Oscar Farinetti bets on Sicily: 'Made in Sicily' park for wheat and pasta
The initiative. The entrepreneur guest at the DiVino Festival in Castelbuono confirms the plan to invest in the Palermo area to create a company that covers the entire supply chain and announces: "We are still looking for an area of around 300 hectares, from 2025 the project will come to life".
by Nino Amadore
2' min read
2' min read
He had already said it in the autumn, last year, in Taormina during Taormina Gourmet, the event organised by Cronache di Gusto directed by Fabrizio Carrera, and repeated it on other similar occasions. He reiterated it last Saturday as a guest in Castelbuono at DiVino Festival, the event now in its 18th edition that has transformed the Madonie municipality into the capital of Sicilian food and wine.
Oscar Farinetti confirms his plan to launch a wheat and pasta initiative in Sicily, and particularly in the Palermo area, covering the entire supply chain with a precise idea: grow wheat, harvest it, mill it locally, and then a factory to make pasta and sell it all over the world. A concept that he reiterated in March after meeting the President of the Sicilian Region, Renato Schifani: 'We want to take Sicily on the real Italian and world food and wine tour,' Farinetti said. 'I illustrated our investment projects in Sicily, including one to build a pasta factory where we will not only produce pasta with Sicilian durum wheat, but also to tell the world where this food so typical of Italian gastronomic culture was born.
This would not be Farinetti's first investment in Sicily: in Castiglione di Sicilia with the entrepreneur Francesco Tornatore he has already set up the 'Carranco' winery producing Etna doc red and white, while in the Palermo area he has started a commercial collaboration with the Di Lorenzo family's 'Feudo Disisa' winery in the heart of the Monreale DOC area.
A project, involving wheat and pasta, that Farinetti has imagined with precise characteristics: 'We have not yet found the right place,' he explains. It is not a question of simply making an investment to produce wheat and pasta, but of having a place that can tell everything and tell, for example, that pasta was born in Sicily, in Palermo. I am thinking of a land of about 300 hectares: I have already visited some places that did not convince me. From 2025 onwards as a family I think we will dedicate ourselves to this initiative'.
This year for the Farinetti family it is, it can be said, to all the other initiatives that have been put into the field, starting with the Gran Tour Italia agrifood park that involves all the Italian regions in the same spaces of Fico in Bologna. And in this initiative, Sicily will play a leading role in what is intended to be a tale and a concrete representation of Italy's excellence: 'Sicily,' says Farinetti, 'will have the most beautiful stand. we will make our debut with chef Peppe Barone and Francesca and it will be a great success: we start on 5 September.Sicily has great appeal, but we have not limited ourselves only to food and wine: there is a whole celebratory area where we will tell many other things about this wonderful island'. This is a theme that Farinetti had addressed with the president of the region a couple of months ago, receiving a substantial willingness.
