The miracle baker who revived his ghost hamlet

The experience

“Don’t get screwed by nostalgia,” Alfredo-Noiret intimated to little Totò in “Nuovo cinema Paradiso,” advising him not to look back, to forget Sicily, “malignant land.”

Maurizio Spinello, on the other hand, kneaded bread with nostalgia, lived every day, and chose against everything and everyone not to leave his hamlet of eleven inhabitants lost in the countryside of the Island.

Santa Rita, eleven kilometers from Caltanissetta, between the towns of Delia and Sommatino, is now a tour with tasting not to be missed. An experience that includes a tour of the village and a baking experience with Maurizio.

The tiny settlement was built in 1920 by a baron, Ignazio La Lomia, for the peasants of his fiefdom who over time acquired ownership of the houses, low stone cubes on which stands the church named after the patron saint, dedicated by the baron to his wife in 1935.

To visit Maurizio Spinello in his bakery (now also a pizzeria, trattoria, pasta and pizza workshop) is to taste bread, pizza, and pasta with a unique taste, but most of all to breathe in the scent of hope.

Because Mauritius, the son of very poor ranchers, won his bet with life, a personal challenge that smacks of universal history. And which tells how from the suburbs, from tradition, from a return to nature and its rhythms can start an entrepreneurial story that – started from poverty and sacrifice – today engages twenty employees. His bread, made only from ancient and organic grains, has received major awards and is now shipped halfway around the world. There is no shadow of brewer’s yeast, so it stays fresh for 15 days. There is only flour, water, salt and rising, that is, sourdough made from bread that has already risen. Every time Maurice makes bread, he takes a piece of dough and saves it for the next time, a chain that is never broken.

Producers around have started growing traditional grains again-much healthier and digestible-that had almost gone extinct.

And that nearly depopulated village today, thanks to him, has become a destination for foodies and visitors.