A Painful End

During the night between the 14th and 15th of January 1968, a violent earthquake of 6,4 Richter scale, hit a huge area of west Sicily including the provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento.

Even if the biggest part of the municipalities like Gibellina and Salaparuta have been completely destroyed, Poggioreale after 41 years still preserve the whole city system, a vast majority of the houses, churches and public buildings. The center of the city, identified like elimo, was founded in 1642 and apparently populated since the antiquity; on the nearby Monte Castellazzo, traces of indigenous dated IV century a. C have been founded.

Walking among the ruins of Poggioreale, between streets and alleys, courtyards and squares, it’s easy to come across with people that appear and disappear, just like ghosts, that walks around ruins in a village still impregnated of life. Of this people you can only imagine the happiness of a too faraway memory that mixed up with the reality of the present, the sadness and the feeling of abandonment that this people had to endure.

A wound still present in the inhabitants of Poggioreale, an open wound that could be found between the ruins where is still perfectly decipherable the city interlacing among houses and courtyards, alleys and streets, churches and noble palaces and the precious theatre. Rests perfectly readable, reason why they open a gash even more painful in the history of Poggioreale.

The tragedy of the earthquake it continues with the poor living conditions in which the population is oblige to live for 14 years. They lived in shacks, which sanitary conditions were simply too far from the actable, cold and humid during winter, extremely hot during summer, being the shacks made out of tin. Some of the people manage to emigrate in other parts of Italy or abroad, but for most of them there wasn’t any other choice than to wait for the construction of the New Town. This was happening while the State distributed money to over 120 municipalities, even though if there were no more than fifteen municipalities hit by the earthquake.

When the construction of the New Town ended up, the inhabitants of Poggioreale founded themselves in front of a town badly designed and even worse constructed. Over dimensioned if we think that it has been thought for five thousand people, when there were no more than two thousand people left after 14 years. It is a town where the squares (so big as ugly) are empty as well as the streets and the biggest part of the houses. Many project have been made and systematically finished and abandoned; sports centres, the system of the squares and pedestrians bridges, a theatre ended in 1991 end never used.

Different architects thinks that the New Town of Poggioreale have been thought in a different architectonic system that was too far from the autochthon life style “Rebuild a town in the Trapani province thinking about a Danish quarter, it is obviously lacking in the culture and the history of the place. Poggioreale is an example of this choice”.

Today, after 41 years, Poggioreale is a twin town: the oldest one that is dying under the wearing out of the time and the disinterestedness of the administrations, the youngest one that was born in coma and it doesn’t look likes that is waking up.