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 severe 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 survived the passage of time. On the beach that always only welcomed fishermen’s nets and few holidaymakers, there was also an old abandoned structure. After a radical renovation work, that building became a hotel, different from the others, unique in Sicily and perhaps unique in the world, the Art Hotel Atelier sul Mare. Sardines and anchovies of the beautiful blue sea of Sicily then gave way to quality tourism, and made room for a new and flourishing economy with great ethical value, whose founding pillar is Art, the one written with a capital A. The creator of the ambitious project was Antonio Presti, a modern Sicilian patron and also an artist. The choice of the location, however, was not accidental because in Castel di Tusa there was the cement factory and the family business. After the death of his father, the young Antonio, 29 years old and about to graduate in engineering, decided that his future was not in road construction but in art, thus making a life choice almost seen 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 [the inheritance from my father, ed.] and put it at the service of an ideal.”
The story began 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 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 enormous works of contemporary art 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 lands because he wanted to donate the newly born cultural deposit to the State, and therefore to the people. But Sicilian bureaucracy blindly followed its course, also arousing the indignation of the international artistic world. Presti was accused of illegal building, went through 8 trials and was sentenced to 15 days in prison and to 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 State’s artistic and cultural heritage.
Despite the judicial misadventures, his enthusiasm for art did not stop. In Catania, on the southern coast of the island, Antonio Presti opened his eighteenth-century house to young artists with the will to give back space to creativity and the intention to free creators from the economic constraints that increasingly regulate artistic production. In short, a project conceived for the pure pleasure of creating art. The “Casa Stesicorea“, named after the Piazza Stesicoro it overlooks, thus became a true forge of artistic projects, every year its spaces are redesigned and opened to the public for a major international art festival.
The success of the Catania initiative mirrors that of Castel di Tusa where the eccentric patron created in the ’90s the hotel Atelier sul Mare. The idea is simple and at the same time revolutionary: to appreciate art it is not enough to look at it but one must live inside it. “It is not surprising,” Presti argues, “that so many people neglect contemporary art, when even those who visit exhibitions spend just a few seconds in front of each painting, sculpture or installation“. An eclectic and constantly evolving project, which with plays on perspective 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 high, white, in Mediterranean style, with a huge golden Nike outside that seems to support the entire 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-high candle was lit made by sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro along with 15 students of the Academy of Fine Arts, in honor of Sant’Agata, the city’s patron saint. The hotel’s restaurant overlooks the sea and is a true 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 classified as standard, are furnished with sculptures, paintings, ceramics and other works of contemporary art.
And then there are the 20 “art” rooms, all different from each other, made by famous 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 a suggestive name that evokes the theme dealt with: La Bocca della Verità, The Room of the Denied Sea, Trinacria, Dreams among Signs, On Paper Boat I Embark, The Tower of Sigismondo, 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 the Water Bearers, The Room of the Prophet, The Room of Painting.
No intervention from the commissioner was made in the creation of the rooms, and all the artists transferred their emotions into the work using very 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 and 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, each guest is given the possibility to choose where to stay according to their mood at the moment and, naturally, within availability limits.
Talking about his room Mistero per la Luna Hidetoshi Nagasawa said “I imagine the hypothetical visitor who enters the Atelier, goes to the reception, goes upstairs with the key and locks himself in. From that moment on, that space becomes “their” space, a living museum to be enjoyed. Not a hotel with works of art on display, but a place where people can live in the museum, a human-sized museum, with all the works at human scale. Whoever wants for an hour, two days, one week, can live in the work: in my opinion this is a unique situation“.
Art for Art’s sake, therefore, is the guiding principle that Antonio Presti has been following for some years to contain, at least a little, the unstoppable spread of the “art-business” binomial, but also so that the “devotion to beauty” spreads simply among ordinary people.
Does it work? In Castel di Tusa, it surely seems so.
