Journal articles on the topic 'Dialetti siciliani'

La rete dell’atlante italo-svizzero AIS comprende sette isole linguistiche tra cui tre sono di natu- ra alloglotta (relative cioè al greco ed all’albanese) mentre cinque sono di origine romanza. In tre delle isole linguistiche romanze, tutte ubicate in Sicilia, si parlano ancora dialetti galloitalici: si tratta delle località di Aidone (P.-AIS 865), San Fratello (P.-AIS 817) e Sperlinga (P.-AIS 836). è ben risaputo che l’origine storica di queste isole risale all’Alto Medioevo (XII–XIII secoli) e che la patria dei rispettivi coloni alto-medievali si trovava nella zona di contatto situata tra il Piemonte meridionale, la Liguria settentrionale e la contigua Emilia occidentale.Nel corso della dialettometrizzazione della totalità dei dati dell’AIS – svoltasi a Salisburgo negli anni 2005–2009 – si è presentata l’opportunità di esaminare, tramite tutti gli strumenti dialettometrici attualmente a disposizione, tanto la posizione (quantitativa relazionale) dei dialetti galloitalici delle suddette tre località nella rete dell’AIS, quanto quella di alcuni dialetti siciliani limitrofi.I risultati delle rispettive analisi sono molto sfumati e dimostrano chiaramente la comples- sità dell’inserzione delle parlate galloitaliche nel diasistema siciliano: vengono presentati tra- mite 16 carte dialettometriche a colore, ciascuna delle quali è accompagnata di appositi spiega- zioni e commenti dialettometrici e linguistici.

La prima metà del Settecento — periodo in cui scrisse Filippo Orioles (1687–1793), autore del Riscatto d’Adamo — fu segnato in Sicilia da un continuo alternarsi di dominazioni e quindi anche da normale commistione di linguaggi. Di riflesso, i lavori dell’Orioles (La notte in giorno, La S. Rosalia, Il S. Alessio e Il San Basilio Magno), analizzati brevemente nella loro esemplarità linguistica, sono uno specchio di questa realtà. Nelle opere esaminate troviamo una mescolanza di lingue (italiano, spagnolo e latino), frequenti latinismi, dialetti (siciliano e napoletano). La contaminazione dei linguaggi si manifesta sia sul piano puramente linguistico, sia su quello dei codici e delle tradizioni culturali: abbiamo in contempo il linguaggio lirico e drammatico, colto e popolare, profano e religioso. Al linguaggio galante dei salotti si contrappone il dialetto schietto dei popolani; al tono epico si contrappone quello eroicomico dei servi. L’elemento più interessante delle commedie agiografiche dell’autore palermitano è il plurilinguismo — inteso in senso lato — grazie al quale va in scena, sia pure in modo anacronistico, la Sicilia del ’700, sia aristocratica che popolana. E sono proprio, e principalmente, i personaggi del popolo con il loro colorito dialetto che rendono meno pesanti, se non addirittura vivaci, le commedie dell’Orioles.

Abstract This article is concerned with basic intonational features of Sicilian, a Romance variety spoken in Sicily in Southern Italy. While there has been some research on the intonational features of the regional variety of Italian, Sicilian intonation remains undescribed. The first part of the article provides a historic overview of the dialectal configuration of Sicilian and the Sicilian-Italian diglossia. In the subsequent section we perform an intonational analysis on a Sicilian corpus containing acoustic data of 432 utterances (216 broad focus statements and 216 information-seeking yes-no questions). Once the basic intonational features of Sicilian are described and analyzed we use the informatic tool ProDis (Elvira-García et al. 2018) for a quantitative cluster analysis in order to define geoprosodic groups within Siciliy. Finally, we carry out another cluster analysis with the aim of modelling prosodic distances between Romance varieties spoken in different areas in Italy.

Este estudio ofrece una propuesta lingüístico-comparativa entre el español y el siciliano.Mientras que se han realizado detalladas comparaciones entre lenguas romances, menosatención se le ha dado al siciliano, dado su carácter de dialecto del italiano. Segúnalgunos lingüistas, el siciliano, como el sardo (hablado en Cerdeña), no se constituyecomo un dialecto, sino como una lengua independiente, que perdió su estatus de talcuando el parlamento italiano decidió asignar una lengua oficial nacional. En esta investigación,independientemente de la interpretación del siciliano como lengua o comodialecto, se analizarán algunos de los aspectos fónicos, léxicos, ortográficos y morfológicosmás sobresalientes que lo diferencian del español. Paralelamente, se establecencorrespondencias con el italiano y el latín para entender mejor los procesos evolutivosdel siciliano. Nuestro propósito reside en contribuir al canon analítico de estudios dedialectos y lenguas romances y en darle más visibilidad al siciliano, el cual cuenta conpocos estudios de esta índole.

