Gibellina, Italy
Sicily’s landscapes are a combination of dreamy shoreline, rugged peaks and rolling hills which are each bit as spectacular as these in Tuscany.
But within the far west of the Mediterranean’s largest island, amid the undulating panorama of the Belice Valley, lie two hillsides that would by no means be mistaken for Tuscany. On one stand columns and partitions that, from a distance, may very well be Greek or Roman stays, however up shut change into recognizable because the ruins of extra modern buildings.
The subsequent hill over, in the meantime, is the colour of concrete. It’s not an experimental crop rising there — get nearer and also you see there’s nothing swaying within the breeze. Closer nonetheless, you understand that it is because it’s actually concrete, poured over the hillside in a polygon form — a grey blanket swaddling the inexperienced.
Visible for miles round, and initially a surprising white when it was accomplished in 2015, that is the “Cretto di Burri,” or the “Grande Cretto” (the nice cleft, or crevice). An unlimited work of land artwork, it’s made of concrete poured over 926,000 sq. ft of the hillside. This isn’t artwork for the sake of it. The Cretto sprawls over the stays of the city of Gibellina, which was destroyed in an earthquake on January 15, 1968.
While different villages destroyed by the earthquake nonetheless stand in ruins, Gibellina is a city turned to stone. Channels minimize by means of the concrete characterize the streets that when ran beneath. Visitors can stroll alongside these “streets” the place the concrete wedges — every representing a block of the city — stand shoulder-to-head top. Sometimes, a swell within the concrete signifies ruins under that had been greater than common, or had been tougher to clear.
It is, in essence, a modern model of Pompeii — a city trapped in time. But the place the traditional Roman metropolis was smothered by volcanic ash in 79 CE, Gibellina has been lined as a means of preserving its reminiscence for the ages.
The Cretto — made by Twentieth-century artist Alberto Burri — has additionally change into a vacationer attraction for inland Sicily. So has the brand new Gibellina, which was rebuilt half an hour away as a startlingly modernist city — after which full of artwork donated by some of the world’s finest recognized up to date artists.
Today, Gibellina is Italy’s first ever Capital of Contemporary Art. Throughout 2026, it can host a sequence of occasions and exhibitions in its extraordinary modernist buildings. It’s a testomony to the resolve of the individuals who didn’t settle for their destiny however determined to rebuild — and, finally, to show their struggling into artwork.
With its mountain ranges, volcanoes, fragile coastlines and delicate islands, Italy has at all times been a spot of violent geography. Minor earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are frequent. Other quakes over historical past have razed complete areas to the bottom, and displaced lots of of hundreds of residents.
The Belice earthquake of 1968 was Italy’s first catastrophe of the modern period. And it got here as a whole shock.
Beginning at lunchtime on Sunday, January 14, a sequence of tremors shook the valley, culminating within the last, and strongest, at 3.01 a.m. on January 15. It measured 6.4 on the Richter Scale — two ranges from “total destruction” on the Mercalli Scale, which measures injury on the bottom.
The quake hit 21 cities throughout three provinces of Sicily, however the worst affected had been Gibellina, which was flattened in seconds, and its neighbors, Salaparuta and Poggioreale.
“If that had been the first tremor, there would have been many more dead, says Gibellina’s mayor, Salvatore Sutera, who was eight years old at the time. “Most people left during the day. Those who stayed at home were older people who didn’t believe there was danger.”
“It was completely unexpected,” says Giulio Ippolito, who was 15. His household, like Sutera’s, fled the city through the afternoon.
Across the Belice Valley, 296 individuals misplaced their lives. Over 1,000 were injured and nearly 100,000 were made homeless.
‘Abandoned by everybody’
How do you rebuild from an earthquake? Even now, life returning to regular isn’t assured — there are nonetheless hundreds residing in non permanent lodging after the 2016 earthquakes in central Italy.
In 1968, the scenario was far worse. Francesca Corrao, whose father was to be instrumental in reworking Gibellina, mentioned authorities didn’t need to rebuild what was seen as a poor city. “They weren’t interested.”
Initially, the federal government supplied individuals cash to depart.
“A few month after the quake, the state gave people one-way tickets to Australia and the US,” says Michele Benfari, president of Percorsi a Morsi, an area cultural affiliation.
“The earthquake was only the first catastrophe,” says Ippolito. “We were abandoned by everybody,”
Eventually, most of the affected villages had been rebuilt near their unique places. Gibellina was the exception — due to its mayor. Ludovico Corrao was a Palermo lawyer who’d visited Gibellina within the wake of the catastrophe to assist the group. “He went there and never came back,” says his daughter Francesca. Corrao was elected mayor in 1969.
One of his first proposals was to maneuver Gibellina from the hills to flatter land west, close to the railway line connecting Palermo to Sicily’s southern coast. A freeway to the capital was additionally under building — and Corrao believed that connectivity could be the important thing to Gibellina’s future.
