> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # WHERE IT WASN'T, AS IT WASN'T - URL: https://www.theslowarchitect.com/gibellina-cretto-burri/ - Published: 2026-10-14T07:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-22T17:33:19.000Z - Description: I got there by motorbike in June 2019, two months after the Notre-Dame fire, and didn't connect the two. It took me seven years. - Author: Giulio Romano - Tags: Italy, Architecture, Restoration, Travel I first came across the Cretto as a drawing, in a classroom, and it wasn't mine. My first design exam. The brief was an extension to the faculty of architecture, and we were greenhorns with our eyes full of Eisenman and Libeskind without having really understood them. We all turned up to reviews with the same thing in our pockets: some had taken their cue from Herzog & de Meuron, some from Siza, some from Gehry. All big-name architects, all forms borrowed from magazines we leafed through more than we read. Except one. Just one, in the whole course, had started from Burri's Cretto. He amazed us and he amazed Professor Tommaso Valle, and I remember exactly what I felt: I liked it and I hated him, because he was good, very good. I think it's normal to admire and envy a little at the same time. It took me years to understand why his project stood up and ours didn't. He hadn't copied a form. He had copied a gesture. In those same years I got 24 out of 30 in urban geography, on a book by Jean Gottmann that explained, in essence, why our façades counted for almost nothing. I didn't understand that either. It comes in handy later. I got to Gibellina for real much later, by motorbike, on a day in June 2019\. First the new town, then the ruins, in the right order: the other way round doesn't work, because after the Cretto nothing holds up by comparison. I had put the bike on the ferry at Naples and got off at Palermo, with Kat on the back, and that summer my father and mother were in Sicily too. It was a wide loop: Trapani, Selinunte, Agrigento, then up towards the Madonie and down to Cefalù. Bends, heat, and my father commenting on everything we saw, the way two architects do when they travel together, and my mother putting up with the pair of us. Then you take off your helmet and you are standing in front of eighty-six thousand square metres of white concrete laid on the side of a hill, with vineyards all around and wind turbines on the ridge. ![The white concrete blocks of Burri's Cretto spreading up a hillside under a blue sky, with wind turbines on the ridge above](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/01-gibellina-cretto-collina.jpg) The Cretto on the hillside, June 2019\. Wind turbines on the ridge. From a distance it looks like the plan of something. Then you walk into it and the plan disappears, because the walls come up to eye level. You can't see over them. You walk along a corridor whose walls are as tall as you are, and after three turns you no longer know where you are: you have lost sight of the ridge, lost the entrance, and the fissures all look alike. You get lost. It is the only place I know where you get lost inside the plan of a town that no longer exists. ![Massive white concrete blocks of the Cretto separated by narrow walkways, with sharp shadows on one side](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/02-gibellina-cretto-blocchi.jpg) Inside the fissures, the walls come up to eye level. The walls have the skin of the pour, with creases from the formwork sheeting like a badly pulled bedsheet. The floor of the fissures is pale and dusty. And there is the shadow, sharp, cutting the corridor diagonally and leaving one wall in full light and the other in the dark, which at the Cretto happens at every hour except midday. But what struck me most was the white. A white almost at odds with what the work means. You would expect a dark shroud, and instead the June light slams into it and the place dazzles, and beneath that whiteness are the homes of more than six thousand people. My classmate from the design exam, all of a sudden, had been right for a long time. Notre-Dame had burned two months earlier. In April. I remember it, like everyone, the spire falling live on screen. But that day, walking over Gibellina, it never crossed my mind. They were two facts on different shelves, and neither asked the other a question. The question came seven years later, this summer, coming out of a cleaned-up cathedral, said to Kat on the parvis. I have written about it twice, first on [the light in Paris](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/notre-dame-chartres-light/) and then on [St Mark's Campanile](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/venice-campanile-fenice-as-it-was/), and each time it comes back to the same place: when something falls down, the decision is always to rebuild it *com'era, dov'era*, as it was and where it was. The city council on the evening of the collapse. Cacciari while the theatre was still smoking. Macron in front of the cameras. Gibellina is the only place in Italy where that formula was overturned outright, in both its halves. Not as it was. Not where it was. And I had been there, I had walked on it, and I hadn't noticed. This year, as it happens, Gibellina is Italy's Capital of Contemporary Art. It is the first town to receive the title, and the project that won it is called *Portami il futuro*, Bring Me the Future: a million euros from the state, a year of exhibitions, festivals, residencies, urban regeneration. A town born of an earthquake that becomes, almost sixty years later, a national showcase. It's the right year to go back with the question in your pocket. ## Fourteen January 1968 On the night of 14 to 15 January 1968, the Belice valley comes down. Gibellina is among the towns razed to the ground. What happens next is neither a restoration nor a reconstruction. It is a choice of sides. The town is not remade on its own rubble: it is rebuilt somewhere else, kilometres away, on a new site, with a new plan. And the mayor, Ludovico Corrao, decides that the new town will be made by the best Italian artists and architects he can persuade to come. They all