> Enchanted Castle Sciacca
Enchanted Castle
Il Castello Incantato - 92019 Sciacca

 

 

The Enchanted Castle is located in the western part of Sciacca. It's a garden with an infinity of mysterious faces carved into the rock and in the trunks of Saracen olive, made with the unusual creativity of Filippo Bentivegna. A person who, for over 50 years, hadn't done anything but sculpt and carve heads, creating more than three thousand faces, some perhaps resembling famous historical figures, others with wide-eyed expressions, with indescribable, uneasy smiles and others with double faces.

Perhaps he was an individual with a compromised mind, but he showed great skill in manual activity aimed at the creation of his sculptures showing a remarkable idealistic and expressive ability, certainly very eccentric and to some extent perhaps even delusional.

"His Excellency Filip of the heads" as he was known by his fellow countrymen was born in Sciacca in 1888 and emigrated at fifteen to the United States in search of fortune. When he arrived in the United States, he worked together with his brothers in the construction of a railway line, and charmed by a young American girl, was involved in a furious fight with a rival man of color, who in the middle of the scuffle, violently punched his head. The fatal consequences caused by the blow affected his sanity, altering his character, but greatly contributing to the awakening of a creative instinct in his unconscious that shortly thereafter would manifest in his art form a naifs style. He decided to return to Sciacca and with the money earned in America was able to buy a small plot of land just outside the town, and he started a frenetic excavation to recover the stone required for the creation of his faces. The garden became
his world, his life, his home. He lived quietly on his farm away from any relationship with society. He was the self-proclaimed "Lord of Caves", so called for the many tunnels he dug, and the rare times that he wandered through the streets of Sciacca with a small cane like a scepter, the symbol of his majesty. Filippo Bentivegna died in 1967 at age 78, leaving an extravagant sculpture gallery of unique, and certainly not easy to interpret, art. Today, in addition to the "garden with its rock creations", there is the satisfaction of knowing that this bizarre character in the history of Sciacca, in the past years has been involved in numerous articles in regional newspapers, and even Swedish television, interested in his works, which had a special interview. Currently, some of the sculptures of this whimsical saccense artist are exhibited at the Musée de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, the only museum dedicated to the naifs art and those forms of unusual, eccentric art, close to the edge of pathological creativity.


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Name: Enchanted Castle