuseppe Patti. It is still there, and it is monumental.

But Partinico is bound above all to one of the highest pages of civic Italy. Danilo Dolci arrived at nearby Trappeto in 1952 and in the following years built up here his campaigns against poverty, unemployment and exclusion: the fasts, the «reverse strikes» — unemployed men who set to work for nothing on an abandoned road to claim the right to work — and the campaign for the dam on the river Jato, which in the end was built. In 1955 he published «Banditi a Partinico», the book that told Italy what life was like in these parts. The study centre keeps his memory, and the city's secondary schools bear the names of Danilo Dolci, of Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa and of Felicia and Peppino Impastato. Between the citrus plain and the gulf of Castellammare, Partinico is a gateway to western Sicily: half an hour from Palermo, ten minutes from the coves of Balestrate.