The modern Pompeii buried under tons of concrete

Gibellina, Italy (CNN) — Sicily’s landscapes are a mix of dreamy coastline, rugged peaks and rolling hills that are every bit as spectacular as those in Tuscany.

But in the far west of the Mediterranean’s largest island, amid the undulating landscape of the Belice Valley, lie two hillsides that could never be mistaken for Tuscany. On one stand columns and walls that, from a distance, could be Greek or Roman remains, but up close become recognizable as the ruins of more modern buildings.

The next hill over, meanwhile, is the color of concrete. It’s not an experimental crop growing there — get closer and you see there’s nothing swaying in the breeze. Closer still, you realize that this is because it is literally concrete, poured over the hillside in a polygon shape — a gray blanket swaddling the green.

Visible for miles around, and originally a shocking white when it was completed in 2015, this is the “Cretto di Burri,” or the “Grande Cretto” (the great cleft, or crevice). A vast work of land art, it is made of concrete poured over 926,000 square feet of the hillside. This isn’t art for the sake of it. The Cretto sprawls over the remains of the town of Gibellina, which was destroyed in an earthquake on January 15, 1968.

While other villages destroyed by the earthquake still stand in ruins, Gibellina is a town turned to stone. Channels cut through the concrete represent the streets that once ran underneath. Visitors can walk along these “streets” where the concrete wedges — each representing a block of the town — stand shoulder-to-head height. Sometimes, a swell in the concrete indicates ruins below that were bigger than average, or were harder to clear.

It is, in essence, a modern version of Pompeii — a town trapped in time. But where the ancient Roman city was smothered by volcanic ash in 79 CE, Gibellina has been covered as a way of preserving its memory for the ages.

The Cretto — made by 20th-century artist Alberto Burri — has also become a tourist attraction for inland Sicily. So has the new Gibellina, which was rebuilt half an hour away as a startlingly modernist town — and then filled with art donated by some of the world’s best known contemporary artists.

Today, Gibellina is Italy’s first ever Capital of Contemporary Art. Throughout 2026, it will host a series of events and exhibitions in its extraordinary modernist buildings. It’s a testament to the resolve of the people who didn’t accept their fate but decided to rebuild — and, eventually, to turn their suffering into art.

Total destruction in seconds

With its mountain ranges, volcanoes, fragile coastlines and delicate islands, Italy has always been a place of violent geography. Minor earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are common. Other quakes over history have razed entire areas to the ground, and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents.

The Belice earthquake of 1968 was Italy’s first disaster of the modern era. And it came as a complete surprise.

Beginning at lunchtime on Sunday, January 14, a series of tremors shook the valley, culminating in the final, and strongest, at 3.01 a.m. on January 15. It measured 6.4 on the Richter Scale — two levels from “total destruction” on the Mercalli Scale, which measures damage on the ground.

The quake hit 21 towns across three provinces of Sicily, but the worst affected were Gibellina, which was flattened in seconds, and its neighbors, Salaparuta and Poggioreale.

“If that had been the first tremor, there would have been many more dead, says Gibellina’s mayor, Salvatore Sutera, who was eight years old at the time. “Most people left during the day. Those who stayed at home were older people who didn’t believe there was danger.”

“It was completely unexpected,” says Giulio Ippolito, who was 15. His family, like Sutera’s, fled the town during the afternoon.

Across the Belice Valley, 296 people lost their lives. Over 1,000 were injured and nearly 100,000 were made homeless.

‘Abandoned by everybody’

How do you rebuild from an earthquake? Even now, life returning to normal isn’t guaranteed — there are still thousands living in temporary accommodation after the 2016 earthquakes in central Italy.

In 1968, the situation was far worse. Francesca Corrao, whose father was to be instrumental in transforming Gibellina, said authorities didn’t want to rebuild what was seen as a poor town. “They weren’t interested.”

Initially, the government offered people money to leave.

“A few month after the quake, the state gave people one-way tickets to Australia and the US,” says Michele Benfari, president of Percorsi a Morsi, a local cultural association.

“The earthquake was only the first catastrophe,” says Ippolito. “We were abandoned by everybody,”

Eventually, most of the affected villages were rebuilt close to their original locations. Gibellina was the exception — thanks to its mayor. Ludovico Corrao was a Palermo lawyer who’d visited Gibellina in the wake of the disaster to help the community. “He went there and never came back,” says his daughter Francesca. Corrao was elected mayor in 1969.

One of his first proposals was to move Gibellina from the hills to flatter land west, near the railway line connecting Palermo to Sicily’s southern coast. A freeway to the capital was also under construction — and Corrao believed that connectivity would be the key to Gibellina’s future.

