If there’s one thing that abounds in Sicily – more than orange groves and vineyards – it’s concrete. True to stereotype, there are cement plants all over this Mafia-riddled island. And its once-beautiful capital, Palermo, is rife with hideous concrete buildings that hover next to Baroque palazzi. (These soulless structures are often constructed using pilfered funds intended to restore buildings bombed in WWII). Amid all of these mind-numbing edifices, we found what is considered the largest work of land art in Europe. And guess what? It’s made of the same poor-quality concrete as the buildings in Palermo.Only here, it works. Titled Grande Cretto, by postwar Italian artist Alberto Burri, the piece commemorates the destruction of the Western Sicilian town of Gibellina in a catastrophic 1968 earthquake. In 1980, roughly twelve years after residents rebuilt their town 18 km away, Burri covered the hillside town’s streets and ruined buildings– an area roughly 900 x 1200 feet and about 5′ in height, with white concrete. The streets look like the crackle pattern on Burri’s fabled paintings, only you can walk through these. Or skate through them. (Not to give anyone any ideas.) But if you were to, no one would know: it’s in the middle of nowhere, a two hour drive from Palermo.
