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Up to the end of the seven hundred one the wagon had only a hand of color (blue, grey, yellow), spread out to assure a certain protection. Then something changes. The ethnologist Joseph Pitrč tells him/it: "The wheelbarrows, above a general fund of yellow color in the four compartments of the two broadsides, they brought rough sketches of saints, of heads and of baskets with flowers and fruit in red color and of slices of mellone." In short, to the beginning the famous wheelbarrow has few more than some simpleton frieze. Then necessity arrives to improve his/her own system of sale and as him industriano I candied and gelatieri, knife sharpener and bibitari, the itinerant ones think well about attracting the attention of babies and clients with elaborate and fluorescent paintings more and more. The element scaramantico then, conquest soon the throne: to St. George that kills the dragon the place of honor, the pizzu or rather the center of the spread out joist on the axle of the wheels.
None of the artists of the brush stays extraneous to the great movement of elaboration iconografica that begins to take shape turning himself/herself/itself into the turn of few generations in a great phenomenon of custom: from the painter of poster for the puparis, with his/her thick procession of the launchings Hemming, Charles Magno, Roger, Rinaldo, to the pincisantis and painters of ex vote that steal to the religious repertoire you sprout and ideas to be transported on the wood, giving origin to of the real artistic tides, with the wheelbarrows to catanisa, to st.antunisa, to bruntisa.
They realize so of the authentic works of art, calling to harvest teachers cabinetmakers, skilled blacksmiths and excellent painters, to agreeably conjugate arabesque in wood and reliefs in beaten iron, leaving the final touch to a crowd of embroideries, playthings, plumes of long beautiful colored feathers. The wheelbarrows, been born then, as agricultural wagons, they become the tallest example of craftsmanship and Sicilian popular painting.
When the wheelbarrow loses its middle function of transport, the wheelwrights transfer their decorative abilities to the motoapes (lape). And when these disappear from the roads, he goes to seek the way to maintain in life such a rooted artistic tradition elsewhere.
The committenza is changed. In the park clients show up architects and foreign buyers, museums and local corporate body. To the Sicilian wheelbarrow reinventarsi is touched in thousand ways (the wheels have discovered the electricity allowing to be hung to mo' of chandelier; the panels have learned to compete with pictures and tapestries on the walls of hotels and private residences and the auctions, those slender sculturine that seems totem from I walk, they are ended up making himself/herself/themselves contend as collezionismo pieces).
The whole wheelbarrows, looked for in the open country and wisely restored, they find his/her own ideal position together with about ten other pieces (broadsides, casce, fused, keys...) ripescate from who knows where, or you create of healthy plant. And they are authentic triumphs of color, the wheelbarrows still today servants in the little and glorious shops, where she among diction withstands, with a tenacity all Sicilian.
Some specimens are exposed in Palermo in Museo Etnografico Pitrč, where are collected all of the most important testimonies on customs and traditions Sicilian.
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