The aim of this article is to identify the pragmatic functions of code-switching to the Sicilian dialect of the Italian language in the autobiography of the contemporary Italian writer G. Culicchia. Code switches studied by contact linguistics are the embedded language units of different levels in the matrix language utterance. The author uses I. Y. Mishintseva and G. N. Chirsheva's classification of pragmatic functions for studying code switches in literary works. The foreign language units in G. Culicchia’s work perform two groups of functions: functions characteristic of fiction (creating the effect of communication in the Embedded Language in the literary work) and those characteristic of spoken language (topic-related, metalinguistic, citing and emotional functions). The topic-related function of codeswitches is used to convey Sicilian culture realities as well as the direct speech of the author’s Sicilian relatives. The metalinguistic function of the code-switches under analysis involves introducing the reader to pronunciation and lexical features of the Sicilian dialect. The citing function means the author’s citing of Sicilian proverbs and sayings. The emotional function consists in expressing the author’s emotions and feelings towards Sicily and Sicilian relatives. Thus, the pragmatic functions show that the code-switches under analysis are the source of subjective and objective information in the novel. The Sicilian code-switches have a graphic feature in the novel: all of them are printed in italics. The italic type as a graphic stylistic device is used to logically separate Sicilian words from Italian lexis, to convey emotions, to separate the author’s Italian speech from the other characters’ Sicilian dialect.

This paper highlights the richness associated with having several dialects within the same Italian language system, and specifically discusses the Sicilian dialect that was highly affected by Arabic. The article will also go back historically to introduce “Siqilliya,” examining the Arabic Sicilian lexicology to demonstrate syntactic constructions typically relevant to the Arabic language, and thus exposing the Sicilian Arabism. My main target is to show, through different examples, the interaction between the Sicilian and Arabic languages at the cultural, syntactic, lexicological and grammatical levels. I will also trace some terms used by Andrea Camilleri through his “Commissario Montalbano,” which have become a “modo di dire” or way of speaking that has become an integral part of the Italian language.

SoPhISM (The SocioPhonetics of verbal Interaction: Sicilian Multimodal corpus) is an acoustic and articulatory sociophonetic corpus focused on whithin-speaker variation as a function of stylistic/communicative factors. The corpus is particularly intended for the study of rhotics as a sociolinguistic variable in the production of Sicilian speakers. Rhotics are analyzed according to the distinction between single-phase and multiple-phase rhotics along with the presence of constriction and aperture articulatory phases. Based on these parameters, the annotation protocol seeks to classify rhotic variants within a sufficiently granular, but internally consistent, phonetic perspective. The proposed descriptive parameters allow for the discussion of atypical realizations in terms of phonetic derivations (or simplifications) of typical closure–aperture sequences. The distribution of fricative variants in the speech repertoire of one speaker and his interlocutors shows the potential provided by SoPhISM for sociophonetic variation to be studied at the ‘micro’ level of individual speaker’s idiolects.

Andrea Camilleri, autor de novelas policíacas de éxito publicadas en numerosos países extranjeros, no escribe en la norma culta del italiano. Todas sus obras utilizan una interlengua que ha sido descrita como un hibrido entre el italiano y el dialecto siciliano. Aunque existen muchas novelas que se caracterizan por adoptar una variedad diatópica –pensamos en textos como Ragazzi di vita de Pasolini, o Quel pasticciaccio brutto di via Merulana de Gadda- Camilleri es el primero que realiza una elección semejante en un ámbito de literatura de género con vocación comercial. Eso lo ha convertido en una anomalía y en un reto para su publicación en el extranjero. Las editoriales han tenido que plantearse si traducir la variedad lingüística empleada, en detrimento de una comprensibilidad, o eliminar los rasgos dialectales en la traducción. La mayoría han optado por esta última alternativa, aunque muchos traductólogos y traductores han avanzado otras propuestas. En el centro de este debate está el axioma de que la dificultad lectora de las novelas de Camilleri surge en el momento de traducirlas. Este trabajo quiere proponer un enfoque distinto. El punto de partida es una simple observación: el léxico empleado por Camilleri dificulta la lectura también al lector italiano. Solo una minoría de italianos hablan y entienden el siciliano. La problemática polisistémica que conlleva la traducción a una lengua meta, en realidad, ya existe en la edición original. Si es así, el dialecto cumple en las novelas policíacas de Camilleri una función inédita: poner al lector -también al lector italiano- dentro de un juego de descodificación. Intentaremos sacar a Camilleri del debate sobre la traducibilidad del dialecto para colocarlo en un marco paralelo y más amplio: el del autor que juega con la lengua y su ambigüedad semántica.

