Borgo Schirò

Borgo Giacomo Schirò is a frazione administered by the comune of Monreale.

The small village lies about 12 kilometres from the town of Corleone.

It was founded at the end of the 1930s by the Fascist regime. Together with other villages built across Sicily, the aim was to encourage the colonisation of large estates and let farmers live close to the land they worked, so they would not emigrate to the cities and leave the fields behind.

It was named after Giacomo Schirò, gold medal for military valour, a young Arbëresh bersagliere stabbed 53 times in the streets of Piana degli Albanesi (not far from the village) on 23 July 1920. The project was designed by the architect Girolamo Manetti Cusa and built by the Mario Odorisio company.

Besides the farmers' houses (about twenty), the village had a church with a rectory, a primary school for the farmers' children, a grocery and tobacco shop, a barber's, a doctor's surgery, a shop, craft workshops, a restaurant and a fountain. The institutional buildings included the town hall and the barracks.

Borgo Schirò was at its peak between the 1940s and 1950s, a compact, lively community of about 100 inhabitants.

In 1942 the village was meant to be expanded with offices, workshops, a veterinary clinic and housing, but because of the war the work never started.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian