Death, Sepulchre, Resurrection

There are cities that catastrophic events have transformed into archaeological ruins of a bygone era, yet very near to us. The 1968 Belice Valley earth quake halted the life-form (to recall a Pirandellian concept) of some cities, often subjecting them to a state of death, in other cases generating “other” forms of life. In Poggioreale, abandoned and rebuilt on a different site, the remains of the ancient city have maintained their urban form intact. The buildings, like a contemporary Pompeii, suggest a suspension of time, frozen at the moment of the disaster, free from the disastrous transformations that in the years that followed have altered the image and form of contemporary cities, both large and small. The ravaged buildings appear as construction sections that restore spatiality previously hidden by the façades, fragments of monumental building fronts, and the technical and material forms of a civilization conscious of the aesthetics of construction. But this city, since the living reside elsewhere, is dead, even though its architecture evokes the vivid memory of its ruin. The city of Gibellina, which suffered the same fate as the refoundation, was instead frozen and enclosed in a white tomb that extends across the topography of the ancient site, reminiscent of it and idealizing it in its square shape. The city, imploded or demolished, rests in its entirety in the tomb into which it was transformed, yet continues to confront its landscape, its horizons, its sky. In Salemi, the ancient Mother Church, rises up transfigured: while some elements remain fragmented, the site – which has transformed from a space of religious worship into a space of secular worship – explodes and expands into the rest of the city: the new architecture becomes a centrifugal element for the regeneration and targeted transformation of the old town. (The square becomes the hub, from which paths branch off that expand into the old town, renewing the narrow, steep streets of the town with the ground plan).