Morning light pours through the monastery windows as Valeria Oblak, a flight attendant, throws a fist of clay onto a wheel. We’re in Salemi, a rural Sicilian town an hour’s drive from Palermo, with peeling facades and views across the Belice Valley. “Have you done this before?” I ask. She grins, her wet fingers shaping spinning clay. “No. But I’ve always wanted to try.”

Oblak, like many of her classmates, didn’t come to Sicily for the beaches or food. She’s here for a beginner’s ceramics class in a centuries-old monastery – the home of Salemi Ceramics, a social enterprise bringing new energy to a town that nearly slipped off the map.