From the ostentatious baroque square of Quattro Canti all the way up to the Teatro Massimo, Palermo’s Via Maqueda is thick with tourists. Pomegranate juice sellers are setting up pyramids of fruit on their carts at gaps in the crowd and waiters are trying to reel in passersby with happy hour prices for Aperol spritzes. Amid the noise and movement, it’s easy to walk straight past number 206, whose arched doorway features a stone cross stained black with dirt – a clue to the building’s former use.
Convento dei Crociferi was abandoned for 30 years, until Sicilian power couple Andrea Bartoli and Florinda Saievi took over and transformed it into Palermo’s newest arts space, the Museum of World Cities, due to open at the end of February. Inside, a cloister with high, scalloped porticoes frames a verdant courtyard filled with palms and banana trees. Bartoli comes to meet me and enthusiastically pumps my hand before leading me up to the grand, marble-floored rooms on the first floor, which have been given over to a rather self-referential exhibition on urban change.
“Cities change because people make them change,” Bartoli tells me. This is the ethos behind their organisation Farm Cultural Park, which has rehabilitated four different urban sites across western Sicily, starting with the city of Favara in 2010. The former sulphur mining town suffered rapid depopulation when its mines closed after the second world war, and many buildings across the historical centre were abandoned by owners who emigrated abroad.
Bartoli and Saievi decided to transform a warren of empty, crumbling palazzos into a colourful casbah of art studios, exhibition spaces and hipster cafes. It had the effect of reviving the town, making it a destination for holidaymakers. One oft-repeated statistic is that before Bartoli and Saievi came along, there was only one six-room hotel in Favara – now the town has 600 tourist beds.
“What happened in Favara was a miracle. But you can’t just put art in a place and hope it solves all of the problems,” says Bartoli pragmatically. “Contemporary art can’t change Sicily. It can’t improve the healthcare system or education.” But it can be used as a tool to draw in visitors, generate employment and, potentially, lure back residents. Farm Cultural Park, along with other art foundations, gallery owners and artists, has seized on a moment of opportunity. Sicily’s depopulation crisis is occurring in tandem with a resurgence in the island’s cultural scene, and vacant churches, prisons and convents are being snapped up.
Close to Palermo harbour, another arts organisation, Fondazione RIV, has transformed the cavernous, dark interior of the deconsecrated San Mamiliano church into a contemporary art exhibition, plunging the church’s ornate frescoes and tapestries into darkness to better spotlight the artworks on display. Nearby, in the heart of the Vucciria district, Cristina Giarnecchia and Adriano La Licata have turned an unused storage space and former warehouse into All, a studio, exhibition venue and incubator for contemporary artists and curators.
The same creative energy can be found outside Palermo. Gibellina, the next stop on my contemporary art tour of western Sicily, has been an art hotspot for decades, but is only now getting wider recognition. Art is present even as you enter the town – in fact, you drive right through it. An enormous star, Stella d’ingresso al Belice by Pietro Consagra, built out of stainless steel, straddles the dual carriageway.
Gibellina was built from scratch after the original town was razed by an earthquake in 1968, and the then-mayor, Ludovico Corrao, invited artists and architects to reimagine the city, weaving art into the town’s fabric. His audacious post-disaster reconstruction plan turned Gibellina into a carousel of experimental postmodern buildings, sculptures and mosaics.
“The founding principle of Gibellina is that artists would live here and work with the community to create works of art they would then leave behind,” explains Ludovico Corrao’s daughter, Antonella Corrao, who runs local arts organisation Fondazione Orestiadi alongside her sister. “Gibellina has never been a place where art is commodified.”
In recognition of its heritage, the national government has just designated Gibellina the country’s first Italian Capital of Contemporary Art, hoping it will breathe life back into a town that has mostly dropped off the tourist map.
wings by architect Alessandro Mendini. Photograph: Abaca Press/Alamy
An old civic centre designed by Nanda Vigo has been emptied of debris after decades of disuse and repurposed for residencies for visiting artists, dance troupes and performers. Graffiti has been scrubbed from Francesco Venezia’s roofless, postmodern spiral Giardino Segreto I-II. Torre Civica, a concrete tower with colourful wings designed by architect Alessandro Mendini, was originally fitted with speakers that played regional folk songs several times a day. In 2026, the tower will once again play music.
When I asked Antonella whether the Capital of Contemporary Art designation was the culmination of her father’s vision for Gibellina, she was moved to tears, describing it not as an end point, but a new beginning for the town: “This is how a dream becomes reality – with art truly becoming an economic driver for the region.”
I was reluctant to move on from Gibellina, as even after several days of wandering I still hadn’t seen every artwork or postmodern building in the town, but I wanted to go further south, to check out where this drive for urban revitalisation had begun.
My partner and I stayed at Sciabica Suite in Favara in the heart of Farm Cultural Park, a pocket of quiet luxury inside the riddle of the casbah. We were there on a blustery, rainy night in late November, so couldn’t take advantage of our beautiful suite’s roof terrace and hot tub, but were perfectly placed to explore the exhibitions just outside our front door. Favara is a good place to base yourself – from there, you can hop over to Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples or visit one of Farm Cultural Park’s newest additions, the former San Vito prison.
It was a monastery before it was a prison, and its different uses are layered through the building like geological strata: pinched, austere monks’ quarters with thick stone walls made ideal solitary cells, and now one-room art installations. Many local mafiosi served time in this prison until it closed in 1996, and the cells are like time capsules: walls are still decorated with football scores, pages from pornography magazines, and a poster of Robbie Williams sporting impressive sideburns.
I explored the exhibitions with Lorena Caruana, a local architect who works with Farm Cultural Park, and we walked around the prison’s perimeter as the sun set, watching murmurations of swallows ribbon through the sky. “There’s so much collective memory associated with this place,” she explained. “We don’t want to paint over it. The idea is not to transform the space entirely.”
It is a noble goal: art helping to revitalise Sicily’s ghost towns and deserted urban spaces without replacing or stifling the history of the place; the present sitting happily alongside the past.
Accommodation was provided by B&B Carella in Palermo (doubles from €80) and Sciabica Suite in Favara (suite from €110)
