What Can You Do With a ‘Failed’ Postmodern Utopia?

The panorama round Route A29, which connects Palermo and Mazara del Vallo, is a travel-brochure model of rural Sicily: rolling hills dotted with barley fields, olive groves, and vineyards, and the occasional cluster of historical ruins. Exit at Salemi, nonetheless, and observe the indicators for Gibellina Nuova, and a surprise awaits. Like a postmodern model of Roman period metropolis gates, there stands a 70-foot-tall metal sculpture of a five-pointed star by Sicilian sculptor Pietro Consagra. Porta del Belice (Door of Belice) or the Star of Belice marks the doorway to Gibellina Nuova, a city that hosts one of many largest collections of up to date artwork on the planet and a status as a failed artwork utopia or a surreal, postmodern ghost city.
Typically known as “Sicily’s Marfa,” a reference to the Texas city that has change into a nexus for modern artwork, Gibellina Nuova (New Gibellina) was constructed within the Nineteen Seventies after Gibellina Vecchia (Previous Gibellina) was destroyed by an earthquake. The previous city was not rebuilt because it was, or changed by bland condominium and workplace blocks, however as a substitute reformulated with surprisingly spherical church buildings, large avenues, squares that recall the surrealist work of Giorgio de Chirico, large public sculptures, and brutalist buildings, assembled by a roster of world-renowned artists and designers.
Its destiny, to this point, has been the destiny of many utopias through the years. Preliminary enthusiasm light. Weeds sprouted. Folks left. It turned a curiosity relatively than a mannequin. However lately, some Gibellina Nuova locals have been making an attempt to place it again on the cultural map, to stage one more resurrection within the Sicilian highlands.

Nestled atop a hill in the Belice Valley, Gibellina Vecchia was a city of about 20 acres and 6,000 individuals. On January 15, 1968, a magnitude-6.4 earthquake destroyed most of its centuries-old buildings and killed an estimated 300 individuals. “I do not forget that it was snowing on the night time of the earthquake,” says Salvatore Sutera, mayor of Gibellina Nuova, who grew up within the previous city and was eight years previous when it was leveled. “My household took shelter with some family members in a close-by city after the primary earthquake wave hit.”
Within the aftermath of the catastrophe, residents have been housed in non permanent shelters whereas the Italian authorities labored out a plan. On the time, Sicily had been largely left behind by the “financial miracle” that helped raise tens of millions of Italians out of poverty in the course of the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties. “The state noticed the reconstruction within the Belice Valley as a chance to launch western Sicily into the longer term,” says Angela Badami, a professor of structure on the College of Palermo and the creator of Gibellina, la città che visse due volte, on the historical past of Gibellina.
The state entity tasked with rebuilding Gibellina—Istituto Superiore per l’Edilizia Sociale, or ISES—checked out fashionable city fashions of the time, Badami explains. They ultimately settled on the “garden city,” a design popularized within the Sixties by English city planner Ebenezer Howard. With satellite tv for pc communities separated by greenbelts, backyard cities have been designed to mix points of city and rural dwelling to alleviate the density of the UK’s industrial cities. Utilized to an agricultural space in western Sicily, the backyard metropolis framework had a bizarre impact. “It was like placing a mountain hut within the desert,” Badami says.

It was a controversial plan from the beginning. Ludovico Corrao, a well-known progressive lawyer, acquired closely concerned within the imaginative and prescient for a brand new Gibellina. A devoted artwork collector, he and his artist and mental buddies had mentioned creation of a hub for Mediterranean arts and tradition. In a city that was a clean slate, he noticed a chance.
“He sought to recreate a shared id by way of arts and tradition,” explains Davide Camarrone, creator I Maestri di Gibellina, a guide in regards to the city. “Sicily has at all times been on the crossroads of various civilizations, individuals coming from Africa and from the jap Mediterranean have all transited by way of the island, taking with them completely different languages, religions and cultures.”
Corrao thought Gibellina may mirror this cultural melting pot and revive it as core to Sicily’s cultural id. He was elected mayor of Gibellina Nuova in 1969 and in 1970 he shared a name for artists, architects, and intellectuals to contribute to the brand new city. The decision, cosigned by novelist Leonardo Sciascia, trendy painter Renato Guttuso, and cultural patron Giovanni Treccani, introduced the eye of artists, architects, and concrete planners, together with Consagra, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Ludovico Quaroni, Nanda Vigo, and Alberto Burri.
The reconstruction of Gibellina had taken on epic proportions.

