Michele Ducato
Michele Ducato paints Sicilian carts in Bagheria, in the Fratelli Ducato workshop. He learned as a child, from his father and an uncle, and sold his first piece at the age of eight. At the end of the 1960s the workshop had closed, because carts were no longer needed for work. It reopened in 1977 to prepare the exhibition Forma e colore del carretto siciliano, and since then the cart has become a collector's object. I photographed him at work on 1 September 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.
Painted side panels, pots of paint, a wheel, a grey cat.
No cart can be without Saint George, carved in the centre of the axle box, the part under the most strain. The scenes were chosen by the carter, often the paladins of the Opera dei pupi puppet theatre. The colours come from the workshop, and they are its signature: bright and clean.
‘Ours is a bit like a tailor's trade.’
The cart has outlived the other tools of rural life because, says Michele Ducato, ‘it tells a story’. Today the workshop's decorations also find their way onto new objects, for fashion and design. He is an architect, but he carried on the craft almost without deciding to, in the workshop where he grew up.
September 2025, Bagheria.
All images © Alessandro Criscuolo
The people portrayed have consented to publication.
