What Can You Do With a 'Failed' Postmodern Utopia?

22.02.2024 - 00:13 / atlasobscura.com / Art

The landscape around Route A29, which connects Palermo and Mazara del Vallo, is a travel-brochure version of rural Sicily: rolling hills dotted with barley fields, olive groves, and vineyards, and the occasional cluster of ancient ruins. Exit at Salemi, however, and follow the signs for Gibellina Nuova, and a surprise awaits. Like a postmodern version of Roman era city gates, there stands a 70-foot-tall steel sculpture of a five-pointed star by Sicilian sculptor Pietro Consagra. Porta del Belice (Door of Belice) or the Star of Belice marks the entrance to Gibellina Nuova, a town that hosts one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world and a reputation as a failed art utopia or a surreal, postmodern ghost town.

Sometimes referred to as “Sicily’s Marfa,” a reference to the Texas town that has become a nexus for contemporary art, Gibellina Nuova (New Gibellina) was built in the 1970s after Gibellina Vecchia (Old Gibellina) was destroyed by an earthquake. The old town was not rebuilt as it was, or replaced by bland apartment and office blocks, but instead reformulated with strangely spherical churches, wide avenues, squares that recall the surrealist paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, massive public sculptures, and brutalist buildings, assembled by a roster of world-renowned artists and architects.

Its fate, so far, has been the fate of many utopias over the years. Initial enthusiasm faded. Weeds sprouted. People left. It became a curiosity rather than a model. But in recent years, some Gibellina Nuova locals have been trying to put it back on the cultural map, to stage yet another resurrection in the Sicilian highlands.

Nestled atop a hill in the Belice Valley, Gibellina Vecchia was a town of about 20 acres and 6,000 people. On January 15, 1968, a magnitude-6.4 earthquake destroyed most of its centuries-old buildings and killed an estimated 300 people. “I remember that it was snowing on the night of the earthquake,” says Salvatore Sutera, mayor of Gibellina Nuova, who grew up in the old town and was eight years old when it was leveled. “My family took shelter with some relatives in a nearby town after the first earthquake wave hit.”

In the aftermath of the disaster, residents were housed in temporary shelters while the Italian government worked out a plan. At the time, Sicily had been mostly left behind by the “economic miracle” that helped lift millions of Italians out of poverty during the 1950s and 1960s. “The state saw the reconstruction in the Belice Valley as an opportunity to launch western Sicily into the future,” says Angela Badami, a professor of architecture at the University of Palermo and the author of Gibellina, la città che visse due volte, on the history of Gibellina.

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