If there is a common thread among the various activities carried out by the Planeta family, it is certainly memory, recollection: in the processing of agricultural products, in the development of rural or productive areas, in cultural projects – almost a tale, which develops and is enhanced generation after generation.
For this reason, after Vito Planeta’s sorrowful passing in 2023, we decided to dedicate him a special place in the heart of Ulmo, in Sambuca di Sicilia: a small studio that, recalling his many interests, through the books he collected over a lifetime and that are housed here, becomes symbol and memory.
Studiolo
In memory of Vito Planeta
Vito was the animator of an intense program of contemporary art, theatre, literature: for years, his passions happily intertwined with the soul of our places. He conceived and implemented projects that were explorations of other worlds, exchanges of experiences, stories, ideas. He acknowledged and exalted talents within micro-journeys across an unconventional Sicily, perhaps imagined, certainly transformed also by Planeta’s work. The end result was a sort of large family, an extended community of artists who were also very different in terms of age, training and background – each with his or her own ‘superpower’ – who had found in him an attentive and curious counterpart, a tireless pursuer of innovation, and at the same time a reference point.
Ulysses, as you see it here, was born out of a desire to remember Vito through his exaggerated passion for books and reading, characterized by some magnificent obsessions – Joyce in the lead, and hence Ulysses – and an extraordinary voracity and mnemonic capacity. Giving new life to this evocative building on the shores of Lake Arancio, on the slopes of the La Segreta forest, creating a cultural space in the middle of the vineyards, in constant dialogue with the landscape, seemed to us the best way both to bear witness to his life and work and to make him known to those who had never met him.
The set-up is the result of an adaptation of an installation by Ignazio Mortellaro, Corpo fragile (2023), focusing on the theme of desertification, transformed by the artist himself into a hybrid work, between art and design, a container for books and a convivial table for tasting a good wine, a place for reading, meditation and conversation. Ignazio Mortellaro and art historian Valentina Bruschi have been inseparable travelling companions for Vito: this installation was born thanks to them and the work of Vito Junior.
The space will always be accessible: anyone will be able to enter and read a book inside or walk among the vines. It will be a living space of dialogue, meetings and projects. So that in Vito’s name we can continue to do what he enjoyed most: to read, to converse, to generate movement – of ideas, of people, of things. Travelling, in short, if only with the mind.
Close to Ulysses, in order to create an ideal link with the world of the vine, is the open-air museum Iter vitis, where the journey of wine (and here comes Ulysses again) is narrated through a series of educational tables.
Around it, two viticultural sites charged with symbolic value for Planeta: the historic vineyard where Didacus Chardonnay is produced and the field collection of Sicilian and Georgian grape varieties, to complete the journey of knowledge and defence of memory.
