From Gia Marie Amella’s unpublished manuscript of interviews made in Sicily in 1999. All photos, courtesy of Modio Media.
“In this barren land, there’s nothing left except for one Crack,
a tortuous maze of cold memories.”— Anna Lisa Forte, poet
Just ahead, the gray-white mass hugs the Sicilian hillside like a giant’s handkerchief, casually tossed to the ground and pulled tautly across its contours. Some of the locals call it an eyesore because of that particular spot where it lay. To my eyes, the undulating slab is right at home nestled among ancient olive groves and scorched grain fields. Already, variegated vineyards tumbled across the hills, flush with late-summer fruit. Stalks of wild fennel sprout in abundance along these country backroads. The Carthaginians had marched through here, stuffing their bellies with the island’s bounty, like so many other colonizers that came later. Like me, maybe they had plucked the thick fennel stems that tapered off into a starburst of aromatic flowers. They were fused to the Sicilian landscape, like the monolith I’m headed toward now.
This was Il Grande Cretto, the Great Crack, in Trapani’s deep hinterland. The Umbrian artist Alberto Burri set to work on it in the mid-1980s and, once finished, it would become Europe’s largest land art installation.The spot he’d chosen was just as telling as what the work memorialized. Il Cretto was built on top of the ruins of Gibellina, one of several villages leveled in a rash of earthquakes that shook the Belice Valley across three provinces between January 14-15, 1968, the largest seismic event on record in Western Sicily. Hundreds died and hundreds more were injured—the actual number of victims will never be known—during one of the bitterest winters in memory, a cruel coda that left 100,000 people shifting for themselves in freezing temperatures until aid, much delayed, finally came.
I had some idea of people’s terror. I’d lived through the Loma Prieta Earthquake that shook the San Francisco Bay Area for several terrifying seconds. I was a graduate student at San Francisco State University at the time. It was just after 5:00pm, and as I waited for my tram, I recall glancing up from the newspaper I was reading with a feeling of uneasiness. Moments later, the ground began swaying. I nearly lost my balance and grabbed ahold of the equally startled man standing nearby. Charlie and I wandered the streets of San Francisco over the next several hours until we managed to reach his sister’s home across town where I took shelter for a few days until I was able to board a ferry and head back to my apartment in Berkeley. The aural experience remains indelible. Screams, including my own, metal striking metal, and a low-frequency rumbling that seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth. The sound design for Irwin Allen’s Earthquake isn’t far off the mark.
Gibellina would never rise again where it had stood for nearly seven centuries. Perhaps out of superstition, it would be rebuilt a half hour’s drive to the northwest closer to the coastline. As reconstruction got underway, Gibellina’s mayor Ludovico Corrao began actively courting artists to create public works of art to beautify the new city he envisioned. He invited Burri to Sicily to see what the great artist might contribute. Uninspired by the new location, Burri asked to be taken to see Gibellina’s ruins. Deeply moved, he decided he’d create something right there, on top of the old city. It would be ambitious and costly, but there’d be nothing else like it, he promised. Corrao, by all accounts no stranger to making a splashy statement, wholeheartedly approved.
And so, in 1984, work on Il Grande Cretto began.
The Great Crack is a contiguous chain of massive rectangular blocks molded from concrete that follows the contours of the old city’s topography. Burri noted that a large amount of rubble hadn’t been cleared away so he and his assistants added handfuls into the concrete mixture before it hardened, creating a time capsule of Gibellina’s remains inside the work itself. Funding came in spurts and work progressed slowly. In 2006, the last blocks were laid in place and Il Grande Cretto extended over 80,000 square feet across the hillside. Burri never got to see his opus finished as he’d died a decade before its completion. Up close, The Great Crack is both transfixing and terrifying. It undulates. You undulate, as if someone had given a forceful tug from one end, catching you in a massive rippling wave. I wondered. Did Burri have an inkling of the showstopper he’d eventually come to create? Il Cretto emanates the visceral power of memory and place, a Goliathan testament to what had been. For me, it symbolizes scores of moribund villages clinging precariously to life across Sicily’s interior, like a cruel constellation of dreams going nowhere.
