Roger de Barbarin

Roger de Barbarin’s family had a military background. His great-grandfather played an active part in the French revolution while his grandfather was an officer in Napoleon’s army during the Peninsular War. However his father eschewed the military and became a well-known portrait painter in the mid 19th century.

One of France’s foremost trap shooters in the first decade of the twentieth century, he became the inaugural Olympic champion in the discipline when he beat Rene Guyot and Justinien, Count Clary in a sudden death shoot out after the three had shot seventeen of twenty clay birds. Guyot missed his thirteenth shot to allow de Barbarin to become champion.

On the death of his mother, Maria Accursia Consiglio, baronessa di Castel Belici, an aristocratic native of Sicily, he inherited the Castel Belici estate, which extended over more than 1000 hectares in the province of Palermo. In 1908 a local bank brokered a deal where the estate was sold to the local Mafia boss Calogero “Don Calò” Vizzini.