When Riccardo Priolisi and John Hooks set off to find a refuge from their busy careers in London and Milan (both then worked in fashion), they knew exactly what they wanted. Or so they thought. ‘It had to be a tiny house by the sea anywhere in southern Italy except for Sicily,’ Hooks explains, ‘because Riccardo, who was born in Palermo, did not want to deal with the romantic trappings and complications of living on this island.’
Fast-forward ten years and the notion of a seaside dwelling on the mainland for light-hearted holidays has been scrapped in favour of something radically different. What follows is the twisting tale of how the couple ended up moving to Sicily to take on a cyclopean project: to restore the rambling ruins of an ancient rural settlement, an extraordinary example of vernacular architecture, and transform its interiors into an ode to artists and travellers whose take on the Classical world has inspired their own wide-ranging revisitations.
Perched like an eagle’s nest on a rocky cliff some 30 kilometres inland from the Baroque town of Noto, in southeastern Sicily, Masseria Cardinale looks on to a forested ravine with a river running through it. Its nucleus, a vast square courtyard paved with hand-cut stones and enclosed by buildings on all four sides, is accessed through a huge portal surmounted by a sighting turret. When active, this settlement, which hosted dozens of land workers and their large families, bustled with activity. The tall, fortified walls that still separate it from the fields around bear testimony to dark times. When it was built in 1860, and for decades after, the encircling woodlands and countryside were plagued by groups of bandits that preyed on settlements such as this.
Riccardo and John first visited this place in 2015 during a digression from their ongoing, if unfruitful, search for a home by the sea. By then Masseria Cardinale had been lying in a state of abandonment for nearly 60 years. ‘The ceilings had collapsed to the ground,’ Riccardo recalls, ‘and trees and bushes were growing out of the rubble in nearly every room.’ The two immediately discarded the idea of getting involved. Even thinking about it was pure madness. And yet there was something about this place, its remoteness perhaps, or the desolation that shrouded the ruins in a long-cast spell, that stirred their imagination. ‘We kept coming back again and again,’ John recalls with a bemused smile, ‘just to spend time exploring every nook and cranny.’ These included several grottos on the cliff on which stands the settlement – a hamlet that had first been colonised during the bronze age.
Two more years passed before the couple abandoned their original idea and surrendered to Masseria Cardinale. By then Riccardo, who for decades had been harbouring a passion for painting and interior decoration, had elaborated a clear and detailed vision of how to transform these ruins into a home, one with ample space to host their many friends. A swimming pool was de rigueur, of course, because summers can be hot, as were fireplaces and central heating for the winter. They would plant an enormous citrus garden in a walled enclosure and a large vegetable patch, erect a chicken coop and design a rose garden. As for the couple’s own living quarters, the choice fell on a building at the far end of the courtyard where the wealthy landowner who built this masseria would stay when he came to visit. His name is long forgotten, but his status can be surmised by the rather grandiose architectural details, such as the Baroque-style window frames on the façade. The rear rooms open on to dizzying views of the ravine. Within weeks of purchase, the courtyard and adjoining buildings were teeming with workers, including an ironmonger and a carpenter, who moved their workshops on site for the duration of the project: three years. ‘It has been an amazing adventure,’ Riccardo says as he shows us into the house. ‘We felt all along as if there had been a lucky star guiding us.’
The first thing one sees as one steps into the entrance hall, a small room with high ceilings and a lovely floor of black and white stone triangles (the pattern changes according to the room), are the contours of a jolly face beaming from a Picasso plate. It hangs at the centre of a pastel blue oval niche and sets the tone for what is to come. ‘Both John and I share a passion for Classical culture,’ Riccardo explains, ‘and for the way this culture was revived time and again by artists travelling to southern Europe for inspiration.’ The library, a vast whitewashed room surrounded by wooden balconies and with an Andy Warhol silkscreen portrait of Goethe above the mantelpiece, hosts the couple’s collection of Greek and Latin poetry as well as volumes devoted to ancient art and architecture, and the Grand Tour. Riccardo feels an elective affinity with the Dilettanti, the so-called Society founded in the early 1730s by a group of young British men who delighted in finding inspiration among the ruins of the Classical world.
The pale-green walls of the morning room, for example, are lined with framed 18th-century prints by Georg Christoph Kilian, a German engraver who spent months drawing every object recovered on the archaeological site of Herculaneum. Riccardo has taken his fascination one step further by reproducing the bucolic figures Cocteau painted in the Villa Santo Sospir on the Côte d’Azur – ‘a place I find immensely evocative’, he admits – on to the walls of his bedroom. Inspired by the result, he went on to replicate the figures he saw in Picasso’s drawings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, copying them on to the walls of a vast living room with soaring ceilings that was once the granary. ‘I paid homage to these artists by adapting their figures to the proportions of these rooms and changing the spatial relationship between one and the other.’
These murals, all so beautifully executed and so joyful, are one of the many flowerings that have sprouted from this life-changing project. Other fruits are the rediscovered pleasure of reading by the fireplace and taking long walks with their motley crew of mongrel dogs. Who would have thought? There is an ancient Italian proverb of Homeric influence that describes how the future likes to sit on Jupiter’s lap. In other words, as John and Riccardo have discovered, it may be fun to plan one’s tomorrows, but it’s far wiser to leave the door open to great surprises.
A version of this appears in the August 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
