Old Gibellina

I'm inaugurating this blog with one of the strangest communities I have ever visited, Gibellina.
Gibellina is really the name of two cities in North Central Sicily, about an hour from the Sicilian capital of Palermo. My trip started with a visit to old Gibellina in February, 2008. Gibellina is a hard place to find with almost no signs pointing you toward the lone twisting mountain road that ascends up from the valley floor. After a twenty minute ride the road suddenly ends to reveal a strange sight, a series of concrete blocks that seem to create the outline of a life size map. These blocks are all that remains of Gibellina, a city destroyed by a horrific earthquake in 1968.

Gibellina was a poor mountain village, challenged by its medival location on a steep mountain slope and difficult to reach from nearly anywhere. The tight, dense village clung to the steep slopes of a mountain at a particularly windy location. Gibellina was surelly a harsh place to live however few could predict the events that unraveled on January 25th 1968.

The earthquake left little standing of Gibellina. The survivors of the disaster were moved to temporary trailers (a la FEMA) a few miles away. The concrete platforms for the trailers can still be seen as you drive toward old Gibellina. The village itself was deamed unsafe for habitation and residents were not allowed to move back. To commerate the disaster the towns layout was incapsulated in concrete, forever removing any chance of reconstructing the original community. The concrete Gibellina art piece today stands earily abandonded on the windswept mountain top, seemingly forgotten.

The Gibellina memorial, made by Tuscan artist Antonio Burri, is a strange way to mark and remember space. Place has strong emotional conotations for a resident and Burri's dramatic statement at Gibellina erases nearly all context and meaning from the sight. All that is left to remember are the meandering paths of the villages streets, but even they, slowly decaying in the chipped concrete, will one day be forgotten. For locals Gibellina is a place that produces mixed feelings. It appears to be almost a high handed act by the central government that diverted money from reconstruction and created a memorial disconnected from anyones actually memory.

The residents, after over decade of living in a temporary trailer park, were finally moved to New Gibellina, a city envisioned as a architectural and urban planning vanguard. Gibellina Nuovo was built with high aspirations but like Burri's work was of dubious success. The strange city of Gibellina Nuova will probably be the subject of later posts.