“Corrao’s extraordinary intelligence was to pull them out of deafening poverty by moving the village near the freeway,” says Benfari. Today, locals still praise that decision. “It’s a huge advantage,” says Andrea Messina, who produces I Siciliani cheese from Belice Valley sheeps’ milk, for global export, with his brother Piero. “It wouldn’t be comparable if we were in the hills.”

An ‘alien’ town

The rebuild didn’t run smoothly. Government planners saw the reconstruction as an opportunity to experiment with modern architecture never before seen in Sicily.

This was an era of huge industrial expansion. Italy was becoming a European center of car manufacturing, and the new Gibellina was planned around the automobile with no piazza as focal point. People who had lived close together in old apartments were transferred to houses with sprawling outdoor space to park cars. The streets were now 40 feet wide, which would help mitigate future earthquake damage, but meant residents could no longer chat to their neighbors, window to window.

“The urban plan has nothing to do with Sicily,” says Andrea Cusumano, director of the Capital of Contemporary Art program. “It was imposed from on high. I don’t think they ever came here — it was an experiment.”

The rebuild took decades. Residents were housed first in tents, and then metal huts insulated with asbestos, now known to be carcinogenic. Families had to keep their farm animals inside with them.

The last families left the huts in 2006. But the first residents who relocated to the new Gibellina were presented with a dilemma — how do you rebuild a community and a life in an urban environment that is completely alien?

Corrao’s idea was to focus on its the soul. “Faced with oblivion, they chose to make the town be reborn through art,” says Cusumano.

On January 15, 1970, the citizens of Gibellina launched an appeal for help. Artist Renato Guttuso attended — one of his paintings now hangs in Gibellina’s modern art gallery. Intellectuals including Carlo Levi spoke. Gibellina gained a national platform, thanks to celebrity intervention.

And as residents gradually relocated to the new city, prominent artists visited — to work or get involved in community projects. Over time, this tiny Sicilian town became one of the most important hubs for modern art on the planet.

“They were giving hope through art,” says Francesca Corrao, an academic who’s now president of the Fondazione Orestiadi, a cultural institution founded by her father.

“What happened in Gibellina was incredible,” says Ippolito. “Even now you couldn’t believe it.”

Not everyone was excited. Sutera, who spent 13 years in temporary accommodation, remembers the mistrust of the locals. “It was a double shock,” he says of the earthquake and the rebuild. “This was a really poor place — you had people who worked for a piece of bread and never left the town. You think you understand something, and then someone arrives who shows you something else.”

A modern Pompeii

The “Grande Cretto” is one of those artworks. Alberto Burri was one of the artists invited to work on the new Gibellina, but it was inspired by a visit to the ruins and, says Ippolito, a visit to a Greek temple at nearby Segesta: “An ancient thing preserved over the years.”

The Cretto covers a nearly 30-acre rectangular stretch of land and is made up of 122 blocks of cement between five and six feet high. Burri created his “town blocks” by fencing off areas of rubble with cement walls. He then created sunken pathways between the walls and filled the “blocks” by pouring cement over the ruins, freezing them for eternity.

In essence, it’s the opposite process of that at Pompeii, where archaeologists pour concrete into the empty spaces underneath the ash layers to show the imprints of the people and animals who died in the explosion. At Gibellina, the concrete has been used to cover the destruction — yet also spotlight it.

The Cretto was inspired by an old map of Gibellina, and some pathways between the cement retrace the original streets. Others were created by Burri to form a labyrinth effect.

It was a controversial idea — not least with the population, who were deeply attached to their destroyed town. “The concrete was going to cover those bits of their houses that they could still see,” says Sutera. A handful of remains were moved to Nuova Gibellina: an elegant archway, a few columns, a dolphin-shaped fountain, all remnants of the past in their brave new world.

Work began in 1984, but was halted five years later because of lack of funding. Burri died in 1995 but work restarted in 2013 and was finished in May 2015.

“The work emerges in a literal place of death, but it is not a work of death, but of life,” author and psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati has said of the Cretto. “It shows the impossibility of forgetting what happened, the impossibility of oblivion.”

Today, some of the “walls” are tinged blood-red as a result of iron from bulldozed ruins leaching out and oxidizing in the rain, says Benfari, whose Percorsi a Morsi association runs a gallery and bar in the semi-destroyed church of Santa Caterina. He’d like to see the Cretto resurfaced or painted to restore the original blinding white color that was once visible from the main road along Sicily’s southern coast.

The Cretto stands in stark contrast to its neighbors. The ruins of Salaparuta sag on a neighboring hill, while Poggioreale stands like a ghost town further along. Unlike Gibellina, both were rebuilt close to the ruins.

A Sicilian Marfa

The Cretto isn’t the only artwork, though; Nuova Gibellina is an unassuming world-class repository of modern art. Postmodern painter Mario Schifano worked with Gibellina’s school kids and the town now owns the second largest collection of his works in the world.