One afternoon, a friend who sometimes assisted me on shoots, I’ll call him Salvo, drove down to record footage. We spent a few hours wandering Il Cretto’s pathways forged between the long rows of concrete blocks, just high enough to peek over on tippy-toe. It was church-silent. I stuck the Hi-8 camera on the tripod and hit record. From a distance, the blocks appeared identical, the concrete taut and marble-smooth. Up close, each block was a canvas of texture, shading, color. Tufts of vegetation and, I noted, a few small trees that had sprouted between the spaces separating the blocks. Along the interior walls, large swaths of concrete had been eaten away and showed deep pitting, as if a chisel had been dragged across the surface at varying depths where mold and weeds had happily settled in. A couple walked past me, curious, politely sidestepping the camera. We didn’t exchange words. Reviewing the footage years later, there hadn’t been much talking that day. We had been treading on a mass grave that had been a scene of total annihilation. I prefer the Italian word annientamento. (turning into nothingness). Not for how it sounds, but because it exactly captured what had run through Burri’s own mind the first time he’d walked among the remaining piles of debris. His time capsule monument will probably be there for a very long time, perhaps as long as the old city, or forever. I couldn’t have guessed it then, but I’d soon be more intimately connected with this place and the Belice earthquake.
While logging field tapes of Il Cretto, my future spouse, Beppe, casually mentioned that his family was from Salaparuta, one of the villages that had also been wiped out in the 1968 earthquake, a few miles downroad from Gibellina. Maybe I’d been there, he asked? I kept on watching footage I’d filmed from the car window. The countryside rolled across the screen; sometimes, an annoying guardrail obscured the view. Then came a nondescript town, concrete from one end to the other (Hail to the Italian Gods of Concrete!), the only sign of life, a lone figure shuffling across a bleak background. I clearly recall that I was glad to see the town disappear in the rear-view mirror. I watched the screen intently. More countryside and guardrail popped on the monitor and quickly exited screen-right. Hold up. A perfunctory flash caught my eye. I hit pause and rewound the tape. A few hundred feet past the concrete town, I’d captured a sign with writing scrawled across it. I hadn’t noticed it while filming. I toggled back and forth until the letters came into sharper focus: Salaparuta. There was a diagonal red slash through the name indicating that we’d reach the city limits. Those few frames of screen time opened up a direct pathway to learn what had happened as the earthquake struck Salaparuta and how Beppe’s relatives had survived.
In 1968, my late in-laws, Antonino and Lucia, had been living in Tuscany for some years. Antonino had been a policeman in Montevarchi, a medieval city situated between Florence, Siena and Arezzo. He returned to Salaparuta to marry Lucia—it was still common practice to marry someone from your own hometown—brought her North and they started a family. The couple hadn’t lived through the Belice earthquake though they’d have heard accounts from family members and close friends they’d managed to reach in the earthquake’s aftermath. After Sunday lunch, we’d sometimes sit around Lucia’s kitchen table and talk. Though reserved to a fault, with time, she began to share what she knew.
The day after the strongest temblor toppled what was left of Salaparuta, Antonino and his younger brother, Giovanni, made the long train trip to Salaparuta. Once there, they collected their elderly parents and assorted relatives, including a wheelchair-bound aunt, and escorted them back to Tuscany. On the ferry ride across the Strait of Messina, Antonino’s mother remembered she still had her house key, one of those heavy, cartoonishly oversized ones. “E ora? Che me ne faccio di questa? Tanto la casa non c’è più quindi la butto.” (What do I do with this? In any case, our house is gone so I’ll toss it.) She extracted the key from her pocketbook and flung it into the sea. The view from the ferry as it inched toward Villa San Giovanni on the mainland was the last time she would see Sicily again.
Like Beppe’s family, thousands headed North after the earthquake. At first, Lucia had 18 people camped out in her small apartment that included her own family of four. Kind neighbors took a few relatives into their own homes until they got settled. Terremotati weren’t always welcomed with open arms. Hostility against Southerners was still openly expressed and deeply wounding to those on the receiving end. The terremotati already endured the sting of being labeled terroni (in the broadest sense, a pejorative term for Southern Italians and Sicilians of peasant stock, i.e. someone who works the land, from the Latin root terra) with its deeply classist, and I’d argue racist, overtones. The respect that Antonino commanded as a law enforcement officer likely helped family members find work and decent housing. I never understood how Tuscans, or Italians from any other region, breezily threw that word around when the vast majority descended from families who’d worked the land for generations.
