With its vivid painted decorations and carved panels, the carretto siciliano is one of Sicily's most distinctive craft expressions; the Randazzo area preserves a tradition documented since the nineteenth century.
On the northern slopes of Etna, where lava stone builds walls, paves streets and defines the very character of the architecture, Randazzo preserves one of Sicily's most intricate craft traditions. The carretto siciliano (Sicilian cart) — born as a working tool, a means of transport on dusty dirt roads — has a documented history here going back at least to the nineteenth century, attested by archival photographs from the Fondazione Alinari dated 1900. It was not born a decorative object: it is a functional artefact that over time accumulated layers of meaning until it became something difficult to classify.
Building a traditional cart calls on distinct, non-interchangeable skills. The carpenter shapes the platform, the side panels and the wheels according to proportions codified by practice; the blacksmith works the iron rims, hubs and fittings in wrought iron; the painter comes last, laying scenes across the wooden surfaces drawn from the cycle of the paladins of France, episodes from Norman history in Sicily, the lives of local patron saints. Each side panel is a narrative sequence belonging to the island's oral and visual culture: Roger the Norman, Orlando, the Saracens, Saint George. The colour palettes vary by region — around Palermo yellow and green prevailed, while in the Etna area the palettes follow their own conventions — but the density of imagery remains constant: no surface is left empty, no inch fails to take part in the story.
Randazzo sits at the centre of three protected areas — the Parco dell'Etna, the Parco dei Nebrodi and the Parco fluviale dell'Alcantara — and this geographical position has historically favoured a relative isolation that helped preserve craft practices already lost elsewhere. The medieval town, built entirely in dark basalt, kept for centuries an economic structure tied to the land and to agricultural transport: the cart was not ornament but necessity, and its decoration was an investment in identity as much as in resources.
Today the workshops still able to build and decorate a cart according to traditional methods can be counted on a few hands across all of Sicily. The craft demands years of apprenticeship in each of its components and a direct transmission — from master to pupil — that the ordinary education system is not structured to guarantee. What remains in Randazzo and its surrounding territory is a technical and iconographic heritage that survives more through generational momentum than through systematic protection policies. Every cart still made according to the old canons carries with it the entire chain of knowledge that produced it: the geometry of the carving, the preparation of the grounds, the visual grammar of the painted scenes.
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