A visitor walks across Sicily’s interior landscape and encounters something that doesn’t belong. A hillside has been sealed beneath a vast expanse of concrete—not by accident, but by design. When artist Alberto Burri completed this work in 2015, it gleamed brilliant white. Now, weathered and stained with rust-red iron from the rubble beneath, it sprawls across thirty acres like a geometric scar. This is the Cretto, or “great crevice.” Beneath it, frozen in time, lie the remains of an entire town that was swallowed by earthquake, obliterated by tremor, and ultimately preserved by cement. It is a modern Pompeii—a monument less to death than to the refusal to forget.
Gibellina didn’t simply vanish on 15 January 1968. It was obliterated.
The Moment Everything Changed
The Belice Valley had weathered tremors since Sunday lunchtime. Residents noticed, some fled. But at 3.01 a.m. on Monday morning, the earth didn’t merely shake—it unleashed. The quake measured 6.4 on the Richter Scale, enough to reduce a cluster of towns across three provinces to rubble in seconds. Gibellina absorbed the worst of it. Nearly three hundred people across the valley lost their lives. Over one thousand were injured. Nearly a hundred thousand lost their homes.
Those who survived faced an impossible question: how do you rebuild a life when your entire world has turned to dust?
The government’s answer was brutal in its simplicity. Leave. Within months, authorities offered one-way tickets to Australia and the United States, as though the solution to catastrophe was erasure—to scatter the survivors and let the valley be forgotten. Most communities that were destroyed chose to rebuild close to their original ruins, clinging to continuity however fractured. Gibellina, however, had a different fate waiting.
The Mayor Who Refused Abandonment
A lawyer named Ludovico Corrao travelled to Gibellina shortly after the disaster to help survivors navigate the wreckage. He never left. Elected mayor in 1969, Corrao looked at the flattened hills and the desperate, displaced people, and he made a choice that seemed audacious at the time: move the town entirely. Not to reclaim the ruins, but to build something new—somewhere with access to a motorway being constructed toward Palermo, somewhere with space and connectivity rather than nostalgic isolation.
The decision cut two ways. It was pragmatic—his contemporaries recognised that linking the town to regional infrastructure was the only way to offer residents economic opportunity. Yet it was also deeply personal. Corrao understood that a community buried in rubble would slowly suffocate under the weight of its own grief. To live was to move forward. But how do you move forward without forgetting?
Corrao’s answer arrived through culture.
As the new Gibellina rose from the plains half an hour away—a startlingly modernist settlement, all wide streets and car-centred design, utterly unlike the dense neighbourhoods of the old town—Corrao began inviting artists and architects to imagine something unprecedented. In 1970, just two years after the earthquake, the town launched an appeal for support. The painter Renato Guttuso came. Intellectuals travelled from across Italy. Slowly, artists arrived: some to contribute works, others to live and teach. The catastrophe that had seemed designed to erase Gibellina instead became the catalyst for transformation.
Concrete As Remembrance
Then came Alberto Burri’s vision. Burri was invited to create art for the new town, yet he found himself drawn to the ruins—those haunted hills where rubble still scattered. He visited the remnants of Gibellina, and later toured the ancient Greek temple at nearby Segesta. An idea took shape: what if the destroyed town could be preserved not by excavation, but by entombment? What if the wreckage itself became the artwork?
Between 1984 and 2015—with a devastating gap in funding that lasted from 1989 to 2013—Burri oversaw the pouring of concrete across the original town’s footprint. His method was deliberate. He fenced off areas of rubble with cement walls standing five to six feet high, each representing a city block. Between them, he carved sunken pathways that traced the streets of the vanished community. Then he flooded the spaces with concrete, sealing the destruction beneath a solid surface.
The result contradicts everything archaeologists do at Pompeii. There, experts fill empty spaces in ash layers with plaster to reveal the forms of the dead. At Gibellina, concrete covers everything, acknowledging what cannot be recovered while making clear that it is still there—a geometric acknowledgement of loss. Walking the Cretto today means treading pathways that follow the original streets. Occasionally, a swell in the concrete marks where larger structures lay, or where rubble proved difficult to clear. The town is legible only through absence.
