(Text by Cristina and Sabrina Ricciardo)
(Photos by Francesco Minciullo)
(Translation by Monica Lanza)

There is a place, up on a hill in Capo d'Orlando, wrapped in a timeless and fantastic dimension. A place where the memories of the past still survive in the objects and the environments belonged to those who lived there, in the beauty and the fragrance of flowers. It is impossible to talk of Villa Piccolo, the old summer residence of the Barons Piccolo di Calanovella, today museum and seat of the homonymous foundation, without telling about the genius, the originality and the charm of its owners, who, from the beginning of the thirties, left the aristocratic world of Palerme, and moved definitively to their country house in Capo d'Orlando. A decision mostly due to financial troubles, but that, in the time, became a real choice of life. The existence of the Piccolos (two brothers.: Lucio and Casimiro, their sister Agata Giovanna, and the mother Teresa Tasca di Cutò), gained the quiet and slow rhythms of a lonely and rural environment, allowing them to develop their attitudes and interests.

Lucio Piccolo is today indicated to be one of the most representative poets of the twentieth century. Polyglot, genial, he dedicated his life to the study of the Italian and foreign literature. His poetry, aimed at "re-evoking and fixing a singular Sicilian world", is above all the memory of the past designated to disappear, a past that the poet wanted to keep immortal through the art. The description of a luxuriant, enchanting, mysterious and sometimes a metaphysic nature (that is the one typically Mediterranean of the wonderful garden of Villa Piccolo) is one of the leitmotivs in the poetic art of Lucio.

Casimiro Piccolo was an expert in metaphysics and a good painter and photographer. Nature and common people, taken in the spontaneity of daily life, were his favourite photo subjects. At nigthtime he was used to wonder in the garden of the house looking for celestial "creatures", men and animals, and he tried also to photograph them. His famous thirty four water-colours, representing a fairy-tale world full of elves, gnomes, fairies, witches, state his singular vision of life, where reality, fantasy and magic are perfectly melted together.

 

Agata Giovanna Piccolo dedicated her life to the study of Botany, reaching excellent results; she contributed to enrich the Mediterranean flora in the garden, which became in the time a natural park, with a great variety of wonderful exemplars, among them the " Puya Berteroniana" , a rare plant that originally came from Brazil, cultivated for the first time in Europe and up to now existing only here, in Villa Piccolo. Wisterias, roses, jasmines, hydrangeas, iris, waterlilies, still living in the garden, are the touchable results of the ability of Agata Giovanna in floriculture field, a triumph of fragrance and colours that in springtime reaches the top of its splendour.

 

It is well-known the passion the Barons had for their dogs, they personally tested the food that was served to them, and there are many photos portraying the Piccolos together with their animals. Their love is also attested by a little cemetery, built under a secular pine tree inside the park. It is reachable walking through a magnificent series of pergolas covered by wisterias. In the cemetery (the only one in Italy and one of the few existing in Europe) there are about thirty dogs and some cats and every one has got a tomb stone with a name.

 



The "Famiglia Piccolo di Calanovella" foundation was instituted for testamentary will of Casimiro and Agata Giovanna and it was recognised as corporate body in 1972. This institution aims at "increasing the cultural activities in literature, art, and botanic fields.
From 1972 up to now many shows, congresses as well as cultural and artistic events have taken place in this suggestive scenario.

Villa Piccolo, turned in a museum in 1978, contains a great variety of precious art objects belonged to the family.: pieces of furniture, ceramics from Deruta and Faenza, china-ware of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, printings, paintings. One of the most peculiar objects is unquestionably a wrought-iron coffer of the fifteenth century with its amazing system of combination locks. Remarkable and interesting are also the standing exhibition of Casimiro's photos and paintings, and Agata Giovanna's botanic collection.
The library, where there are more than 10000 volumes written in various languages, contains books concerning literature, art and poetry, XIX century fairytales, Latin and Greek classic works, botanic reviews, exoteric books and treaties of magic.
Inside the museum it is also possible to visit the room that lodged Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Piccolo's cousin and the writer of one of the most important novel in contemporary Italian literature
: "Il Gattopardo". Some pages of the novel have indeed been written in Villa Piccolo and many of the autograph letters of the writer are still kept there.