É noto come la letteratura siciliana postunitaria esprima una relazione conflittuale con le istituzioni statali che appaiono sovraimposte e distanti dalla realtà locale; ne deriva una risentita diffidenza verso apparati giudiziari spesso inadatti a gestire la diversità dell’universo isolano, con sue proprie regole e codici comportamentali. L'applicazione di norme giuridiche continentali individua negativamente tale diversitá, in accordo ad un processo di orientalizzazione della realtá siciliana che segue alla fase unitaria. La tematica, centrale in Verga, si trasforma con le opere di Pirandello in antitesi fra la Legge e i suoi apparati, intesi come forme statiche e rigide, e la fluidità e mutevolezza dell’esistenza, che il diritto pretende di irreggimentare; la coscienza individuale non è invece mai riconducibile ad una norma uguale per tutti. Un motivo sviluppato ampiamente dalla novella pirandelliana Il dovere del medico del 1902, ma già trattato nel racconto di Ugo Fleres (1857–1939) Peccato veniale del 1891, che il presente articolo si propone di analizzare. Ancora legato ad un “discorso di classe”, ma al tempo stesso in qualche modo antesignano del relativismo pirandelliano, appare il lavoro giovanile di Nino Martoglio (1870–1921), I civitoti in pretura del 1893. Il dibattito processuale, bloccato da fraintendimenti linguistici fra parlanti in dialetto e in lingua, individua come difficoltà primaria nell’esercizio della legge l’incomunicabilità a livello di codice comunicativo fra i popolani catanesi e i magistrati che provengono da ‘nfora regnu. Si consideri inoltre che il pubblico del processo, attivo con commenti e risa, “si supponi ‘ntra la platea”; la rottura dell’illusione scenica rende i fruitori dello spettacolo parte attiva di un procedimento giudiziario comico, quindi per esigenze di copione dileggiato e sconfessato. Si intende infine prendere in analisi il romanzo fleresiano “Giustizia” (1909), ambientato nel paese siciliano di Riva: il titolo risulta antifrastico, considerando che l’opera racconta tortuose vicende di errori giudiziari intorno all’omicidio di una baronessa, per il quale magistrati inetti trovano diversi capri espiatori; il vero colpevole rivela invece il suo delitto solo in confessione, facendo collidere giustizia umana e divina. Il processo continuamente riformulato non si vede mai in scena, ma il romanzo è punteggiato da dibattiti informali di ambito giuridico, agiti in luoghi atipici, quali la farmacia o i salotti del paese; il lontano evento processuale, deviato dalle sue autentiche funzioni, diventa occasione di sfoggio e promozione sociale dei Rivesi. L’unico personaggio realmente giudicato proprio chi non può difendersi: la defunta baronessa, la cui reputazione viene distrutta nel corso dell’inchiesta. L’immagine letteraria primonovecentesca di una giustizia caotica, inefficace, inesistente, che “resta confinata in un oltre” (Borsellino, 1997), riflette la visione problematica di un’esistenza priva di valori di riferimento, ma agisce anche come efficace strumento ermeneutico per evidenziare l’interno dinamismo di una realtà prismatica, che si ricrea incessantemente dall’incrocio e dallo scontro delle opposte verità.

L'articolo prende avvio da una riflessione privata sul sentimento del nostos che ha caratterizzato (e continua a caratterizzare) la vita di migliaia di italiani in emigrazione. La dimensione privata è però solamente un input per considerare il nostos e la sua valorizzazione anche da un punto di vista istituzionale e accademico, sia di ricerca letteraria che linguistica. Sono analizzate le opere in chiave migratoria della letteratura siciliana moderna e contemporanea, in particolare di due scrittori di Delia: Stefano Vilardo e Lina Riccobene. Sul piano linguistico è proposto un riferimento all’italiese come linguaggio creativo del nostos, una lingua a sé stante nello spazio linguistico italiano globale, capace di creare identità personale e sociale a gruppi di persone intragenerazionali.