Not everybody may see Corrao’s imaginative and prescient, and massive plans require massive funding—at private and official ranges. “A few of us have been disoriented by all that change taking place in such a brief period of time,” Sutera says. “The earthquake projected us from an agricultural world into a contemporary world mainly in a single day.” Some residents grew notably skeptical when little building occurred within the early Nineteen Seventies, and when reports of state-level corruption started to flow into in the midst of the last decade. Finally the state funds got here by way of, and by the Nineteen Eighties, the city was frantic with growth.
Diego Fontana, who was eight on the time of the earthquake and got here of age in the course of the Corrao period, remembers the Nineteen Eighties as Gibellina’s model of a medieval city’s cathedral-building, a communal effort that channeled the artistic power and labor of a complete populace. “Artisans, blacksmiths and carpenters have been all concerned with the belief of artworks,” he says, “individuals had the sensation they have been concerned with one thing greater than themselves.”
Rosalba Durante, who runs the city pharmacy, agreed to let her residence change into new an experimental mission by architects Franco Purini and Laura Thermes. “Corrao had a imaginative and prescient to create a city primarily based round modern artwork,” she says, “most of us believed in it and took dangers.”

Total, residents appeared to embrace the mayor’s mission. “We’re those who voted in Corrao,” Fontana says, including that he opened the primary restaurant of the brand new city, the place artists and locals would have dinner and keep up speaking till late at night time.
Greater than 50 works of public artwork and structure have been constructed in the course of the Corrao years, together with the Chiesa Madre or Mother Church, a big sphere resting on a concrete sq. designed by architect and concrete planner Ludovico Quaroni (impressed by the varied historical civilizations that dominated components of the island a thousand years in the past); the Torre Civica or Civic Tower, a megaphone-equipped 65-foot-tall concrete tower by Alessandro Mendrini that marks time with sounds from the audio assortment of Palermo College’s Anthropology Institute; and the Teatro, a brutalist constructing composed of rounded blocks of concrete designed by Consagra. Because of this, Gibellina is at the moment town with the very best variety of artworks per capita in Italy, Badami says.
Impressed by the traditional Greek city-state mannequin, Corrao envisioned a city the place efficiency was on the middle of public life. He turned a former textile laboratory into an arts foundation, known as Orestiadi. Locals have been actively concerned in performs, and the Orestiadi Festival would change into certainly one of Europe’s main arts occasions. “Throughout the Orestiadi, Gibellina felt like the middle of the world,” Sutera says. “Each resort on this a part of western Sicily was absolutely booked.”
However the guests didn’t stick round for lengthy.

Corrao’s imaginative and prescient continued to take form by way of the Nineteen Eighties, however the give attention to artwork and artists who didn’t dwell there rubbed some the mistaken approach. In 1994, with a few of the most bold initiatives (together with Alberto Burri’s large land artwork memorial, Il Grande Cretto (The Nice Crack), additionally known as the Cretto di Burri, which encased all of Gibellina Vecchia’s ruins in gleaming concrete) uncompleted, Corrao misplaced a mayoral election.
Over time, an absence of funds led to the decay of a few of the new initiatives. Weeds began to envelop the Cretto di Burri earlier than it was accomplished, in addition to the Palazzo di Lorenzo, a roofless constructing designed in 1981 by architect Francesco Venezia to protect a few of the partitions of a historic palace that crumbled in the course of the earthquake.
“After Corrao was gone we misplaced our sense of path as a metropolis,” Durante says. Many households left the city to search for jobs. Over the course of 40 years, Gibellina’s inhabitants decreased from 6,000 to three,500. The backyard metropolis, nonetheless, was designed for 50,000. The place the previous, medieval city lined about 50 acres, the brand new one sprawled throughout almost 500. Massive boulevards for automobiles took the place of cobblestone streets, and there was no piazza that supplied a locus for public life. “It seems like a metropolis designed with excellent geometrical proportions,” says 27-year-old Riccardo Lattuada, whose household relocated to a close-by city after the earthquake, “however perfection with out individuals can really feel alienating.”
By the late Nineteen Nineties Gibellina was labeled as a “failed experiment.” Town was ranked on lists of “failed architecture,” whereas journalists referred to it as a “ghostly disaster” and a “euthanized utopia.”

