Meet the owner: Discovering Sicily past, present and future at Fausta Occhipinti’s agriturismo

Fausta Occhipinti was a landscape architect and botanist. After growing up in Sicily, she’d moved to Milan and Paris and was happily working there, with no thoughts of coming back. Then her father, Bruno, who was still living in the area, found a ruined old winery for sale. “He needed my mother on board” says Fausta, “so he set up candlelit tables in the ruins and laid out a beautiful meal which he invited her to. He wanted everyone to see what the place could be.”  

The vision that Bruno saw has now become reality and it has been Fausta, drawn back by the chance to do something profound for her homeland, that has shaped it. She wanted guests to experience an authentic Sicily, but that first meant ensuring there was such a thing to be discovered. As Stanley Tucci lamented in his travel programme Searching for Italy in which he visited Baglio Occhipinti, young people are leaving Sicily in droves, looking for work and a more modern lifestyle elsewhere. With this exodus, many traditional industries and occupations are dying out, but Fausta was determined to make Baglio Occhipinti part of the island’s past and its future. 

What followed was an ongoing project involving an enormous number of local craftspeople and unstinting dedication from the Occhipinti family. From the rich Sicilian soil, rose bushes blossomed, a tribute to Fausta’s grandmother, but more important than the decorative growth was the functional. An enormous wealth of vegetables and fruit were cultivated as the team sought to nourish the land as much as the soul.  

It was all part of the wider tradition that Fausta was fighting to preserve – not simply farming, but community living that brought visitors into the family for their stay. Guests can take part in cooking courses, but rather than starting in the kitchen, they begin with a walk through the gardens. Here, you might bump into Bruno and his brother Giusto, head gardener Giambattista or more of the team. Each of them can talk for hours about their part in preserving the heritage of the baglio and nurturing Sicily’s history. 

While tradition is important, the Occhipintis aren’t afraid to break with it when necessary. Some of the sustainable building and land management techniques are state-of-the-art, but they never put too much distance between people and the soil. It’s in wine production that the family is really pushing the boundaries, changing the perception of Sicilian wines and the industry itself under the guidance of Fausta’s sister, Arianna.  

As Tucci also noted, it’s unusual for women to run wineries in Sicily, so Arianna, known as “nature woman” for her dedication to organic farming, is already something of an outlier, but it’s her wine that’s making a real splash. She’s creating vintages that lighten and broaden the traditionally heavy Sicilian flavours, adding a fresh new branch to a tradition millennia old.  

The balance of past, present and future is something that Baglio Occhipinti manages effortlessly. To stay here is more than an experience of a culture, something which can almost sound contrived, it’s a chance to be a part of Sicily yourself, even if only briefly. Fausta hopes that people take away something of that for themselves, however small – a new pasta recipe, a bottle of wine, a feeling of connectedness, anything which spreads the dream shared over dinner among the ruins, of Sicily both old and new, to as many people as possible. 

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