Painter Carla Accardi designed ceramics for the walls of the new town hall. Artist Emilio Isgrò translated Aeschylus’ ancient Greek tragedies into Sicilian dialect, sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro constructed avant-garde costumes for actors when it was performed in the ruins of Gibellina, and playwright Robert Wilson directed. Artist Mimmo Paladino created his “Salt Mountain” sculpture for a production; composer Philip Glass premiered an opera in Gibellina.

There was monumental public art, too. Sculptor Pietro Consagra created the Stella d’ingresso al Belice, an 85-foot stainless-steel star marking the spot where the Belice hills flatten into the plains below. In the yawning space outside the vast town hall stands the Torre Civica, a Brutalist-style “civic tower” which originally blasted Sicilian folk tunes through a loudspeaker. Around the town are dozens of sculptures by artists from Mimmo Rotella to Joseph Beuys and Ignazio Moncada.

The artists and architects injected art into the architecture of the town, too. To fill a blocks-long empty space between streets, Franco Purini and Laura Thermes designed the Sistema delle Piazze, a haunting three-block space of geometric precision that looks like a Giorgio de Chirico painting crossed with a grand Egyptian temple.

The main church, by Ludovico Quaroni, looks like a ship spliced with a hot-air balloon — a vast white sphere outside eating into the interior.
Another church, by Nanda Vigo, echoes Sicily’s past as a North African colony.

Then there’s the Teatro — a fan-shaped behemoth of a building, so vast that it straddles two roads. Consagra planned this as the town’s theater, but it was never finished. Today, it seems more like a multi-story parking lot crossed with a UFO. Two friendly stray dogs are its permanent inhabitants.

Today, Gibellina’s population has dropped from around 6,000 at the time of the earthquake to 3,000 — and over 5,500 contemporary artworks. Andrea Cusumano parallels it to Marfa, Texas — or even Brasilia, Brazil’s modernist capital. The map of Gibellina lists no fewer than 70 artistic sites, including the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, one of Italy’s best contemporary art museums, and the Museo delle Trame Mediterranee, which knits together Mediterranean cultures through art. The latter is located in a farmstead that’s home to the Fondazione Orestiadi, a cultural foundation founded by Corrao. Ippolito — that 15-year-old boy who experienced the quake — is its energetic co-founder and vice president.

An eerie experience

Visiting Gibellina today is a mesmerizing, if eerie, experience. Because the town was built for cars and has no real center, it feels like small-town America — you’ll barely see any pedestrians, but you’ll notice cars parked up outside the bars and restaurants.

And because the authorities prioritized rehousing locals over kickstarting the economy, many left to look for work elsewhere. That means Gibellina Nuova feels too big for its current population.

Those looking for a typical Italian experience — a coffee in the piazza, followed by a dip into a church and a stroll — are out of luck. You can walk around, but you likely won’t see anyone else to greet. But it’s a different story inside Moma Café, or any of the bars or restaurants on the two main streets. “Gibellina is full of vast spaces, but little by little there are growing pockets of bars or places where people meet up,” says Sutera, the mayor.

After years of emptiness, could 2026 be the year that the artists’ dream of Gibellina finally comes to fruition? As Italy’s first ever Capital of Contemporary Art, it has won funds to restore some of the buildings. Many had fallen into a state of disrepair — “It’s not easy for a small city to maintain this heritage,” says Cusumano. He means psychologically as well as practically. “Over the years there’s been a distancing of the population from the art — it’s like we lost the instruction book,” he says. But he hopes that with this year’s exhibitions, that will change.

The Teatro building has been transformed into an exhibition space, as has the deconsecrated church. The Fondazione Orestiadi is another spectacular exhibition space. And the artists are back. This summer, Igor Grubić will make an installation of walking from Gibellina Vecchia to Nuova, speaking to locals about their experience of being uprooted.

Meanwhile at the Cretto itself, since last year, Benfari’s cultural association has been putting on regular art and photography exhibitions.

Cusumano hopes to use the town’s year in the spotlight to establish lasting links with fine-art academies across Italy to start Gibellina residencies next year. “We want to bring back this idea of artists being present,” he says. “We’re imagining the legacy of Capital of Contemporary Art. It can’t be just about making Gibellina attractive to tourists. This is a year of construction, not presentation.”

The Belice Valley’s problems aren’t over. Benfari says that depopulation levels are similar to those of the 1960s and economic woes persist.

It’s the same story for rural towns and villages across Italy — hence all those one euro homes projects — but there’s an extra piquancy in the Belice Valley, which has already resisted so much. Cusumano says that tempting back young people who’ve left is too ambitious; instead, he hopes to attract artist newcomers.

“This is a magical place,” says Benfari. Those visiting this year will likely agree.

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