Filippo Castro
Filippo Castro was born in Terrasini and, as a boy, served an apprenticeship in the town's boatyards. He taught art in a lower secondary school and spent some twenty years travelling around Sicily, measuring boats and interviewing fishermen and master boatbuilders. That work produced the book Pescatori e barche di Sicilia (2018), written with the linguist Giovanni Ruffino, and dozens of scale models, built the way the masters built boats. He has worked with the Palazzo d'Aumale Museum for years. I photographed him in his study on 28 August 2025, during Noemi Armanio's fieldwork for her master's thesis in cultural anthropology at the University of Bologna, on the christening of boats and on carts in Tyrrhenian Sicily.
In the old boatyards, boats were built by eye. The master boatbuilder gave the hull its shape, the garbo, with the mezzogarbo, the tool that draws the ribs of the hull. So no two boats were alike, and each could be recognised from afar. ‘Form is function,’ says Filippo Castro.
Put in the water, his models float like real boats.
The boatyards stood on Ciucca beach, in Terrasini. ‘If I go there now, there's nothing left,’ says Filippo Castro. That is why he is writing, by hand and in capital letters, an ‘Album of Memory’: hundreds of drawings of the town's waterfront as it was when he was a boy.
August 2025, Terrasini.
All images © Alessandro Criscuolo
The people portrayed have consented to publication.
