Donnafugata: The Woman in Flight and the Reinvention of Sicilian Wine
- Posted on
- By Tim Graham
- Posted in Donnafugata, Mount Etna, Sicilian Wine, Sicily
There is a moment in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard when the Prince of Salina retreats from a convulsing Sicily to his country estate, a place the novelist called Donnafugata. The name, in dialect, means "woman in flight," and it carries an older story still: a Bourbon queen who fled Naples in the Napoleonic years and found refuge in the hills of western Sicily. When Gabriella Anca Rallo and her husband Giacomo founded a new winery in 1983, they chose that name deliberately. It was a declaration that Sicilian wine could break with its past and, like the Prince, change so that things might stay the same — the land, the varieties, the light — while everything about how the world saw them was made new.