A visit to Sicily’s haunting concrete ghost town
Gibellina was flattened by a massive earthquake in 1968. Fifty years later, a sprawling work of land art has finally been completed to commemorate the lost town
If you were a subscriber to the New York Times on 15 January, 1968, a small news item on the front page might have caught your eye as you ate your morning toast.
PALERMO, Italy, Monday, Jan. 15 (AP) — A series of earthquakes ripped through the countryside of western Sicily early today, and the police said as many as 20 persons may have been killed and 300 injured.
Three shocks struck between 2:34 A.M. and 4:20 A.M. They were said to have crumbled stone walls and cinder-block buildings in dozens of small farming towns southwest of Palermo.
Three lesser tremors hit the same area yesterday, driving hundreds of rural residents into vineyards and fields covered in four inches of snow, the mark of Sicily’s worst winter in years.
The police at Trapani, a provincial seat on the western coast, said at least 10 persons were reported killed in Gibellina, a town of 6,000, 30 miles southwest of Palermo.
You might have shaken your head at the thought of the destruction, and moved on with your day; perhaps, given it was the 1960s, you might have wondered what became of the distant relatives you were still vaguely aware of through your nonna back in the old country. Whatever your reaction, though, the Times piece wouldn’t have given you the full picture of the damage done by the earthquake. Because even if the death toll was only ten, Gibellina was entirely levelled. Nobody would live in the town ever again.
The Belice Earthquake was one of the worst to hit Italy in the modern era. Somewhere between 200 and 400 people were killed1, a thousand injured, and possibly up to 100,000 made homeless. In fact, several quakes took place over a couple of days, and after the first few hit on 14 January, many residents of the affected towns chose to sleep outside in the bitter cold rather than risk their roofs falling in on them, a decision which likely saved hundreds, if not thousands of their lives.
Sicily, particularly the interior of the island, is poor and underdeveloped in 2024; in 1968, it would be unrecognisable to those expecting to visit a modern European country. Long considered the breadbasket of Italy, the island was an extremely rural and conservative society compared to the north (parts of Sicily are further south than parts of Tunisia and Algeria; northern Italians will still to this day occasionally and derogatorily describe Sicilians as “Africans”). The rich, layered cultural tradition in Sicily belied an island which had only abandoned feudalism a century earlier, in the process swapping one form of exploitation (that of the lord and the serf) for another: mafia protection rackets.
Palermo, Sicily’s largest city, had been bombed to smithereens during the Allied liberation of Italy twenty years earlier, leaving 14,000 people homeless; as such, the demand for concrete and new, often illegal housing had led to a boom in construction, and by the 1960s, the mafia had considerable interests in quarries and the cement and construction industries. According to John Dickie’s history of the Italian mafia, Cosa Nostra, between 1959 and 1963, roughly 80 per cent of building permits were granted to just five people – none of whom represented major construction firms, and all of whom were very likely mafia frontmen. Buildings had been thrown up illegally across the city and the outlying towns, often in violation of building codes, in what became known as “the sack of Palermo”. From 1951 through to 1981, the population of Palermo grew 41 per cent, from 503,000 to 709,000. The demand for housing was such that people lived in crowded, unsafe tenements and housing blocks that sprang up for miles around the city. Some even lived in caves.
It was against this backdrop that after the destruction of Gibellina and several surrounding towns, the authorities – such as they were – decided to do something a little different. The towns would remain ruined, and the populations would be moved and housed in new, purpose-built settlements a few miles away from each (one hardly need wonder what the motivation to upsize the building contracts could have been…). Architects from across Italy were called in to design the new towns. Not unlike the way British cities were rebuilt after the war, there was a certain utopianism at play – a high-minded chance for urban renewal.
If you know anything about Sicily, though, or about postwar British council estates, you’ll know that high-minded ideals don’t get you hugely far. The new towns were designed with cars in mind, rather than people. Many residents preferred to move abroad than to live in the new urban centres built for them. One, Poggioreale Nuova, was designed to house 10,000 residents, but by 2018, the Guardian reported that it was home to only 1,400. Nuova Gibellina was rebuilt 12 miles away, on land belonging to mafia associates called Ignazio and Nino Salvo. Well – it was “rebuilt”. Today, the town remains unfinished, and is only home to 5,000 people when it was intended for 20,000. I’ve been there, and you can tell. Supposedly, it will cost (this from the Guardian again) about €380 million to complete.
As for the ruins of old Gibellina, they remained untouched for 16 years. Until Alberto Burri came calling.