come. The Chiesa Madre is by Ludovico Quaroni. The Civic Tower is by Alessandro Mendini. The System of Squares is by Franco Purini and Laura Thermes. The portico on the town-hall square is by Vittorio Gregotti and Giuseppe Samonà. At the entrance stands Pietro Consagra's Star. ![A tall open bell frame above a slot between two sloping stone walls of the Chiesa Madre of Gibellina Nuova](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-gibellina-nuova-chiesa-madre-bell-tower.jpg) Gibellina Nuova, Ludovico Quaroni's Chiesa Madre. ![A large white sphere set within the stone and concrete walls of the Chiesa Madre of Gibellina Nuova, with a sloping bell tower behind](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/03-gibellina-nuova-chiesa-madre-quaroni.jpg) Gibellina Nuova, Ludovico Quaroni's Chiesa Madre and its great white sphere. ![Stepped seating curving around the great white sphere of the Chiesa Madre in Gibellina](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/g1-gibellina-nuova-chiesa-madre-sphere-steps.jpg) Stepped seating curving around the great white sphere of the Chiesa Madre in Gibellina. It is the exact opposite of everything Italy usually does. No nostalgia for the lost figure, no reinstatement, no fake. A new town declared as such, designed by those who at that moment represented Italian architectural thought. On paper it is the right answer to every objection I raised in the two previous articles. If *com'era, dov'era* is an emotional decision dressed up as philology, Gibellina is the opposite decision, taken in broad daylight and signed. So why is it that when people talk about Gibellina they almost always talk about the Cretto, and almost never about the town? ## The town that never filled up Because the new town, for the most part, didn't work. The works are there, and they matter. The quality of the names is beyond question. But the urban fabric is loose, sized for an idea of a town rather than for that town, and the distances are car distances in a place where people used to walk. Many of the collective spaces designed to be the heart of shared life remained spaces, without ever becoming places. Some works have aged badly; others waited years for maintenance. A town of a few thousand people found itself inside a full-scale museum of architecture, and did not always know how, or want, to live in it. This is not a judgement on the designers, who did serious work. It is a question of direction. Gibellina Nuova was designed for the community and not with the community, at a moment when that community was living in shacks and had neither the time nor the means to debate urban form. The form arrived before the life, and the life struggled to get inside it. [And here the book I had studied badly comes back](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/gottmann-invincible-city/), boiled down, is that cities are not forms but nodes: they live on circulation, of goods and people and ideas, and on the crossroads where those flows meet. Urban design can welcome those flows or obstruct them. What it cannot do is create them. Old Gibellina stood where it stood for reasons. Not beautiful reasons, not chosen reasons, but reasons: a position, some roads, the countryside around it, a web of relationships laid down over centuries. New Gibellina was placed elsewhere, on a site picked by administrative procedure, and at that point no signature in the world could make a difference. You can call in Quaroni, Gregotti, Samonà, Purini and Mendini and get a beautiful town. You cannot call them in to create a crossroads for you. (I came at the same question from another side in the piece on [Sabbioneta](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/sabbioneta-ideal-city/).) That is exactly what, at nineteen, I wasn't able to take in. Architecture, to me, was form: plans, elevations, proportions. That a city lived on something else, and that this something else came before any drawing, was an idea without the question that goes with it. Gibellina, among other places, gave me the question. This, when I think about it, is the real reason why in Italy *com'era, dov'era* always wins. Not because we are conservative out of laziness. Because the old form is the only one there is already agreement on. No one has to explain it, no one has to defend it in a public meeting, no one has to convince a traumatised population that that square there will work. *Com'era, dov'era* is not an aesthetic choice: it is the shortcut that lets you skip the hardest part, which is getting people to agree on how they want to live from tomorrow onwards. Gibellina didn't skip that part. It delegated it. ## Eighty-six thousand square metres of concrete Then there is the Cretto, and that is another story again. ![The thick edge of a white concrete block of the Cretto beside a walkway, with the hillside behind](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/03-burri-cretto-block-edge.jpg) The edge of a block, about a metre and a half of concrete over the rubble. At the start of the 1980s Corrao invites Alberto Burri to make something for the new town, and the new town doesn't interest him. What interests him is the rubble, still lying where it was more than ten years on. He decides to work there: to compact the debris, contain it and cover it with a pour of white concrete, leaving the fissures open along the lines of the streets. Eighty-six thousand square metres. Blocks a little over a metre and a half high. Work begins in 1985, stops in 1989 with the piece unfinished, and is only completed in 2015. What comes out of it is the most radical thing Italy has done with a destroyed historic centre, and at the same time the hardest to classify. It is not a restoration. It is not a reinstatement. It is not even a preserved ruin, because the ruins can no longer be seen: they lie underneath. It is a cast. The plan of the town remains legible and walkable, the streets are still streets, the blocks are still blocks, but everything that once stood upright has been buried under a shroud of concrete. ![The Cretto spreading over the hillside like a cracked white sheet, with wind turbines on the