Pancrazio Buciunì (28 June 1879 – 30 January 1963) was an Italian model, lover and heir of Wilhelm von Gloeden,[2] a German photographer who settled in Sicily in the late nineteenth century and was significant in the History of Taormina.

The young Buciunì looked after von Gloeden when he was sick, administering medications, getting special food from townspeople, preparing the saltwater baths that doctors prescribed.

At the end of the 1920s, when the Vatican formed an alliance with the fascist government, some 1,000 glass negatives and about 2,000 prints from von Gloeden's inheritance were confiscated and destroyed by police as obscene.

The same as with his treason case he was able to defend himself and von Gloeden's memory, telling the court that it was not competent to judge works of art.

During the events of WWII Pancrazio had lost his daughter Natala, who disappeared in 1943 in Catania during an Allied bombing,[8] and had seen his son Alfio deported to Germany as a prisoner of war.

As for mail-order sales, the exhausted nations of the conflict had all imposed severe restrictions on capital exports, so the foreign market was practically closed at the time.

When Roger Peyrefitte visited Taormina in the 1940s, he mentioned Pancrazio Buciunì in his novel, telling that: "His faithful Moro, today a simple fisherman, working at what many of his countrymen do (fishing)".

It is reasonable to doubt that at almost seventy Buciunì could compete in the profession of fisherman with the many unemployed young men: a different tradition in fact says that he simply "made the season" as a waiter on a cruise ship.

Unexpectedly, the publication in 1949 of Roger Peyrefitte's short novel, Eccentric amori, which had considerable success all over the world, relaunched the name of Wilhelm von Gloeden among a new generation of homophiles, who began to contact il Moro to buy pictures of the baron.

Some 800 remnants of von Gloeden's work, that belonged to Il Moro, including 878 glass negatives, 956 positives and 200 albumen prints, were sold to the archive of Lucio Amelio in Naples by his son Vincenzo Buciunì(1912-1997).

In 2021, the financial problems of the Alinari Foundation finally led the Tuscany Region to purchase the Gloeden archive, to preserve it and make it accessible to the public again in the future.

A part of this collection, which includes a hundred positives, the 18x24 camera and Gloeden's private photos, was purchased by the Municipality of Taormina in 2023, thanks to the sponsorship of an unnamed fashion house.