When the work was completed, the gleaming white surface was visible for kilometres. Now, oxidised iron from the buried ruins bleeds through in rust-red patterns. Psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati observed that the Cretto “emerges in a literal place of death, but it is not a work of death, but of life. It shows the impossibility of forgetting what happened, the impossibility of oblivion.”
Art As Survival
Yet the Cretto was merely the foundation of something larger. The new Gibellina—Nuova Gibellina—became something almost inconceivable: a destination for contemporary art in rural Sicily.
An extraordinary roster of artists answered the town’s unspoken invitation. Postmodern painter Mario Schifano taught and created with local schoolchildren; Gibellina now holds the world’s second-largest collection of his works. Sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro designed avant-garde costumes for theatrical performances. Sculptor Pietro Consagra created the Stella d’ingresso al Belice, an eighty-five-foot stainless-steel star marking where the Belice hills flattened into plains. Artist Mimmo Paladino sculpted the Salt Mountain for a theatrical production. Composer Philip Glass premiered an opera in the ruins. Joseph Beuys, Ignazio Moncada, and Mimmo Rotella all contributed works.
The town’s architecture itself became art. Franco Purini and Laura Thermes designed the Sistema delle Piazze—a haunting expanse of geometric precision that echoes both Giorgio de Chirico paintings and ancient temples. The main church resembles a ship spliced with a hot-air balloon. Another was designed to echo Sicily’s history as a North African colony. The Teatro, a fan-shaped structure so vast it straddles two roads, was never completed—it stands today like a multi-storey monument to unfinished dreams.
By the time the year 2026 arrived, Gibellina housed fewer than three thousand residents but more than five thousand contemporary artworks. The town had become what observers compare to Marfa, Texas, or Brasilia: a place where art and urban design converge into something neither fully town nor fully gallery, but something altogether stranger.
The Weight Of Memory
To walk through Gibellina Nuova today is to experience something disorienting. The streets are too wide. The piazzas are too empty. Built for cars rather than pedestrians, the town feels more like an American suburb than a Sicilian settlement—there are few people to greet, few neighbours chatting across windows. Many residents never came, or came and left. The economic opportunity that Corrao envisioned took decades to materialise. The depopulation that threatened the region in the 1960s returned in a different form.
Yet within the bars and restaurants that have emerged on the main streets, something persists. The Fondazione Orestiadi, Corrao’s cultural institution, operates from a restored farmstead. The Museo d’Arte Contemporanea stands among Italy’s finest contemporary art museums. The deconsecrated church hosts exhibitions. The Teatro has been transformed into exhibition space.
In 2026, Italy designated Gibellina as its first ever Capital of Contemporary Art. The decision brought funds for restoration and, more intangibly, a reassertion of the vision that has sustained the town for nearly sixty years: that art is not decoration added to a town, but rather the medium through which a fractured community remembers itself and imagines its future.
Artist Igor Grubić is planned to create an installation that walks between the old and new Gibellina, speaking with residents about the experience of being uprooted. At the Cretto itself, exhibitions of photography and contemporary work have begun to animate the concrete surfaces. The hope is no longer merely to preserve the past, but to weave it into the present.
What Remains
The Belice Valley still faces challenges that transcend art—economic depression, depopulation, the same forces that plague rural communities across southern Europe. The earthquake’s wounds have not fully healed, nor has time made them simple to bear.
Yet Gibellina stands as testimony to an uncommon choice: when given the option to abandon their land, a community instead chose to transform it. They didn’t deny what had been lost. Instead, they sealed it beneath concrete, built a new town around it, and filled that town with art. The result is unsettling, even eerie—a place where wide streets remain largely empty, where modernist buildings house world-class artworks, where the past is not forgotten but rather entombed and memorialised.
The Cretto remains the town’s most visible statement: a vast gray blanket covering what can never be recovered. It says, plainly, that some losses cannot be undone. It also says something else—that memory, when honoured through deliberate acts of creation, becomes a form of resurrection. The concrete that sealed Gibellina did not erase it. In a strange alchemy, it preserved the town precisely by acknowledging that it could never be the same.