However some inventive visions typically die laborious. Although Corrao died in 2011, by the mid-2010s the thought of a cultural hub began to take maintain once more. In 2015, the Cretto di Burri was lastly accomplished after native artist Nicolò Stabile issued a name for its completion, that includes signatures from worldwide artists resembling Marina Abramović.
In 2016, town hosted the primary version of Gibellina Photoroad, a global, open-air artwork exhibition internet hosting large-scale pictures, prints, and installations organized round key landmarks. “The Photoroad exhibition gave Gibellina a breath of contemporary air,” Fontana says. The 2021 version, hosted just a few months after the tip of pandemic lockdowns, was notably heartfelt.
In 2019 international vogue home Yves Saint-Laurent shot an ad campaign on the Cretto di Burri, boosting the city’s fame on social media. Typically Individuals whose ancestors left Sicily for america pop up in Gibellina, trying to study extra about its historical past, Sutera says.
However echoes of its previous stay, like a palimpsest: destroyed city, grand imaginative and prescient, worldwide artwork vacation spot, depopulated city, largely empty between occasions. Greater than 30,000 individuals visited Gibellina in the course of the three months of the 2023 Photoroad, and appreciated the city’s websites. However in any other case it could possibly nonetheless really feel like a postmodern ghost city.
In response to Giuseppe Maiorana, president of the Belice’s Cultural and Pure Museum Community and director of the Belice/EpiCentro Museum of Living Memory, Gibellina may nonetheless be a year-round cultural vacation spot, maybe if paired with different close by points of interest, such because the archaeological parks of Selinunte and Segesta, and the well-known vineyards of Salaparuta. What’s missing, he says, is tourism infrastructure, from resorts, to bus and practice connections, to English-speaking guides. Proper now, Sutera explains, the city can solely host 70 in a single day guests in small bed-and-breakfasts.

Official pathways to growth in Italy take money and time, so some locals are taking issues into their very own palms. Throughout the 2021 Photoroad, Fortuna seen that quite a lot of guests have been taken with Gibellina’s 50 public artworks however had no instruments to find out about them. “There aren’t many indicators or pamphlets explaining the historical past of those works,” he says. Prior to now three years, he labored with a neighborhood print store to create leaflets, and has volunteered as a tour information. “The perfect half is witnessing individuals response after we discover Gibellina’s key landmarks like Quaroni’s church,” he says. “It’s like main individuals to discover a hidden treasure.”
The same DIY spirit animates Nicolò Stabile, the native artist who fought to finish the Cretto di Burri. Lately, he has labored with structure departments of main European universities to prepare workshops on Gibellina’s postmodern structure. “There appears to be extra curiosity in Gibellina’s heritage by international establishments than by native ones,” he says.
In response to Stabile, the way forward for Gibellina will largely rely on a standard imaginative and prescient that’s shared by most residents, as in the course of the Corrao years. Final summer time, city designers ran a collection of workshops with native residents to higher perceive their expertise of post-earthquake reconstruction. The findings have been introduced throughout a week-long exhibition at Consagra’s Teatro, which was opened to the general public for the primary time. “Individuals largely approve of the humanities a part of the reconstruction,” says Valentino Matteis, an city designer at Progetto Materia, a cultural affiliation that organized the workshop. “However they lamented the shortage of clear socialization areas and of labor alternatives.”
Maiorana, who has been working to advertise consciousness of Gibellina’s heritage by internet hosting free instructional occasions on the city’s modern artwork museum, wonders if it is going to ultimately change into a model of Noto, a Sicilian metropolis well-known for its UNESCO-recognized Baroque structure, and was additionally rebuilt from floor up after a robust earthquake destroyed a earlier settlement in 1639. Half of previous Noto was worn out and reconstructed following what on the time was modern structure. “As we speak, Noto attracts guests from world wide and is a must-see for college kids of Baroque structure,” he says, “Perhaps in 100 years that would be the destiny of Gibellina.”