The Villas of Bagheria

Ezio Ferreri’s photographs scrutinise something that had eluded us. They illuminate it by offering a new and personal view of these richly meaningful expressions of Sicilian aristocratic culture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They do so by creating relationships. The lens does nothing other than discern and select relationships: between unexpected details within a single photograph, between seemingly unrelated objects or aspects in different photographs. The relationship that is discerned, brought to light and offered to us thus becomes the true subject of this kind of photography...

Through this interpretation of relationships, the “other” villa is treated on the same terms and in the same context as all the rest: the villa of the Prince of Palagonia, known as the “Villa of the Monsters”. Foreign visitors and local observers have passed the same judgement on it: the former’s disgust was shared by the latter. Goethe’s view, for instance, was echoed by Pitrè… In their deliberate, considered search for the relationships mentioned at the outset, Ferreri’s photographs relocate Prince Ferdinando Francesco Gravina’s monsters to all the other villas in Bagheria. Or, if we prefer, they throw open the gates of all these villas to the monsters of a prince who was part “madman” and part “enlightened spirit”, and therefore a man of contradictions. These photographic relationships are illuminating, at least for those of us who choose to read them as an artistic endeavour which, overcoming the petrifying forces of repression, intelligently questions the false and unreliable rationality that all the patrician villas would wish, or might be expected, to convey.

Diego Guadagnino