“Corrao’s extraordinary intelligence was to pull them out of deafening poverty by moving the village near the freeway,” says Benfari. Today, locals nonetheless reward that call. “It’s a huge advantage,” says Andrea Messina, who produces I Siciliani cheese from Belice Valley sheeps’ milk, for international export, along with his brother Piero. “It wouldn’t be comparable if we were in the hills.”
The rebuild didn’t run easily. Government planners noticed the reconstruction as a possibility to experiment with modern structure by no means earlier than seen in Sicily.
This was an period of big industrial enlargement. Italy was changing into a European heart of automobile manufacturing, and the brand new Gibellina was deliberate across the vehicle with no piazza as focal point. People who had lived shut collectively in outdated residences had been transferred to homes with sprawling out of doors house to park automobiles. The streets had been now 40 ft huge, which might assist mitigate future earthquake injury, however meant residents may now not chat to their neighbors, window to window.
“The urban plan has nothing to do with Sicily,” says Andrea Cusumano, director of the Capital of Contemporary Art program. “It was imposed from on high. I don’t think they ever came here — it was an experiment.”
The rebuild took many years. Residents had been housed first in tents, after which steel huts insulated with asbestos, now recognized to be carcinogenic. Families needed to hold their livestock inside with them.
The final households left the huts in 2006. But the primary residents who relocated to the brand new Gibellina had been introduced with a dilemma — how do you rebuild a group and a life in an city atmosphere that’s fully alien?
Corrao’s thought was to concentrate on its the soul. “Faced with oblivion, they chose to make the town be reborn through art,” says Cusumano.
On January 15, 1970, the residents of Gibellina launched an enchantment for assist. Artist Renato Guttuso attended — one of his work now hangs in Gibellina’s modern artwork gallery. Intellectuals together with Carlo Levi spoke. Gibellina gained a nationwide platform, due to celeb intervention.
And as residents progressively relocated to the brand new metropolis, outstanding artists visited — to work or become involved in group tasks. Over time, this tiny Sicilian city grew to become one of a very powerful hubs for modern artwork on the planet.
“They were giving hope through art,” says Francesca Corrao, a tutorial who’s now president of the Fondazione Orestiadi, a cultural establishment based by her father.
“What happened in Gibellina was incredible,” says Ippolito. “Even now you couldn’t believe it.”
Not everybody was excited. Sutera, who spent 13 years in non permanent lodging, remembers the distrust of the locals. “It was a double shock,” he says of the earthquake and the rebuild. “This was a really poor place — you had people who worked for a piece of bread and never left the town. You think you understand something, and then someone arrives who shows you something else.”
The “Grande Cretto” is one of these artworks. Alberto Burri was one of the artists invited to work on the brand new Gibellina, but it surely was impressed by a go to to the ruins and, says Ippolito, a go to to a Greek temple at close by Segesta: “An ancient thing preserved over the years.”
The Cretto covers an almost 30-acre rectangular stretch of land and is made up of 122 blocks of cement between 5 and 6 ft excessive. Burri created his “town blocks” by fencing off areas of rubble with cement partitions. He then created sunken pathways between the partitions and crammed the “blocks” by pouring cement over the ruins, freezing them for eternity.
In essence, it’s the other course of of that at Pompeii, the place archaeologists pour concrete into the empty areas beneath the ash layers to point out the imprints of the individuals and animals who died within the explosion. At Gibellina, the concrete has been used to cowl the destruction — but additionally highlight it.
The Cretto was impressed by an outdated map of Gibellina, and a few pathways between the cement retrace the unique streets. Others had been created by Burri to kind a labyrinth impact.
It was a controversial thought — not least with the inhabitants, who had been deeply connected to their destroyed city. “The concrete was going to cover those bits of their houses that they could still see,” says Sutera. A handful of stays had been moved to Nuova Gibellina: a chic archway, a couple of columns, a dolphin-shaped fountain, all remnants of the previous of their courageous new world.
Work started in 1984, however was halted 5 years later as a result of of lack of funding. Burri died in 1995 however work restarted in 2013 and was completed in May 2015.
“The work emerges in a literal place of death, but it is not a work of death, but of life,” creator and psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati has mentioned of the Cretto. “It shows the impossibility of forgetting what happened, the impossibility of oblivion.”
Today, some of the “walls” are tinged blood-red consequently of iron from bulldozed ruins leaching out and oxidizing within the rain, says Benfari, whose Percorsi a Morsi affiliation runs a gallery and bar within the semi-destroyed church of Santa Caterina. He’d prefer to see the Cretto resurfaced or painted to revive the unique blinding white coloration that was as soon as seen from the primary highway alongside Sicily’s southern coast.
The Cretto stands in stark distinction to its neighbors. The ruins of Salaparuta sag on a neighboring hill, whereas Poggioreale stands like a ghost city additional alongside. Unlike Gibellina, each had been rebuilt near the ruins.
The Cretto isn’t the one art work, although; Nuova Gibellina is an unassuming world-class repository of modern artwork. Postmodern painter Mario Schifano labored with Gibellina’s college children and the city now owns the second largest assortment of his works on the planet.
