In the eighteenth century, the Tonnara del Corvo provided work for many people, but after almost a century of activity, it closed because it had become unprofitable. However, the sea continued to help the locals and the sailors worked for a long time, navigating to transport goods by boat from one port to another. The construction of the railway dealt another hard blow to the already fragile economy of the small town, but once again the sea was the resource, and thanks to the fishing of anchovies and sardines Castel di Tusa has survived the passage of time. On the beach that always welcomed only fishermen’s nets and a few holidaymakers, there was also an old abandoned structure. After a radical renovation, that building became a hotel, different from the others, unique in Sicily and perhaps even unique in the world, the Art Hotel Atelier sul Mare. Sardines and anchovies from the beautiful blue sea of Sicily then gave way to quality tourism, and made room for a new and thriving economy with great ethical value, of which Art, with a capital A, is the founding pillar. The creator of the ambitious project was Antonio Presti, a modern Sicilian patron and also an artist. However, the choice of location was not random because in Castel di Tusa there was the cement factory and the family business. After the death of his father, young Antonio, 29 years old and an engineering graduate student, decided that his future was not in road construction but in art, thus making a life choice understood almost as an existential mission. “I did not want to dedicate my life to money. I discovered art and the possibilities it could offer me. So I took that money [my father’s inheritance, editor’s note] and put it at the service of an ideal.”
The story begins about twenty years ago. Just a few kilometers from his hometown, in memory of his father, Antonio Presti founded the Fiumara d’Arte sculpture park which today is one of the most visited places in Sicily. The artistic project unfolds along the bed of the Tusa stream, now dried up, which descends from the forests of the Madonie and the Nebrodi mountains to the sea. Between 1984 and 1990, important Italian artists such as Tano Festa, Pietro Consagra, Antonio di Palma, Italo Lanfredini, created on commission by Presti huge contemporary art works that transformed the ancient riverbed into a large open-air museum. Although being a large landowner, Presti decided to install the works on state-owned land because he wanted to donate to the State, and thus to the people, the newly born cultural deposit. But Sicilian bureaucracy blindly followed its course, also triggering the indignation of the international art world. Presti was accused of illegal building, underwent 8 trials, and was sentenced to 15 days in prison and the demolition of the illegal works. Finally, in 1990 the Court of Cassation acquitted him of all responsibility, and since 1991 Fiumara d’Arte has been part of the artistic and cultural heritage of the State.
Despite the judicial troubles, his enthusiasm for art did not stop. In Catania, on the southern coast of the island, Antonio Presti opens his eighteenth-century home to young artists with the will to return space to creativity and the intention to free the authors from the economic constraints that increasingly govern artistic production. In short, a project conceived for the pure pleasure of creating art. The “Casa Stesicorea“, named after the Piazza Stesicoro it faces, thus becomes a real forge of artistic projects, every year its spaces are redesigned and opened to the public for a large international art festival.
The success of the Catania initiative mirrors that of Castel di Tusa where the eccentric patron realized in the ’90s the Atelier sul Mare hotel. The idea is simple and at the same time revolutionary: to appreciate art it is not enough to look at it; you have to live inside it. “It is no wonder“, Presti asserts, “that so many people neglect contemporary art, when even those who visit exhibitions spend only a few seconds in front of each painting, sculpture or installation“. An eclectic and constantly evolving project, which with plays of perspectives and colors and thanks to a skillful use of ancient materials and modern technologies manages to create atmospheres of intimate reflection or absolute exaltation of the senses. Creativity transforms an anonymous hotel room into a place where “you sleep in a poem and wake up in a work of art“, where the guest completes the work itself becoming almost an integral part of it. The hotel building is three stories, white, Mediterranean style, with an enormous golden Nike outside that seems to support the whole side of the building. The walls of the hall are covered with national and international newspapers that published the judicial events of Fiumara d’Arte and the reception desk is a large slab resting on two stones carved by Bobo Otera. Above stands the phrase “Devotion to Beauty”, Antonio Presti’s battle cry but also the recall of a major cultural event organized by Presti himself in Catania in 1999, during which a monumental 15-meter candle made by sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro together with 15 students of the Academy of Fine Arts was lit in honor of Saint Agatha, patroness of the city. The hotel’s restaurant overlooks the sea and is a real contemporary art gallery, with works from the private collection of the patron of Tusa.
There are a total of 40 rooms, half of which, although defined as standard, are furnished with sculptures, paintings, ceramics and other works of contemporary art.
And then there are the 20 “art” rooms, each different from the others, created by renowned Italian and foreign artists: Danielle Mitterand, Raoul Ruiz, Mauro Staccioli, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Piero Dorazio, Graziano Marini, Agnese Purgatorio, Ute Pyka, Maurizio Mochetti and Adele Cambria, Cristina Bertelli, Mario Ceroli, Sislej Xhafa, Renato Curcio, Fabrizio Plessi, Paolo Icaro, Maria Lai, Luigi Mainolfi, Michele Canzoneri, Annalisa Furnari, Vincenzo Consolo, Dario Bellezza, Umberto Leone and Antonio Presti himself.
Each room has an evocative name that recalls the theme addressed: The Mouth of Truth, The Room of the Denied Sea, Trinacria, Dreams among Signs, I embark on a Paper Boat, Sigismund’s Tower, The Nest, The Room of Earth and Fire, Shadow Line, The Room of the Necessary Rite, Mystery for the Moon, Hammam, The Room Without No, Energy, The Room of Water Bearers, The Prophet’s Room, The Painting Room.
In the making of the rooms there was no intervention by the client and all the artists transferred their emotions into the work using different styles ranging from Japanese minimalism to archaic Arab-Mediterranean forms. Some were inspired by the drama La vida es sueño by Calderon de la Barca, others questioned the evolution of writing, some wanted to pay homage to Sicily and others, instead, preferred to remember the poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Therefore, to live in symbiosis with the artistic creation, every guest is given the possibility to choose where to stay according to their mood at the moment and, of course, subject to availability.
Speaking about his room Mystery for the Moon, Hidetoshi Nagasawa said “I imagine the hypothetical visitor who enters the Atelier, goes to the reception, goes up to his room with the key and locks himself inside. From that moment on, that space becomes “his” space, a living museum to enjoy. Not a hotel with artworks on display, but a place where people can live in the museum, a human-scale museum, with all works human-sized. Whoever wants for an hour, two days, a week, can live in the work: in my opinion this is a unique situation“.
Art for Art’s sake, then, is the guiding line that Antonio Presti has followed for some years to curb, at least in his own small way, the unstoppable spread of the “art-business” binomial, but also so that “devotion to beauty” spreads simply among ordinary people.
Does it work? In Castel di Tusa it certainly seems so.