By 1984, Burri – a multihyphenate from Perugia, in Umbria – was already an established artist, with an almost forty-year career to his name. Trained as a physician, he’d seen action in the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and again during the fighting in Libya in World War Two, before being captured and interned in Texas. It was at this time that he started painting, but within a few years he became fascinated with materiality, creating a series of collages called Catrami, or “Tars”, as well as working in sand, zinc, pumice and aluminium. From the 1970s onwards, he had moved onto his series of cretti, an old Italian word literally meaning “cracks”, but generally used to refer to the specific hairline cracks that would appear in the edges of plaster moulding. Burri applied heat to the surface of his (still just barely) two-dimensional works to crack the surfaces of them, inspired to do so following a trip to Death Valley, California, where he was captivated by the way the desert cracked and warped under the sun.
Part of the rebuilding of Nuova Gibellina involved commissioning contemporary artists to create public works for the town, which boasted a new cultural centre and a modern art museum. Burri was one of those invited by the mayor to contribute; despite initially ignoring the invitation, this mayor supposedly paid him a visit in person, and Burri relented. He toured the town, and decided against adding to the collection, but when he saw the ruins of the old Gibellina, untouched since the earthquake in 1968, he was moved to conceive of what would be known as the Cretto di Burri, or slightly amusingly “the Crack of Burri” – a sprawling work of land art that would commemorate the loss of the 300-year-old town a decade and a half before.
The aesthetic concept was simple: to apply Burri’s cretti at scale. The rubble, which was still all in situ, would be compacted and encased within concrete, and the blocks would be built to map onto the old street layout of Gibellina, preserving and immuring the town within a new, modernist monument. They would cover the whole of the town’s footprint, all 85,000 square metres, with each block around five feet high. To Burri, the monument would commemorate the town, but it had psycho-geographical visual implications beyond just that: it would be a signifier of the twenty traumatic years the country spent under fascism, the industrial nature of the destruction of the war2, and a reference, in its gleaming white stone, to the antique classical heritage of the Mediterranean, and Sicily in particular.
The villagers who had left Gibellina were initially resistant to encasing their old homes in massive blocks of concrete, and it took Burri some time to convince them of the intent behind the project; eventually, they were convinced, and work crews began to scour the ruins of the town for artefacts from residents’ past lives. Cars, clothes, books, furniture, toys and other objects were all buried within the Cretto, like ancient grave goods. Then the concrete was poured.
I visited the Cretto di Burri on a university trip in 2015. It’s an astonishing, spare place, visible for miles around and bright under the searingly hot Sicilian sun. Lonely Planet calls the Cretto “a disconcerting, lunar-like sea of white cement tumbling down a green hillside”, which I think is a good description, although around three-quarters of the cement is now a faded grey, and perhaps one-quarter is white, the result of funds for the memorial running out in 1989 when only 80% of the concrete had been poured. The Cretto was only finally finished and opened to the public in the year we visited, on the centenary of Burri’s birth. I was lucky to have had my camera and a roll of black-and-white film with me.
Walking around the work is surreal, heightened by the fact that there’s barely a building within miles other than the odd abandoned breeze-block barn. It feels appropriate for Sicily, somehow: striking and beautiful, but also spartan and minimal.
You’re dwarfed by the Cretto. It’s a little like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, but with a less reverent feel. The Cretto is a bit shabby in places. Unlike the Holocaust Memorial, you can climb on Burri’s construction, if you like, without feeling like you’re disrespecting the dead. In a way, it’s hard not to, once you’re there – the view is too impressive. You pull yourself up onto one of the warm grey blocks and look out over rolling hills that seem unchanged since antiquity, something that the villagers of Gibellina doubtless thought about from time to time in the hundreds of years that the town stood there. Or perhaps I’m romanticising it.
When I looked, I couldn’t find any (pardon the pun) concrete evidence of how old the town was when it was destroyed, but “Gibellina” itself comes from an Arabic phrase meaning “small mountain”. Bear in mind the Arabs conquered Sicily in the ninth century, and were driven out by the Normans in the 1070s; it’s fair to guess, then, that there might easily have been a settlement at Gibellina for more than a thousand years, all of that history now entombed under Burri’s concrete monolith.
The Cretto di Burri is one of the great examples of successful and affecting land art. As much as any of the other landmarks we visited in Sicily – Palermo Cathedral, the Cappella Palatina, the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento – it has etched itself into my memory, and I can still remember walking around its deserted “streets” nearly a decade later. Its story is that of the island itself: destruction, poverty and corruption, yes, but also artistic expression, collaboration with outsiders, and deep-rooted localism. You should go and visit it, if you can, but there’s no rush. It’s not like it’s going anywhere.
The most common figure given is 231.
Burri’s younger brother had been killed on the Eastern Front in 1943, and its impact on him is generally thought to have been considerable.
“Wizened husk” is, I personally think, a bit much
Bravo though. This is a great read!