NZULU. Feudo del Biviere, Santa Ninfa. The real Sicily.
NZULU
Sunset over the vine rows: the vines in autumn colour, gold and ochre, and the hills of the Valle del Belìce on the horizon.

Santa Ninfa · Valle del Belìce · Sicily

You don’t stay here.You come back.

Feudo del Biviere in full light: the tall trees, the low whitewashed building with its shutters, and a hay bale beside the path.

Feudo del Biviere is one Sicilian family’s land. Ten rooms, a working olive mill, one single table in the middle of the room. Everything you eat came out of these fields.

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Inside a nature reserve

We are inside the Grotte di Santa Ninfa nature reserve, in the Valle del Belìce: one vast amphitheatre of vines, olive trees and streams.

Two karst valleys, a fully protected reserve looked after by Legambiente, and in the middle of it an estate that grows and picks by hand what it then puts on your plate. This is not a farm stay with a view of nature. It is inside nature, and it depends on it.

The estate’s vines and olive groves climbing towards a rocky ridge, seen from the upper terrace.

The vines and the olive groves, towards the ridge.

Inside the Grotte di Santa Ninfa: lit stalactites and rock formations, with a caver in a red suit giving the sense of scale.

The karst caves the reserve is named after.

  • 01/

    Ten rooms

    Each one designed by an artist. On every wall, an olive tree drawn by hand by grandfather Vincenzo, each with a different dedication. No two are alike.

  • 02/

    One single table

    In the middle of the room there is one table. Everyone sits at it, guests and family. It is not a design decision: it is how people have always eaten here.

  • 03/

    A real olive mill

    Nocellara del Belìce olives, picked by hand, this year’s oil. The family wine: Papa Vince Rosso and Bianco. Pasta with real flour, wine from nothing but grapes, oil from nothing but olives.

Luxury means something else here

Real luxury is not the comfort of a chain, identical in Milan and in Bangkok.

The dining room: one very long table laid for about twenty people, flowers and bottles down the middle, and a wooden map of the world on the wall.

It is the thing that makes your heart shake.

The shared table, the smell of bread just out of the oven, a story told by the person who lived it.

Grandfather Vincenzo never once met his family doctor. He only ever ate what came off his own land.

See what a day here looks like

NZULU

The name comes from two worlds. Sicilian Nonni, because that is where all of it comes from. And the ora Zulu, the universal time zone that pilots the world over set their watches to, which by a turn of fate sounds like “Nzulo”, the name our grandfather Vincenzo went by in the village.

For us it means one thing only: he is the reference point we set everything by.

Read the story
Grandfather Vincenzo in front of his Ape loaded with goods, arms raised: a door-to-door trader.

Vincenzo Biondo. Everyone called him Nzulo.

The table is already laid

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