Cretto di Burri

Seen from the hillside, the Cretto di Burri looks like a vast sheet of white concrete split by a web of narrow channels, as if dried mud had cracked across an entire slope. Those channels are the streets of a town that no longer exists. Alberto Burri, one of the leading Italian artists of the post-war period, laid his work directly over the site of old Gibellina in western Sicily, so that walking through the clefts means following the lanes and alleys that residents once used every day. It is regularly counted among the largest works of contemporary art anywhere.

Gibellina was destroyed by the Belice earthquake of January 1968. Because the ground was judged too unstable, the town was not rebuilt where it stood; a new Gibellina rose roughly twenty kilometres away, and its mayor, Ludovico Corrao, invited artists and architects to help give it a new identity. Burri was among them, but the new town did not move him. What did was the ruined original. His idea was to gather and compact the rubble of the collapsed houses, bind it into blocks and cover everything with white cement, turning the debris into a permanent memorial rather than clearing it away. Work started in the mid-1980s, stopped in 1989 for lack of money with only part of the field finished, and remained incomplete when Burri died in 1995. The remaining section was completed in 2015, the centenary of his birth.

The result spreads over roughly eight hectares. The concrete blocks stand about one and a half metres high, and the fissures between them are two to three metres wide, so a visitor walks below eye level through a pale, silent maze. The motif was not new for Burri: for years he had painted smaller "cretti", surfaces of cracked paint and pigment, and here the same idea takes on the scale of a landscape. Some 350 metres away, the unburied ruins of the old town are still visible. The Cretto has served as a stage for the Orestiadi festival and as the setting for Marco Paolini's theatre piece on the 1980 Ustica air disaster, for which its labyrinth was chosen as an image of a tangled investigation.

Getting there

The Cretto lies in open countryside in the province of Trapani, about 21 km from the town of Alcamo. The nearest airport is Falcone–Borsellino Airport in Palermo (PMO), about 44 km away in a straight line. By road the site is reached from state road SS119 between Santa Ninfa and Salaparuta, or from the A29 motorway towards Mazara del Vallo.