The Lord of Snow

Well before the advent of refrigerators, Sicily, the land of sun, sea, salt and wheat, produced ice for the whole of the Mediterranean and held onto the trade monopoly for around two centuries. The filmmaker and Francesco Alliata di Villafranca, “the last lord of the snow” , now well into his nineties, retrace the pathways together, lay bare the places and the techniques of the Sicilian ‘snow workers’, with the addition of precious archive material. The anthropological journey in this enchanting glimpse of the past tells the story of an activity that still lives on in Sicilian popular culture, tying up with the use of ice and the modern facilities that now produce it.