This is the story of an ancient noble family, of a nonconformist prince, of his anarchist daughter, of art and wine. This is the story of a pioneering, international, avant-garde Sicily. A story that can be felt in the Duca di Salaparuta cellars in Casteldaccia and through the streets of Bagheria, about half an hour from Palermo, where the sun shines even in winter and life is tranquil, almost as it was two centuries ago when it all began.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Bourbon domination threatened to abolish feudal rights and with them the properties of noble families. For this reason, Prince Giuseppe Alliata, Duke of Salaparuta, left his role in government and retired to his summer residence – Villa Valguarnera, one of the most beautiful baroque properties on the island – in Bagheria, to take care of his lands, which stretched from Palermo to Casteldaccia, and particularly the vineyards. In 1824 he began to bottle his wine in a very artisanal way in the storerooms of the villa, writing the first page of Sicilian enology. However, it was his son Edoardo who transformed his father’s passion into a proper business. First, he had the winery built in Casteldaccia and began traveling to Tuscany, Piedmont, and France to learn from those who knew how to produce a more elegant, sophisticated wine with a lower alcohol content, as both national and international markets preferred. Thanks to these changes, the wines of the Duke of Salaparuta improved, entered embassies and the Vatican, and began to win awards. When the reins passed to his grandson Enrico, the family business grew further. Duke Enrico was an eccentric man, a theosophist, vegetarian (he also wrote a book of raw food recipes translated into English), an ecologist ahead of his time, and he took his daughter Topazia with him into the vineyards to familiarize her with the world she would one day inherit. With him, the wine improved further, won more awards, and was appreciated internationally, from the United States to Japan.

It’s not difficult to imagine that, with such an open-minded father, Topazia grew up as an independent and nonconformist woman. For example, she was the first woman admitted to the nudism course at the Academy of Fine Arts, which was unthinkable in early 20th century Sicily. On that occasion, she met Renato Guttuso, one of the most important painters of Italian Neorealism. A close friendship developed between them, as evidenced by some jointly painted works and a portrait by the master displayed at the Guttuso Museum in Bagheria. Topazia was also one of the first women to get a driver’s license in Palermo and, extraordinarily for the time, walked alone through the streets of Palermo. She later married Fosco Maraini, one of the most important Italian anthropologists of the twentieth century, and had three daughters, including the writer Dacia Maraini. After a period with her family in Japan, where Maraini had a university position, and after years of deportation for not supporting the fascist regime, Topazia returned to Bagheria, where she took the reins of the wine business and created her Colomba Platino label, a symbol of peace, to forget the dark years of the world war. With Topazia, the circle of the four fundamental figures of the first two hundred years of Duca di Salaparuta closes, which today is part of the Illva Saronno group, a multinational that maintains solid Italian roots.

One of the company’s flagship labels is Duca Enrico, the Nero d’Avola to which the cellar vault in Casteldaccia is dedicated. Before 1984, Nero d’Avola in Sicily was considered a low-quality wine. It was considered a blending wine and was sold in bulk. Its potential was not understood. Until Franco Giacosa and an award-winning team of enologists, including the legendary Giacomo Takis, created Duca Enrico. After two years of aging in barrels, they brought it to a blind tasting in New York, where the wine was mistaken for a very important Bordeaux grand cru. Panic and surprise when they discovered the Sicilian label. Apart from the shock, everyone wondered what this Nero d’Avola was that no one had ever heard of. Anyway, the wine won three glasses from Gambero Rosso, a first for a Sicilian wine, and a spectacular debut for the grape variety. And even today, when the company organizes vertical tastings of Duca Enrico, starting from ’84, the first year of production, after 40 years in the cellar, it is still a refined wine, with an inviting drinkability despite its 15 degrees of alcohol. The ’84 vintage is the most important, but not the best. From then on, the label has won several awards, until 2020 when it again obtained the Three Glasses of Gambero Rosso.

The guided tours of the winery, which has a modern headquarters in Casteldaccia, are only the final part of an exciting novel, of which there is always a new chapter to write in the explosive history of Sicilian wine. An ambitious challenge whose latest step is the exhibition of a triptych dedicated to the multifaceted personality of Donna Topazia, created by Arrigo Musti, an established Palermitan painter, with works selected for the Venice Biennale and in the contemporary section of the Guttuso Museum in Bagheria.