In January 1968 a strong earthquake struck the Valle del Belice, also destroying the city of Gibellina, a small town in the Trapani hinterland. It was the strongest destructive post-war earthquake and no one knew how to handle the emergency. Despite the human losses and the heavy repercussions on the territory, the desire for rebirth and social redemption met the saving nature of art which, through the hand of Alberto Burri, stopped the historical memory of those places by returning the greatest work of Land Art in the world.
We are talking about the Cretto di Burri, a sort of white cement shroud that retraces and tells the streets and stories of the old city, reconstructing its original plan.
Mario Mattia, researcher at the Etna Observatory of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, told us, with emotional participation, the story of this suggestive contemporary work of art.
What exactly happened that day?
January 14, 1968 was a winter Sunday like many in the country. There was a lot of anticipation for the soccer championship match: Palermo were playing against Potenza.
From 13:28 a seismic sequence began which culminated with the shock of 3:01 on 15 January, of magnitude 6.3.
Many towns were razed to the ground, including Gibellina, one of the most damaged. Although many people had decided to spend the night away from their homes, the toll in the Valley was terrible: 352 human losses, more than 600 injured and tens of thousands of homeless, in addition to the enormous damage suffered to the buildings and rural heritage.
What was the reaction to the earthquake? What happened immediately after?
Republican Italy was young and was caught completely unprepared. It was the first time that the Italian government had to manage such an important emergency, among other things in a very poor area, where industrialization was unknown and archaic cultivation techniques were still used in agriculture. The government of the time, trying to solve part of the problem, found it useful to distribute one-way train tickets to any destination. This choice, however, aggravated the already considerable phenomenon of residential depopulation and those areas suffered an exodus of about 30.000 people. With the abandonment of the lands, reconstruction was no longer urgent and the interventions inevitably went slowly.
When were there the first signs of a renaissance?
After about twenty years, Ludovico Corrao, mayor of Gibellina since the seventies, gave a strong push to the reconstruction of Gibellina and the entire Belice area with the intuition of starting from a "cultural" reconstruction rather than a building one. An extremely sensitive person to art, he had many friendships among the great architects and great Italian artists of the time to whom he launched a sort of invitation and "challenge" to experiment and practice art in Gibellina. He was convinced that only through art would these poor and uninhabited areas have a future.
How did the contemporary Italian artistic community respond?
The response was strong. Many nationally renowned artists accepted Corrao's invitation (free of charge), including Pietro Consagra, Alberto Burri, Ludovico Quaroni, Franco Purini, Laura Thermes, Mimmo Rotella, Mario Schifano and many others who enriched the Nuova Gibellina with works by contemporary art. I'm talking about "New" Gibellina because when decisions were made for the reconstruction it was decided not to recover the town of the old Gibellina but to transfer the town to a piece of Salemi territory, about fifteen kilometers away. The urban layout adopted was typically northern European, in contrast with what was the tradition of Sicilian villages typically perched around a centre, with a medieval-type structure. Here the artists created a completely new city which, paradoxically, experiences a contradiction between abandonment (there are very few Gibellinesi left) and the presence of these extremely modern works of art, strange in some ways, which make it absolutely unique.
Alberto Burri also answered the call to the arts, but chose Gibellina Vecchia as the place of his work. Why?
Alberto Burri, an Umbrian artist who was very important in the Italian art world of the twentieth century, arrived in Gibellina in the XNUMXs but did not like the new town and was accompanied to the ruins of the old city. He was fascinated by it and decided that this was the place where he would give his artistic contribution. So he designed the Grande Cretto.
Burri is an artist famous precisely for his cretti, or rough surfaces that have large incisions that express plasticity and, according to some, wounds. The artist designed and subsequently created a sort of concrete shroud that covers the entire inhabited area of the old Gibellina and that traces, through the typical cuts of the cracks, the streets and squares of the old city, effectively reconstructing its topography. Instead of houses, huge blocks of white concrete cover the hill with an area of 80.000 square meters. The work was carried out between 1984 and 1989, but only in part. Burri unfortunately never saw his project finished because he died in 1995. But the Sicily Region undertook to finish his work, which was completed according to the original project in 2015.
What does it feel like to cross what, from above, looks like a silent white maze?
It is a unique work and represents an evocative journey in a city that no longer exists. Crossing the Cretto, perhaps at sunset, gives life to unique emotions retracing furrows that represent the streets and life of the old city. In silence, it is the place itself that whispers its history for an everlasting memory.
As Leonard Cohen said: "There is a crack in everything and that's where the light comes in".