Painter Carla Accardi designed ceramics for the partitions of the brand new city corridor. Artist Emilio Isgrò translated Aeschylus’ historical Greek tragedies into Sicilian dialect, sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro constructed avant-garde costumes for actors when it was carried out within the ruins of Gibellina, and playwright Robert Wilson directed. Artist Mimmo Paladino created his “Salt Mountain” sculpture for a manufacturing; composer Philip Glass premiered an opera in Gibellina.
There was monumental public artwork, too. Sculptor Pietro Consagra created the Stella d’ingresso al Belice, an 85-foot stainless-steel star marking the spot the place the Belice hills flatten into the plains under. In the yawning house outdoors the huge city corridor stands the Torre Civica, a Brutalist-style “civic tower” which initially blasted Sicilian folks tunes by means of a loudspeaker. Around the city are dozens of sculptures by artists from Mimmo Rotella to Joseph Beuys and Ignazio Moncada.
The artists and designers injected artwork into the structure of the city, too. To fill a blocks-long empty house between streets, Franco Purini and Laura Thermes designed the Sistema delle Piazze, a haunting three-block house of geometric precision that appears like a Giorgio de Chirico portray crossed with a grand Egyptian temple.
The foremost church, by Ludovico Quaroni, appears to be like like a ship spliced with a hot-air balloon — an enormous white sphere outdoors consuming into the inside.
Another church, by Nanda Vigo, echoes Sicily’s previous as a North African colony.
Then there’s the Teatro — a fan-shaped behemoth of a constructing, so huge that it straddles two roads. Consagra deliberate this because the city’s theater, but it surely was by no means completed. Today, it appears extra like a multi-story parking zone crossed with a UFO. Two pleasant stray canine are its everlasting inhabitants.
Today, Gibellina’s inhabitants has dropped from round 6,000 on the time of the earthquake to three,000 — and over 5,500 up to date artworks. Andrea Cusumano parallels it to Marfa, Texas — and even Brasilia, Brazil’s modernist capital. The map of Gibellina lists no fewer than 70 creative websites, together with the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, one of Italy’s finest up to date artwork museums, and the Museo delle Trame Mediterranee, which knits collectively Mediterranean cultures by means of artwork. The latter is positioned in a farmstead that’s residence to the Fondazione Orestiadi, a cultural basis based by Corrao. Ippolito — that 15-year-old boy who skilled the quake — is its energetic co-founder and vp.
Visiting Gibellina right this moment is a mesmerizing, if eerie, expertise. Because the city was constructed for automobiles and has no actual heart, it seems like small-town America — you’ll barely see any pedestrians, however you’ll discover automobiles parked up outdoors the bars and eating places.
And as a result of the authorities prioritized rehousing locals over kickstarting the economic system, many left to search for work elsewhere. That means Gibellina Nuova feels too massive for its present inhabitants.
Those on the lookout for a typical Italian expertise — a espresso within the piazza, adopted by a dip right into a church and a stroll — are out of luck. You can stroll round, however you seemingly received’t see anybody else to greet. But it’s a special story inside Moma Café, or any of the bars or eating places on the 2 foremost streets. “Gibellina is full of vast spaces, but little by little there are growing pockets of bars or places where people meet up,” says Sutera, the mayor.
After years of vacancy, may 2026 be the yr that the artists’ dream of Gibellina lastly involves fruition? As Italy’s first ever Capital of Contemporary Art, it has received funds to revive some of the buildings. Many had fallen right into a state of disrepair — “It’s not easy for a small city to maintain this heritage,” says Cusumano. He means psychologically in addition to virtually. “Over the years there’s been a distancing of the population from the art — it’s like we lost the instruction book,” he says. But he hopes that with this yr’s exhibitions, that may change.
The Teatro constructing has been reworked into an exhibition house, as has the deconsecrated church. The Fondazione Orestiadi is one other spectacular exhibition house. And the artists are again. This summer time, Igor Grubić will make an set up of strolling from Gibellina Vecchia to Nuova, chatting with locals about their expertise of being uprooted.
Meanwhile on the Cretto itself, since final yr, Benfari’s cultural affiliation has been placing on common artwork and pictures exhibitions.
Cusumano hopes to make use of the city’s yr within the highlight to determine lasting hyperlinks with fine-art academies throughout Italy to start out Gibellina residencies subsequent yr. “We want to bring back this idea of artists being present,” he says. “We’re imagining the legacy of Capital of Contemporary Art. It can’t be just about making Gibellina attractive to tourists. This is a year of construction, not presentation.”
The Belice Valley’s issues aren’t over. Benfari says that depopulation ranges are just like these of the Nineteen Sixties and financial woes persist.
It’s the identical story for rural cities and villages throughout Italy — therefore all these one euro homes tasks — however there’s an additional piquancy within the Belice Valley, which has already resisted a lot. Cusumano says that tempting again younger individuals who’ve left is just too formidable; as a substitute, he hopes to draw artist newcomers.
“This is a magical place,” says Benfari. Those visiting this yr will seemingly agree.