It was 1902 when Vittorio Ducrot opened a small artisan atelier in Palermo known as "Studio Ducrot" which soon became an industrial production company. Inside the Cantieri Culturali, in the heart of the Zisa district – from the Arabic al-Aziza, or "the splendid" – the pavilions vibrated with life and creativity: the spaces, full of machinery, formed a real "furniture citadel ”. The greatest craftsmen including carvers, cabinet makers, carpenters, men and women, worked on the creation of artifacts loved all over the world. Everyone competed to request the prestigious wooden masterpieces created by the genius of Ernesto Basile, who took care of the design. There are places in Italy and around the world that still tell the story of falegnamerie Ducrot: from the historic Gran Caffè Faraglia in Venice to the classroom of Palazzo Montecitorio. They are precious furnishings for hotels, luxury ships, casinos, clubs, theatres, headquarters of important public institutions, between Naples, Taormina, Genoa, Cairo and Istanbul.
Today the spaces of the historic Ducrot workshops, inside the Cultural yards at the Zisa, return to being a place of production thanks to technological workshops of NOZ – Nuove Officine Zisa. It is here that courses for the professionalization and for the enhancement of traditional skills are based, with particular attention to intercultural dialogue and the exchange of knowledge. THE wooden carousels made inside the NOZ workshops, they tell a story of craftsmanship that merges with new skills such as the use of numerically controlled machines: a challenge taken up by foreign street vendors in Palermo who wanted to enhance their professional skills and open up to new knowledge learning to use hi-tech equipment, from 3D printers to laser cut. A special fairy tale which inherits the great history of the Ducrot workshops and reinforces it with a new company name. Look for the wooden fairy tales in the stalls of street vendors in the city or request a shipment by writing to info@nuoveofficinezisa.com.