The Forefathers’ houses and its common spaces

 The ancient fortified structure, today multifunction  center, has got  ten units with a reception , info point, lounges with school  and educational workshops, wine bar, breakfast room, reading room and tea bar. Inside there is a museum “Murika, stories of stone” a cultural center and an information service bureau  for tourists and visitors.

The units

The old structure that once was  presumably  a fortress to protect pirates and Saracen has got  10 small houses, some of them come  from  ancient caves, with museum rooms, restored  by natural and typical Sicilian materials.

The project  has preserved  the original spaces and the traces of their mixed use, through the ages, from military and shelter   to that ritual and religious, until farming and domestic use.

 The houses, with common areas and inside with  the cisterns  today finalized by SI Moutique as  culture, tourism and hospitality facilities, are located at  Consolo, the old neighborhood  of Modica, gateway to the old town with an  extreme rock characterization. A neighborhood that seems like a large terrace, a live stage with locust , pine  and oleander trees, overlooking  Passo Gatta and Fontana Grande, formed by high, dense and homogeneous houses  in Calvario street  with an old kiosk , a village with defensive characteristics, and in  its bowels that  are  escape routes against possible dangers.  The top sight  is the bell tower of the St. Anthony of  Padua’ Church.

And not far  the complex  15  century  Santa Maria del Gesù,   the Church and Convent, survived the 1693 earthquake and jewel of the Sicilian art and finally  the Castle of the Counts.

The houses  come  from  ancient caves.

The caved houses, some fortified, require a  planning that recognizes the uniqueness of this heritage.

Human use of these settlements was very comprehensible  over the millennia: from the prehistoric civilization of the Bronze Age to  religious communities, from folk wisdom  to urban marginality.

The judgement of value on these soul  places   with their experience is really  dialectic: from national disgrace of the 1950s of last century, a World Heritage Site today to pass on  future generations.

In any case, places in which  the caves were dug for residential purposes, with an  ancestral calling.

The project carried out by Si-MoutiqueModica with the protection and the preservation and renovation of the old  fortified house of Consolo, today the Forefathers’ have allowed us to do justice to the primordial essence of  the stone cave,  through  choices of preservation, enhancement and reuse of the original spaces.

The architecture of these homes speaks about  centuries of history, preserved and passed  to posterity through the restoration work by its owners, restoration that has allowed the survival in the real visibility.

In these situations you can live and smell the past that rises from underground to the surface, where there were entrenched villages, early examples of permanent settlements, where  the man  developed the techniques of collecting water, today testified by the bell-shaped cisterns  and safeguarded by channels drawn in the caves  to feed the people. In these houses, stone and rock together with  man,   found an imaginative architect in the water, drawing  as a great surprise a  concealed world, no less extraordinary than the Baroque style,  creating an environment of singular beauty, with its cavity, large and small, natural or artificial, it is a good witness of the history of the neighborhood Consolo and the  inhabitants.

In every room one breathes air of the past. The houses form  a frame  to an arcade including  courtyard typical  of t ancient Modica.

Reception

The staff at the reception will welcome  you in a small house paved  by “cuticci”, once a house with essential space, today you can find  some antique  signs such as niches where two maps of Modica are located, one showing the ancient urban structure with its  ancient neighborhoods and  the most significant architectural signs;  the other with the itineraries of identity: the ancient archaeological Modica,  the late medieval Gothic  Modica, the Baroque Modica, the Countryside  and the Seaside.

Hall (the room of relax)

Located in an inner courtyard of the ancient fortress, next to the reception room, overlooking  Consolo, now  Roma street. The environment  with  a vaulted cellar in stone and lime, and  a floor of stone in soft golden limestone, welcomes the  guests  during the processing of simple formalities, while they require information or choose routes or in moments of relaxation, familiarity  and warmth in   places of a past  time.

Multifunction  room

It is allocated in the heart of the court, in an ancient, picturesque and scenic cave house, layered, with underground cavities, the most striking example of the recovery of a typical living environment of old  Modica .

The environment is characterized by  arches and vaulted ceilings, local stone, and tombs, signs  of an  ancestral environment.

Inside the multifunction  room were created:

School handicraft workshops with household tools, artifacts, anecdotes, testimonies that illustrate a world  of experience of centuries and manual creativity ; a work of anonymous protagonists often ignored by official history that have been patient witnesses  of  the collective identity.

The workshops refer to those trades  (scuparu, cannizzaru, mastru re mura a siccu), Bufalino defined   as “vagabond” activities performed in the open air with the sun, rain, and wind “.

The breakfast room

To consume the old recipes of the culinary tradition of the territory, in a unique and relaxed atmosphere

The cellar in the cistern

It offers guests and visitors a selection of foods and wines of the territory

The  tea room

Located in a loft where the  time stands still and where authenticity is the hostess. Ideal to take a break

Reading room with library

In a glass floor loft , animated  by an   esoteric light, you can consult the best editorial productions of  Sicily in general, the South- east and especially the history of the County of Modica.

Murika, a widespread  museum

A room used  for  a  museum.  At Modica in the Forefathers’ houses in an environment with arches and stone vaults,a room  is reserved to  the Museum  “Murika, stories of stones”, an eco museum aimed in preserving the ancient ethnographic living and to  the recovery and development of ‘identity  places’. The aim  is to celebrate rural communities of the County of Modica using as a main material  the local stone, and achievements through it, walls, vaults, floors, artifacts, furnishings as well as the folklore, the fabrics, the furniture, the music of past times. A  social duty of preservation and enhancement about  the forms of popular culture. The aim of the owners  is the integrity of historical buildings and  surrounding landscape, the existence of a heritage  to  be preserved and brought out through the tourism.