Sicilian Branding Preservatives
May 14, 2007 - brandchannel.com
A look across the roundabout outside Francesco Padova’s office window is a good way to understand his motivation. Blocking a good hunk of his view of the sea is a hulking building that was supposed to become the courthouse and jail for his southern Sicily hometown of Ispica.
It’s a big, brutal concrete block. Construction began in the 1980s, stopped, restarted, then stopped for good, leaving a useless, modern eyesore. Wait around a bit, though, and a farmer in a little white car might drive in to sell you ricotta so fresh that it’s still warm. He’ll be followed by another farmer hawking the vegetables he picked that morning in the fields below town.
In Ispica, some of the most beautiful homes and buildings are literally crumbling while new function-over-form structures push out toward the edge of the cliff that surrounds much of the city and squirt north into farmlands.
It’s a funny dichotomy for a city renowned for its examples of baroque and liberty styles.
Now, a group of artisans and intellectuals is working to staunch the problems of Sicilian modernization and, curiously, remind its inhabitants how beautiful the motherland is.
“Italy has such a huge cultural history and the government has very little money to take care of it,” laments Padova, one of the co-founders of a group known as the Passionate Minds.
He and the rest of the group decided to take care of preserving parts of Sicilian art and architecture themselves.
Recruiting Smart Sicilians
Padova formed the Passionate Minds (its real name is the slightly stodgy-sounding Sicilian Heritage Fund) with artisan chocolatier Franco Ruta and the two recruited one of the island’s pre-eminent historic photographers, a professor of architecture and aestheticism in Milan, a food historian, and the island’s most famous chef. They range in age from late-20s to well into the golden years.
The group’s main goal is what Padova calls “preservation of cultural heritage,” which he breaks down into monument restoration, museum financing, and promotion of Sicily’s gastronomic past and future. In a larger sense, they’re also trying to put the idea of what Sicily is—the Sicilian brand, if you will—back on track.
“The future of our territory depends on how we care for our sites and our arts,” Padova says. “The bottom line is to make people more conscious of their identity without losing it on the way.”
This could sound like some serious smoke-blowing, but the weight of its all-star founders is already seeing an effect. Having existed only for a few months, the group is already both wooing and being wooed by corporations and large foundations that are interested in supporting their efforts.
At the very least, Padova, an unmarried 28-year old, has his heart in the right place; after ten years working in Milan for an advertising agency, he has moved back to Ispica, where young, single people with a full set of teeth are rare birds.
As they are elsewhere in Sicily, people in Ispica can seem at a loss at how to deal with technology. At one of Ispica’s cafés, where ten people constitute a crowd, each person could watch a different flat screen television. Yet outside the café tiny, old, three-wheeled Vespa “trucks” putter by at a frequency that makes you wonder if everybody in town owns one. They seem custom-made for a town like this, and it seems hard to imagine a more practical vehicle here.
“Almost every producer’s activity here has a huge history and is always linked to the story of Sicily,” says Padova, who also helps run the business end of his family’s olive oil and almond farms outside of Ispica. “The future of this land is not linked to [large-scale] industrial development.”
How are they penning the story? They’re mixing hard work and leveraging their star power: Padova and chocolatier Ruta are courting the corporate funding that they will use to start building restoration projects (including that of a church façade in Val di Noto), the photographer and the philosopher are collaborating on a book about the Val di Noto region, and the chef, Ciccio Sultano, who is a bit of a media darling in the culinary world, is promoting innovative Sicilian cuisine with a huge emphasis on local goods.
And they’re spreading the word. “Our olive oil products sold in the US and other countries bear a sticker on that says, ‘This purchase supports the preservation of Sicilian arts and sites [which are] part of the world heritage list,’ ” Padova says, noting that items from Ruta’s Dolceria Bonajuto will carry the same labels in the near future.
Developing the Sicilian Image
Based in Ragusa, Giuseppe Leone has been one of Sicily’s pre-eminent photographers for almost half a century, making him a sort of de facto cultural historian for both the island and the Passionate Minds.
Much of Leone’s work is shot in black and white, often contrasting youth, beauty, age, tradition and decay…all of which are a big part of Sicily’s biggest social issues.
“In 40 years, I’ve been able to photograph some of the key characters in Sicilian culture,” he says. “These people were the conscience of Sicily—and now they’re all gone.”
Thus his participation in the Passionate Minds.
“Even if I’m not a huge personality like them, I feel like I have to do something to try to further what they did.”
He’s not entirely optimistic.
“Lifestyles here are changing toward something that’s less human. People go into shopping centers just to buy things and not to spend genuine time together,” he says. “This distracts them from beauty.”
Beauty, according to Leone, is perhaps most at home here in Sicily than anywhere else in the Mediterranean.
“Everything in art and culture from other countries became Sicilian. The baroque [style] was born in Italy, but the most important baroque is in Sicily. When the Greeks used to come here, they called it ‘Big Greece.’ “
Just don’t get distracted by the big McDonald’s that greets you at the edge of town when you drive into Catania from the city’s airport.
“They aren’t the devil,” countered Leone, “but if they menace the existence of our culture, they won’t be any good for us.”
Good Branding Starts at Home
Passionate Minds member Marco Filoni, Ph.D., an aesthetics professor at Politecnico di Milano, doesn’t have much truck with corporations. Born on the Italian mainland, Filoni adopted and has kept Sicily as his spiritual home after dating one of its residents for ten years. For him, the responsibility of keeping Sicily on the rails lies with its inhabitants.
“There’s a risk that man is building something that’s out of harmony. People have been hurting the land for the last 30 years,” said Filoni, “but now they are becoming much more conscious of what’s happening.”
“We want to get people to know where they come from and the importance of what they see everyday,” concludes Passionate Minds founder Padova. “The more they are proud of this, the more they will understand that their future depends on their past.”
Joe Ray is a Paris-based food and wine writer. He can be reached via www.joe-ray.com.
