June 9.
At first, New Gibellina seems strange and sci-fi, but after a couple days, it starts to depress me. I read that after the 1968 earthquake, the Sicilian mafia began siphoning off as much of the reconstruction money as they could. But it wasn’t just the mafia that took advantage of the disaster, so did the out-of-town architects and urban planners. The earthquake had reduced parts of the Belice Valley to rubble, so this was their big break. A chance to turn their utopian dreams into reality. The blueprints for New Gibellina probably looked great in the design studio back in Rome. But all these years later, the result is a collection of half-built municipal buildings, oversized piazzas, and faded public art sitting on the shore of an empty manmade lagoon.
S. and I decide to ride over to Gibellina Vecchia— the original Gibellina. The town that the earthquake destroyed. The place is 20 kilometers away, so before we leave, we order a takeout pizza and strap it to the back of my bike with a bungee cord so we’ll have something to eat when we get there.
The road to Old Gibellina is freshly paved and totally empty. A sign we pass says the road was paid for with European Union funds. It’s the kind of construction project that would drive an austerity-minded German politician bonkers. Except this road doesn’t go nowhere. It goes to Il Grande Cretto. The Big Crack.
Alberto Burri was all about cracks. He made a series of paintings in the 1970’s where he layered paint on his canvases then let it dry and crack. Those paintings are remarkable. Like portraits of trauma and decay; of coming undone. Even so, I’m ready to hate the Big Crack.
In the early 1980’s, Burri had the idea to dump a million tons of concrete on top of the ruins of Old Gibellina and to transform the place into landscape art. The idea seems obnoxious— as if Sicily needs more concrete. But then we get there. It turns out that Burri was faithful to the plan of the village and preserved its contours, so you can walk down its old streets and past its old storefronts and houses. Only now, the storefronts and houses and streets are sealed up in concrete. It’s not a ghost town so much as a mummy town. The concrete preserves the scale and shape of the old town, but all the details are missing, reduced to concrete blocks and cubes. The place is uncanny, the way mummies are. It’s almost a model of the real thing, but not quite.
S. and I find some shade and crack open the pizza. After a while, we begin to hear the ringing of little bells. Next thing we know, a big flock of sheep troops past us and down one of Old Gibellina’s mummified streets. It’s exactly the route the sheep used to take when this town was alive, I imagine. S. grabs her camera and follows the sheep.
“I saw the shepherd,” she tells me when she gets back. “I waved at him.”
“Did he wave back?” I ask.
“No, he was taking a pee,” she says.