Mar 09 2010
The enchanted castle
THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
In the west part of Sicily, at the slopes of Monte Kronio, not far from Sciacca, there is “The Enchanted Castle”: it is a wonderful place invented by the creativity of man and nature where, besides olives and almond trees, you can find heads engraved in stone by a artist countryman called “Philip of the heads” (Filuppu di li testi). His life was unusual and strange; he was born in Sciacca on the 3rd May 1888, in a big family with economic difficulties. So Filippo had to work hard because as a child he couldn’t go to school.
At the age of twenty, in 1908, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Navy till 1912, When he came back to Sciacca, he couldn’t find any work so ventured to America; there, life was too hard for him because of his non-conformist and too different ideas. In America he was ill at case with those racist people and he was immediately marginalized.
During this period he fell in love with an American girl and in consequence of this, he was violently knocked over by his love rival. He was very shocked by this episode and his nature deeply changed.
Obliged to repatriate, he established himself in Sciacca and with the money he had earned in America, he bought a little farm where he spent all the rest of his life painting and chiseling trees and stones. His sculptures are different from each other and they represent known and unknown characters to which he gave an invented name and that in his fantasy represented the subjects of the reign he had created and of which he was the “King”. He loved to be called “His Excellency”.
In the middle of the farm there is a little house where Filippo Bentivegna lived, whose walls are decorated with paintings representing skyscrapers remembering his stay in America, and a big fish containing a little fish in his center which perhaps represents the ship that look him to New York. He was particularly bound to one of his work composed by a few heads ending with a sort of phallus that he named “Key of enchantment”. Because of the slow decline of his vitality and of his bad health, he was forced to move into another house in the center of Sciacca. But he periodically went to his farm of which he look care till his death. He died in 1967 at the age of 78. Some sculpture of Filippo Bentivegna are exhibited in the “Art Brut Museum” of Lausanne.
Via Bentivegna a Sciacca