Beppe’s grandparents never got comfortable in Tuscany. Neither did Beppe’s cousin Domenico who was 18 years old at the time of the earthquake. During summertime, when he’d show up at our door with fresh vegetables from his garden, he often repeated the story about the prized watch, a precious keepsake for a young man in those days, he’d lost in the earthquake. As Domenico tells it, after evacuating the family home after the first strong tremor rolled through, his grandfather, Piddu, remembered that he had stashed money away that he’d earned from some grain he’d sold that day and went back inside to retrieve it. Aware of the danger, Domenico accompanied his grandfather back inside. They had just enough time to duck under the door frame when an even stronger shock hit and the house crumbled around them. Domenico always teared up as he described the watch pulling away as he worked to extract his arm from the rubble and Piddu begging him to leave it, that he would buy him a new one.
Some believe the Belice earthquake was a cruel act of God. Even two decades later, survivors were still living in wooden barracks that the novelist Leonardo Sciascia, a keen observer of social conditions in Sicily, likened to concentration camps. What was cruel was the slow-turning wheels of Italian bureaucracy. Cruel, that funds intended to help people get back on their feet had disappeared into who knows whose nefarious pockets. The great irony is that villages like Salaparuta that were relocated and eventually rebuilt sit half-empty today. Young people continue to leave for Palermo, Catania, or the North, just as so many of Beppe’s cousins have. It was the story of my own family who’d left Sicily decades earlier and later, in the 1960s, relatives my grandfather had sponsored who made new lives in Chicago. The cycle of emigration had never stopped.
What remains of Poggioreale village sits a few miles east of Salaparuta. If you do a Google Maps search, it’s listed as a ghost town. Salvo parked the car in front of a modern apartment building, still relatively intact, on the lower end of town. Beyond the old city gate, homes and storefronts stood in various states of ruin along what I’d gathered was the main street. I aimed my camera toward an upper-story window of the apartment house where a frayed curtain flapped in the wind. Spooky. I heard movement. A ways ahead, a dog began walking in our direction. When it got closer, I saw it was badly malnourished and had an injured paw that made it whimper. I was horrified when I noticed its head and ears were covered in ticks engorged with its blood. It was high summer, and I spilled some water on the ground that it thirstily lapped it up. As we drove away, I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw the dog sitting in the middle of the road. I sobbed all the way back to the main highway.
Many years later after wrapping up a production job for a client, Beppe’s cousin drove us out to see Salaparuta’s ruins. I had only seen them from the car window before. We walked up the elegant stone staircase that led to where the mother church once stood, a Baroque beauty. Every salitano I’d ever met had a framed picture of it prominently displayed in their home. Two massive, canopied palm trees that I remember seeing in a photo of Beppe’s parents on their wedding day were still there. They were blackened stumps now. I turned around to look at the view. The Belice Valley stretched out below us was truly beautiful. Though I couldn’t see it, Il Cretto was just a few turns up the road. No earthquake would bring it down now.
It all came full circle, where the three of us stood. I felt I’d come to understand another part of Beppe, where he’d come from and his family’s story. And I understood more what it was like being the child of Sicilian immigrant parents in Tuscany, how it had shaped his identity and, sometimes, made him less forthcoming with who he fully was. I hear my mother-in-law Lucia’s softly accented Italian as she told me stories over coffee at the kitchen table. I see Domenico, too, stretching out his arm to show me the watch that Piddu bought for him after they’d arrived in Montevarchi. A promise fulfilled. I suspect he’d never take it off now. And I recall the few extraordinary days I’d spent in the company of the man who brought about the Belice earthquake’s most enduring symbol, Il Cretto. Cherished, yes, but that to this very day sends a chill up your spine.
A Chicago native, Gia Marie Amella co-founded Modio Media Productions Inc. in 2006, an Emmy-nominated video and television production company whose work has aired on leading news and entertainment networks worldwide. She earned her M.A. in Radio-Television (1993) from San Francisco State University, where she also served as an adjunct lecturer in the Broadcast & Electronic Communication Arts Department, and a B.A. in Italian Literature (1988) from the University of California, Santa Cruz. The recipient of numerous awards for achievements in her field, in 1998 she received a Fulbright Fellowship supporting her research on popular traditions and identity in Sicily, her ancestors’ homeland. Her writing has appeared in Green Living Magazine, Italy Magazine, The Italian American Review, and Cnn.com. She lives in Montevarchi, Tuscany with her life and work partner and rescue cat.
