By Julia Buckley, CNN
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 comple