WELCOME TO THE HOME OF PELLEGRINO

Its soul hovers in the amber coloured atmosphere, it smells of ripe bunches of grape, of salt air and of orange blossom. Every year millions of visitors come to visit the town, and Marsala reveals its mixture of influences, born from the styles and cultures of the populations who have dominated it. Like a prayer it beckons you, allowing each man melt into its nature and history. Pebbled streets lead to ancient neighbourhoods, where traces of the Arabic culture still remain, while its sea opens the heart towards a feathered horizon that allows a glimpse of the Egadi islands and nearby Africa.

The tourist vocation of this corner of Sicily amazingly attracts anybody passing by sea or land. A welcoming land, of great humanity, respect, tolerance and hope. A generous Mother Land, that offers a precious nectar to its children. Famous all over the world for the production of marsala wine, discovered by English tradesmen, it has became a Kaleidoscope of excellent wine realities, including Pellegrino, one of the wineries that made Marsala history. Today the winery welcomes wine lovers from all over the world, who visit the vineyards, bewitched by the natural landscape and charmed by the wine that is produced.

We enter through a bright, modern wine shop which is full of colour. There is white, the same white of the salt that spreads its glow, illuminated by the sun rays; there are the amber and golden reflections of the labels exposed to evoke the sunsets that it is possible to admire over the opposite landscape. The space is harmonious. But this is only the first stop. A plunge into the past is waiting for the visitor. And the threshold that distinguishes it is near. Walking around we can admire the Punic excavations that surround the old wineries, remains of the ancient civilization that founded one of the most powerful and flourishing colonies of the Mediterranean Basin along Trapani’s coast. The archaeological finds are examples of funerary urns that were used for the sacrifice of first born sons and that were reused by the Romans as containers to dry fish.

An important part of it, contains the documents concerning financial investments that Benjamin Ingham made in the USA in the first half of the 1800s which determined a noteworthy financial success for the family thanks to the production and the trade of marsala wine. The information included in the documentation units are a very important source for any kind of historical and economic and social research about Sicily in the 1800s.

Following the friendship of the Pellegrino family with the Ingham family, descendants of Whitaker, the archive is now under the safeguard of the company, kept in a special consultation room, inside the historic Marsala wineries. It is the only one to have been declared of “great historical interest” by a provision drafted by the Superintendence for Sicilian Archival assets in 1985, and it is at the disposal of university students carrying out research for their degree theses. But all those who pass through history whilst walking through the Pellegrino winery, can have access to it in order to admire those testimonies that destiny, nature, and human virtues have given to Marsala.

Maybe by chance or by destiny, during that period the English researcher Miss Honor Frost, an expert in marine archaeology, was in Mothia, therefore she was entrusted with the recovery mission of the wreck. The team of archaeologists involved in this mission did not have enough funds and the Pellegrino family, firmly believing in this initiative, decided to give a monetary and logistic contribution, offering hospitality to the staff and putting rooms and structures for the preservation of the wood in desalination tanks at their disposal. Their support, inspired by their love for culture and for the city, was such that at the end of the restoration works Miss Frost, who later became an honorary citizen of Marsala, gave the company the plaster casts of the ship. These casts still conserve their lively colours and details today, giving the Historical Wineries an old charm.

The findings of animal bones inside the ship suggest that on board, seamen were following a protein rich diet; almond and pistachio shells, olive cherry and apricot stones, and other remains of plant origin were also found. The Punic ship in fact had a big quantity of ballast stones inside which limited the dispersion of the contents of the hold during the shipwreck; among the findings, it was also possible to identify a bag filled with organic materials: probably green plants which, as scientific documentation showed, were used in part to feed the crew, and in part to give to the seamen as an infusion during moments of weariness.

Built with different qualities of wood and destined to cheer festive occasions, they are embellished with carvings representing pastoral scenes, deeds of paladins, Garibaldian episodes, great literary works, and ancient battle achievements. In the Pellegrino family collection, we find the cart decorated by the Ducatos, cart painters who attended the Bagheria school and who were defined by Guttuso as “masters with incomparable skills”.

Extreme chromatic brilliance and a sure cut of the figures are the characteristics that emerge whilst observing its sides; they represent historical scenes, including the conquest of Jerusalem by the Romans after a hard battle and the Persian king receiving Roman ambassadors and the battle of Capua. Other historical scenes are to be found on the cart decorated by the famous Cardinale school of Palermo: on the sides, Charles the Great crossing Alps in 1800, the coronation of Louis of Bavaria in Rome, the crowning of Charles the Great and Hannibal crossing the Alps.

The carts by Manfrè from the Alcamo workshop are also of great charm with the proud battles of Marpisa and Agramante, Charles the Great and Arcorione, Ferragut and Bradamante, Orlandini and Ruggiero. And finally, the cart by Picciurro from the Palermo workshop, which has war and historical scenes on its sides including the battle of Primo. On all five carts of the family’s collection, the sides and the rear doors are true works of art of rare beauty, a triumph of sparkling colours that are what remains of a trade, that of the cart builder, that has now disappeared, and that is representative of Sicilian folk iconography.

It is said that on St. Martin’s day, which sanctioned the transformation of the must in wine, the noblemen put a new wine barrel on the cart to give to those who had participated in the harvest. It was a festivity and for this reason there had to be pomp, abundance and sharing in the joy.

Beginning in the XVIII century, thanks to the marketing of marsala wine by English tradesmen, Marsala in fact became the fulcrum of the birth of a local crafts trade specialized in the building of barrels to be used in the wineries. Iron, fire and wood, powerful arms and human tenacity shaped the material that became a work of art. They worked by hand with the mannara (chopper) and the sciasso (a type of chisel). Strength and passion were needed to make the wood come alive. In those days, the wineries often used to house the workshops of coopers in their establishments and the word “verra” became not only the unit of measurement for the amount of timber purchased and delivered to the craftsman, but also the same unit that determined the wages of the workers, master coopers, errand boys and the “picciotti” – young boys – of the workshop.

The workshops increased in number. There were about ten in Marsala in the nineteen fifties. This hard and tiring job, gave and offered prestige. “Abballa, abballa a matri chi è mastru di bagghiu” (dance, dance, my daughter, he is a master cooper). This was the saying told by mothers to their daughters during dancing parties. In fact, the position of a cooper was a good one in the society of those times.

Within Marsala, the cooper was the direct witness to work and working life. Today, thanks to the commitment of some old coopers, this ancient job has been passed down, with a passion that challenges the globalisation of markets, renewing tradition. Memories come back to life whilst looking at the agricultural tools of the trade exhibited among the historical Pellegrino winery, together with the iron tools used to work the barrels. And, in their commitment to keep the memory alive, the family maintains the hope of being able to say once more “an ancient trade still exists”, that of the cooper, that of a man who unites his hands and heart to forge the wood. The keeper of good wine.