Castel di Lucio

Castel di Lucio sits at 750 meters in the northwestern Nebrodi, on a ridge that marks the boundary between Messina, Palermo and Enna provinces. The Ventimiglia family built the castle around 1090, after the Norman conquest; the village stayed part of the Mistretta fief until it gained autonomy in the eighteenth century. The Chiesa Madre dei Santi Pietro e Paolo anchors the historic centre, and the ruined castle still tops the rock above.

In 1988 Paolo Schiavocampo's sculpture A Curve Thrown Behind Time was installed on a hill just outside the village, part of Antonio Presti's Fiumara d'Arte, the open-air monumental sculpture park scattered across six Nebrodi communes. The town is small, just over twelve hundred residents, and the surrounding pastures still feed sheep and produce the hard cheeses the inner Nebrodi has made for centuries.