June 7.
The road out of Partanna is slicked with sheep poop. Sheep poop is a road hazard in rural Sicily. I’m serious. Each year, countless crashes are caused by the stuff. What black ice is to the roads of Wisconsin or Minnesota, sheep poop is to the roads of Sicily.
Pretty soon, we’re lost. S. asks a guy parked on the side of the road for directions. He responds Sicilian-style, which means that he doesn’t just give us directions once, but repeats them a half-dozen times, adding some new detail— an olive orchard or a traffic circle to watch for, a farmhouse just before a turn— with each retelling. It’s a slow process of accretion. In the end, we don’t just get directions; we get an illuminated map of the world.
We find the little town of Santa Ninfa, but after that, we can’t seem to catch a break. Our first wrong turn takes us high into the hills till the island of Sicily spreads out beneath us, a green and tan patchwork of olive groves and vineyards. Our second wrong turn detours around the busy highway we’re trying to avoid but dead-ends at a big pile of illegally dumped trash. Our third turn is a charm, that takes us around a series of hairpin turns and straight through the enormous concrete star that marks the entrance to Gibellina Nuova.
An earthquake in 1968 reduced this part of Sicily— the Belice Valley— to rubble. Some of the old villages were rebuilt, but a few were so badly damaged that they were abandoned and the inhabitants were relocated to brand new towns designed by architects with utopian aspirations. It was the late-Sixties; utopian dreams were in the air.
Probably the most famous of these new towns is Gibellina. After the quake, Old Gebellina’s mayor commissioned a group of cutting edge Italian architects to design a master planned replacement town: Gibellina Nuova. The place looks like a mashup of a housing development in the suburbs of Phoenix and the location for a 1970’s Italian sci-fi movie. From a distance, the town appears to be under construction. But up close, you can see that the construction cranes are rusty and the building sites are abandoned. Another example of Incompiuto Siciliano.
Gibellina Nuova is full of concrete. Concrete blocks and cubes, and empty expanses of concrete pavement in between. I wander around the main plaza and take photos of the town’s half-built civic auditorium. I feel nervous, worried that someone will mistake me for an investigative journalist working on a big exposé. Later on, I learn that there was nothing to worry about because there was nothing to expose. Whatever happened to Gibellina Nuova— the bureaucratic mismanagement, the unrealistic plans of the architects, the corruption of the local politicians— is old news.
S. and I go looking for a place to eat. While we’re squinting at our map, an old guy with a creepy smile and weird vibe notices us. He figures out that we’re looking for food and he offers to take us to a place he knows. We try hard to refuse, but it’s no use. For the second or third time in one day, we find ourselves pedaling furiously behind a car that’s driving too fast.
“This is getting old,” S. gasps.
The guy leads us to a little restaurant called La Grotte. The place has a cave theme, with plaster stalactites hanging from the ceiling and plastic ferns suspended in the corners. The owner is a compact guy with a punched-in nose. He takes a look at us.
“Guten Abend,” he says.