ridge](https://storage.ghost.io/c/23/76/23767679-13de-46d2-ac49-39625bb7ee95/content/images/2026/10/05-burri-cretto-hillside-panorama-1.jpg) The Cretto spreading over the hillside like a cracked white sheet, with wind turbines on the ridge. Brandi had written that the adage of *com'era, dov'era* "is the negation of the very principle of restoration", because it makes time reversible and the work reproducible at will. The Cretto does exactly the opposite: it makes time irreversible, and declares it by pouring concrete. In Carbonara's vocabulary it is a work of contemporary art whose support is a historic centre. In mine, it is the closest thing to an anti-reconstruction one can imagine: where Paris remade the figure and lost the material, Burri lost the figure and kept the trace. Notre-Dame gives you back the image of a building; the Cretto gives you back the route through a town and takes the image away. ## What the concrete sealed On this I don't have a comfortable position, and it's worth saying so. The Cretto is, I believe, the most beautiful and most serious thing to come out of an Italian earthquake. It is also an irreversible operation carried out over the homes of living people. It sealed the rubble for good, with no way back, and took from the survivors their last physical link with the town: that wall left standing, that threshold you could still recognise. It turned into a monument a place that for some was still an open grief. Those who criticised it in those terms were not wrong. The Cretto decides, in place of a community, what form its memory should take, and fixes it for ever. It is an author's choice about a collective sorrow, and nobody voted. But there were three alternatives, and it is worth looking them in the face. Leave the rubble to crumble, which is what happened for more than fifteen years and is not dignity, it is abandonment. Rebuild the town as it was and where it was, which would have produced an uninhabited stage set on top of a seismic fault. Or do what was done. I don't believe a clean answer exists, and whoever offers one has usually never signed anything. ## And today Because none of this is archaeology. The formula still arrives, every time, by nightfall. It arrived at Amatrice in 2016, and some observed that the rhetoric of *com'era, dov'era* stifled at birth any imagination about what came after, shifting the debate away from the real question, which spaces and services that community recognises as its own, towards the restitution of an image. At L'Aquila it is estimated that the reconstruction will take twenty or twenty-five years to be considered complete, and as many billions. I work inside that mechanism. Not on earthquakes, but the logic is the same: a deadline set elsewhere, for reasons that aren't technical, and within that deadline a project that has to stand up. When the calendar becomes the main constraint, the first thing to go is the discussion, and the second is the time to understand what is really needed. Under those conditions, *com'era, dov'era* is the most efficient answer there is. It doesn't require consensus to be built. It uses one that is ready-made. That is why Gibellina deserves a year as capital, and why it deserves it now. Not because it succeeded. It didn't, not entirely, and the empty town among the artworks says so more clearly than any essay. But because it is the only place in Italy where someone, after a disaster, refused the shortcut and paid the full price of that refusal. Almost sixty years on, we have the bill in front of us, all of it, in order: what ambition produced, what it missed, and what it sealed for ever under the concrete. That is far more than a cathedral rebuilt identically will ever tell us. And there is one thing I understood only by writing. My classmate, at that exam, hadn't chosen the Cretto because it was a beautiful form. He had chosen it because it was the only thing, in that classroom full of magazines, that wasn't a successful building to imitate. It was a gesture made over a loss. We were drawing façades. He had understood before any of us that architecture, sometimes, is the decision about what to do with what is no longer there. --- ## Visiting Gibellina Nuova and the Ruderi, the ruins, are two separate places, about twenty kilometres apart, and should be seen on the same day and in this order: first the town, then the Cretto. The other way round works badly, because after the Cretto nothing holds up by comparison. You cross the Cretto on foot along the fissures. Give it a good hour to do it properly, with suitable shoes and not under the midday sun: the white concrete reflects the heat, and in June at noon it is unbearable. The best light is the low light of late afternoon, which is also the only time the cracks cast shadows and the plan of the town can really be read. If you come by motorbike, bear it in mind: you arrive hot and you walk on a surface that gives back all the heat it has taken in. Bring water, because there is nothing there. In 2026, with the Capital of Contemporary Art programme, check the calendar before you go: many things open only for events. ## Further reading On the Cretto, the most useful thing is to look at photographs taken on the ground rather than from the air. From above the work is an image; walked through, it is something else entirely, and the difference between the two is exactly the subject of this article. On the reconstruction of the Belice and the role of Ludovico Corrao there is a large and divided literature: it is worth reading at least two opposing voices, because it is a case on which nobody is neutral. Mostly in Italian. Jean Gottmann, [*La città invincibile*](https://www.theslowarchitect.com/slow-library/), which exists only in Italian. I have written about it separately, and it is the book that explains better than any other why a new town can be beautiful and still stay empty. If you read only one title on this list, read that one. On recent Italian reconstructions, the Medusa newsletter devoted a clear-sighted piece to Amatrice and to the way *com'era, dov'era* closed the debate before it had even opened. In Italian. Translations of quotations from Italian are my own.