Donnafugata Castle

The first building on the site is traditionally credited to the Chiaramonte, counts of Modica, in the 14th century, raised — so it is said — on the older structure of a 13th-century tower, and in the following century the place may have been one of the residences of Bernardo Cabrera, Grand Justiciar of the Kingdom of Sicily. None of it is firm. Everything recorded about Donnafugata before the 18th century descends from the 15th-century legend of Cabrera and Blanche of Navarre, and has no historical confirmation behind it.

In 1648 the Bellio-Cabrera fief of Donnafugata was bought by Vincenzo Arezzo-La Rocca, already baron of Serri, who made it a fortified farmstead. Over the generations that working masseria became a neoclassical country casina, and then a neo-Gothic castle.

Most of the building is 19th-century work by Vincenzo's descendant Baron Corrado Arezzo de Spuches, an eclectic scholar and politician, who set into the main façade the neo-Gothic loggia with its elegant trilobed arches. The house he finished covers more than 7,500 square metres over three floors, crowned by two flanking towers, and holds over 120 rooms. Among them is a bedchamber known as the princess of Navarre's — chronologically improbable, but faithful to the legend the house had attached to it.

Around the house the baron laid out a monumental park of eight hectares that once held over 1,500 plant species, with a circular temple, a coffee house, artificial grottoes hung with false stalactites, and a labyrinth built in the dry white Ragusan stone of the district, watched at its entrance by a soldier of stone and trapezoidal in plan after the maze at Hampton Court, which he had probably seen on his travels. He filled the grounds with practical jokes for his guests: a sprinkler set in a garden seat that went off when a visitor sat down, and a chapel at the far end of the park from which a cloth monk sprang out when the door was opened. The leaves of the great ficus at the park entrance were large enough to be stamped and posted as postcards.

His political weight was enough to bend a railway. The Ragusa–Comiso line was rerouted to run close to the castle and give the estate a station of its own, and regional trains still stop at Donnafugata, less than 400 metres from the house.

The name may come from the Arabic ʻAyn al-Ṣiḥḥat, the source of health, which passes into Sicilian as Ronnafuata; the same toponym recurs at another place in the province of Palermo, and Donnalucata near Scicli is commonly read as the source of the hours. The Italian reading, roughly the woman who fled, carries the legend of Blanche of Navarre, widow of King Martin I and regent of Sicily, pursued by Bernardo Cabrera, who wanted her hand and with it the leadership of the island. In one telling she sheltered at Donnafugata until Cabrera besieged it, and Giovanni Moncada got her out and away to the Steri palace in Palermo. Whatever truth the story holds, the name does not come from it, and the castle is later than the legend.

Another account attaches the name instead to Queen Maria Carolina, wife of Ferdinand IV, confined to a palace at Santa Margherita di Belice by Lord William Bentinck, British military governor of Sicily from 1811 to 1816 — a different house altogether. A third reading is grimmer: donna affucata, a woman possibly found suffocated on the spot at some unrecorded date.

Through several generations the estate passed to Clementina Paternò di Manganelli, widow of Viscount Gaetano Combes de Lestrade, a diplomat, historian and sociologist who lived at Donnafugata as the baron had. The successions that redistributed the patrimony of the Sicilian nobility also tied the house to the Catanese branch of the Grasso, known in genealogical tradition as the Grasso di Donnafugata, through marriage and inheritance with the Paternò di Manganelli.

After years of neglect and abandonment the castle was bought in 1982 by the comune of Ragusa, which reopened it following long restoration. Its rooms and grounds have since served as film sets, among them the Taviani brothers' Kaos in 1984, I Viceré, Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales in 2015, and the terrace and park for the Montalbano television series.