The Door Said Art Store

The door said Art Store. Nothing else about it prepared me for what waited inside.
I walked in off a side street in Ortigia with no appointment, no introduction, no idea what I'd find. A cavernous stone interior, dimly lit by one-of-a-kind lighting fixtures and sculptures. Necklaces hung over blouses. Behind a heavy velvet curtain, wood was being carved. One room resembled the backstage of a theatre production mid-strike. Dead stock ornamental fabrics stacked high, waiting to be made into something new.

Everything you see here is made by the people standing in it, regardless of medium.
Mela and Rafaella founded Scenapparente twenty-five years ago as scenic set designers for modern dance and theatre across Italy and Europe. Their studio is a working lab, commissioned interiors for restaurants and hotels alongside their own original work. Andrea, Rafaella's brother, styles while producing his own collection under the label PICCIONE. Their philosophy, I heard before I fully understood it: "We are not social. People find us and want to collaborate."

They weren't performing for visitors. They were absorbed in what they were making. If someone wandered in, they looked up, answered a question, and went back to the piece in front of them. The atmosphere came from the depth of that focus, and I recognized it immediately, a feeling I'd been chasing across all of Sicily.
On my first visit, I shared what I was building with SICULI: the palazzo I imagine as a social sanctuary where craft, culture and conversation meet. I chose two necklaces to bring home. They insisted on gifting me one.

"We are not social. People find us and want to collaborate."

I came back the next day. Neara, who designs her own line under the label NEMA, had stopped by to see Andrea's latest pieces. We fell into conversation and photographed each other's work. I went back a third time simply to be there again.

By then I understood what drew me back: a place where the work sets the tone, not the display. Where conversation starts because curiosity runs both ways, and what you take home holds the memory of the hands and room it came from.

It repeated across Sicily. In Catania, a wander into a palazzo led to a fashion show in preparation, a question to the director, and by the end, a seat at ONE Fashion Catania and an introduction to one of the city's oldest shoemakers. In Ragusa, a stop at Il Barocco, an enoteca that's grown into its own concept store, turned into a long conversation with Manolo about SICULI.

A few days after I landed home, an email arrived from Mela, Rafaella and Andrea. They wanted to collaborate on pieces for SICULI. The fact that I kept coming back, they wrote, told them I understood what they were building.
It was the validation I'd gone there to find.

Con affetto,

Sandra
Founder, SICULI