In addition to twelve recognized minority languages (Law no. 482/1999), Italy features a number of non-recognized so-called “dialects” that is difficult to state, but which renowned linguists like Tullio De Mauro and Giulio Lepschy calculate as ranging between 12 and 15. These languages are still spoken (and sometimes written) by slightly less than half of the Italian population and are the first languages of a significant part of it. Some of them even have a history of (semi)official usage and feature large and interesting literary traditions. An introduction on the linguistic situation in Italy, the classification of its “dialects” and their state of endangerment, is followed by discussion of the present (scant) legislation and action being taken to protect the seven language varieties chosen as case studies: Piedmontese, Western Lombard/Milanese, Venetan, Ligurian/Genoese, Roman, Neapolitan and Sicilian. These language planning strategies are discussed particularly in terms of graphization (corpus planning), status and acquisition planning, even when, as in most cases, this “planning” may be uncoordinated and even unconscious. The article closes with a few general considerations and with some suggestions on how these initiatives could be improved.

The scope of the present article is to reflect upon the question of the environment within the context of the discussion concerning the use of dialect in the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andrea Zanzotto, Nino De Vita and other poets from Sicily. Commencing from the concept of ‘diversity’, as intended by Pasolini as the disappearance of the rural world, which occurs in step with the eclipses of dialectal variety, the essay will demonstrate how the environment – the crucial focus of the poetry of the above mentioned poets – converges concepts of dialects, territoriality and animality. The ecocritical method, which is applied in this study, enables one to signal the urgency to reflect upon the situation of contemporary poetry, in particular of Sicilian poetry, which has its roots in Nino De Vita’s poetic works, inextricably tied to the place, the natural and the cultural context of the island. The new Sicilian poetry does not cancel ‘diversity’, which on the contrary is capable of confronting environmental issues – at times also beyond the island’s borders – and it feeds from the lymph, from the root of the dialect.

This paper explores the effects of language contact in the nominal morphology of central Sicilian dialects. In particular, this study is concerned with the contact-induced changes related to the distribution of three plural formatives that give rise to competition between different inflectional classes with respect to a number of lexemes. It is shown that sociolinguistic factors such as speaker age account for the distribution of the competing plural forms and the high degree of variation. As a consequence, a slow and gradual change is leading to the disappearance of the plural form that has no equivalent in the contact language, that is, in Italian.

The difficulty of translating dialects has been extensively studied over the years, firstly by scholars who focused on the (un)translatability of dialects in literature, and more recently by an increasing number of academics who have been investigating the issue within the field of audiovisual translation, both in dubbing and in subtitling. This study aims to analyse the strategies used in subtitling to translate into English the Sicilian dialect spoken in the Italian film La mafia uccide solo d’estate, directed by Pif in 2013. In this film, the use of dialect is not simply a tool to indicate the geographical origins of the characters, but it is exploited to construe their identity. Indeed, language variation is a device used purposefully to distinguish the ‘good’ characters from the ‘bad’ ones, and, as such, it is a means of identification. The results of the analysis will also be compared to those of previous studies conducted in this research area. Finally, the paper will attempt to provide some potential solutions that might be adopted in the subtitling of similar products, based on previous studies performed by the author on the original dialogues of some Hollywood films.

This article provides both a diachronic and synchronic account of the generalization of perfective auxiliary be in specific irrealis modal contexts across numerous Romance varieties spoken in Italy and more widely within the Romània, which has essentially gone unnoticed in the descriptive and theoretical literature. In some cases (southern Calabrian, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese), the distribution of be is to be interpreted as a residue of an original unaccusative syntax which was exceptionally preserved under higher V-movement in irrealis contexts, whereas in others (person-driven dialects of central and southern Italy, southern peninsular Spanish, Romanian) this original unaccusative signal has been reanalysed as a specialized marker of irrealis (lexicalizing a high Mood head) and extended to all verb classes. In the case of Alguerès, by contrast, the generalization of irrealis be is argued to be the result of language contact with surrounding Sardinian dialects where a specific pattern of dedicated irrealis marking of Mood° has been replicated. Finally, the reverse pattern with generalization of irrealis have, the reanalysis of an aspectual distinction between resultative and experiential perfects found in early Romance varieties (Neapolitan, Sicilian, Spanish, Catalan), is shown to involve a similar pattern of dedicated irrealis marking in Mood°.

