In Agrigento, Sicily, lies a weird and wonderful kingdom of thousands of stone heads but was it simply madness or a divinely inspired urge that fuelled their creation? Curiosity Cat investigates…
Not far from Sciacca in the Agrigento region of Sicily lies a mysterious and magical place known as the Enchanted Castle, but it’s not a castle that you’ll find beyond the gate. Instead, prepare to enter a surreal world populated by a plethora of stone heads. This world is the product of the wild imagination of eccentric local artist, Filippo Bentivegna, and 35 years of unceasing labour, a labour of love.
Bentivegna emigrated to the States in the 1900s in search of work and learned how to carve stone whilst building American skyscrapers. He fell in love with a girl over there but, after receiving a nasty head injury from a jealous rival, he was forced to return home to Sciacca. No sooner was he back in his home town again than he was seized as a deserter and threatened with imprisonment for evading military service. At this point, the awful head injury that had caused his unwanted repatriation, not to mention a stroke, amnesia and possibly even ‘la follia’ (madness) may, weirdly, have proved to be his saving grace.
Following a medical assessment, Filippo was judged to be ‘mentally impaired’, a verdict that allowed him to escape the impending 3-year sentence and, using money he had made in America, he bought a plot of land where he could realise a very personal and unusual dream hidden away from prying eyes. But was it madness or an obsessive creative urge that fuelled him as he set about carving his fantasy kingdom out of the local limestone?
He was certainly prolific in his output. One after another, he kept on producing hundreds of strange stone heads, each with a different face, to people his secret domain. So relentless was his desire to create that when the stone ran out he even started digging tunnels in the land to excavate more. Some have argued that the work allowed him to exorcise the demons of his lost life in the US, each carving relating to a different memory but perhaps he was simply a dedicated artisan perfecting his craft energised by the very act of creation itself.
Each head has its own distinctive features and some have been identified as important figures from Italian history, among them Mussolini, Pirandello, Dante, Mazzini and even Garibaldi, who apart from having a biscuit named after him also spearheaded the campaign to reunify Italy! We’ll probably never really know what it was that compelled Filippo, but I do know that such unremitting focus on a single goal is pretty inspirational.
Also pretty inspiring is the fact that Bentivegna never received any formal art training and refused to sell any of his works, declaring adamantly whenever he was asked “My heads are not sold!” The reclusive sculptor was suspicious of strangers and rarely accepted visitors but there was one notable exception – a Swedish painter named Lilieström, who was living in Sciacca in the 1950s. Keen to meet with the ‘mad sculptor’ that had gained some notoriety in the town by that time, Lilieström requested an audience.
Filippo, who was known to talk to his stone ‘subjects’ and expected neighbours to address him as ‘Excellency’, resisted initially but finally admitted Lilieström to his little kingdom and even gave him the title of ‘Court Dignitary’. In return, Lilieström recognized the value in Filippo’s art and set up an exhibition of his works. The exhibition, however, was not a success and Filippo carried right on sculpting his heads just as before purely for the joy of making them.
When once asked by a baffled journalist why he continued to carve in stone when there was no economic benefit, he responded with an air of mystery; he was ‘looking for the Great Mother’, he said, and confided his belief that ‘inside the earth is the seed of man’. In a story that sadly echoes those of so many artists, what seemed like madness to most and an object of mockery and derision, later came to be viewed as something really quite profoundly special. The tale of the unsung artist inspired Virginiana Miller’s musical homage, so Bentivegna is now immortalised in song as well as in the stones he brought to life…
On his death, he left a legacy of about 20,000 sculpted heads, but unfortunately they were left to decay for nearly 50 years before someone realised their hidden genius and now only around 3000 remain. 14 of them are exhibited at the Art Brut Museum in Lausane but you can marvel at the rest, in their true home, as they appear all over this unusual museum garden. Alternatively, take a stroll along one of the narrow walkways and feel the eyes of hundreds of stony faces fall on you as you walk by!