The variety of Sicilian spoken in Pantelleria has developed a progressive construction which involves pronominal subject clitics. This is striking in many respects. Firstly, on a Romance scale, subject clitics are usually regarded as characteristic for varieties spoken north of Florence. Secondly, in none of the central Romance dialects where subject clitics are known to occur do these convey progressive meaning. The latter seems to be unusual on a larger scale too, as none of the strategies for progressive marking reported in the relevant literature on linguistic typology seems to be directly comparable with the one displayed by Pantiscu. Besides, the results of the present study have some consequences for grammaticalization theory, as they suggest that recent revisions of Hopper & Traugott’s ‘cline of grammaticalization’ are not on the right track and that the cline originally proposed should rather be revised so as to include the distinction between syntactic and phonological cliticization.

Obiettivo del saggio è presentare una prima analisi della lingua del teatro di Ruggero Cappuccio, autore multanime e poliedrico, considerato una delle voci più originali della drammaturgia contemporanea, non solo dell’area napoletana. Oggetto della ricerca sono due opere pubblicate Shakespea Re di Napoli (2002) e Le ultime sette parole di Caravaggio (2012), con un copione inedito, intitolato Circus Don Chisciotte (2017). Le scelte formali, fortemente ancorate alla dialettalità del napoletano, ma anche del siciliano e, con minore frequenza, del veneziano, si affrancano dalla koinè regionale del napoletano, perché superano la diglossia italiano-dialetto della drammaturgia di Eduardo, per dare corpo a una lingua di scena poetica, lontana dal realismo mimetico, resa attraverso un raffinato e originale mlange verbale carico di sonorità, con un ben consolidato livello di scelte pluristilistiche. La rilevanza attribuita alla phoné, reinventata in un’entitè reificata e palpabile, o caratterizzata da una grottesca materialità, dà luogo a partiture sonore e a una scrittura votata all’adibizione di misure poetiche e strutture melodiche, a una “lingua di scena”, fatta soprattutto di intarsi e parallelismi fonici, con prevalenza di couplingassonantici, per l’interferenza di registri tonali dissonanti e per l’esaltazione del patrimonio orale delle koinai regionali del repertorio italiano, spesso accostate all’inglese e allo spagnolo.

This article linguistically analyzes how the Sicilian dialect is used in conjunction with Italian in the books Il cane di terracotta (The Terracotta Dog) by Andrea Camilleri and La Mennulara (The Almond Picker) by Simonetta Agnello Hornby. The analysis considers how the dialect is represented at various levels: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical. In addition, the Norwegian translations of these books are also analyzed: Terrakottahunden, translated by Jon Rognlien, and Mandelplukkersken by Tommy Watz, respectively. It focuses on how the translators solved the challenge of the original books’ text alternating between Italian and Sicilian dialect. The translators’ account of their choices is presented following each analysis.

In questo saggio tratteremo la visione del mondo rurale, nonché le sfumature della lingua, delle intrusioni dialettali e del linguaggio colloquiale contadino rappresentati in due opere teatrali: La Lupa del drammaturgo siciliano Giovanni Verga e Bodas de sangre del tragediografo andaluso Federico García Lorca, esaminando anche gli aspetti macro e microstrutturali dei testi.L’Italia e la Spagna sono paesi vicini a livello geografico e socio-culturale geograficamente e socio-culturalmente, legati alla storia del Mar Mediterraneo e dalla comune matrice linguistica latina. María de las Nieves Muñiz Muñiz riporta che “all’Italia e alla Spagna, parimenti arretrate e solari, anche se diversamente ‘antiche’, toccò il ruolo di serbatoio di miti, leggende e cultura popolare del Mediterraneo”.

This article is devoted to the study of the Italian language vocabulary, as well as its enrichment with Arabic borrowings under the influence of various historical events in the course of the historical development of the island of Sicily. The authors describe the main historical events that influenced the enrichment of the lexical composition of the Italian language with Arabic borrowings. The history of the Mediterranean is saturated with conflicts, meetings, migrations. For centuries, the region of southern Italy has been the center of various cultures and peoples, which greatly influenced the development of art and architecture as well as vocabulary of the people living in this territory. The purpose of the study is to describe and analyze the lexemes of Arabic origin present in the Italian language and Sicilian dialects. The lexemes are referred to "arabisms" that emerged during the period of Arab domination in the southern Italy and under the influence of the Arabic language. Within the scope the authors consider in detail the most important historical events that took place in certain periods in the region. In addition, the authors overview the semantic fields in which there are arabisms and the areas they are related, e.g. toponymy, material culture, agriculture, manufacturing, food, etc. Also the geography of the region and the linguistic contacts are regarded due to the conquests of the Arabs in Sicily.

Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circumstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. 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