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One of the monumental building ruins in Giarre - a small town in Sicily, where a swimming pool, a theater, a polo stadium and much more have been waiting to be completed for decades.
Photo: Anton Maria Storch / Corso
Giarre is a small town in Sicily where you can always decide: if you turn 180 degrees, you can see the Ionian Sea or the summit of Mount Etna.
There is a third possibility: then you would look at the city itself.
Many citizens have been avoiding this for decades, at least in certain places.
You walk past the unfinished community center, the never-finished indoor swimming pool, the hulls of a theater, without complaining.
Even a decaying polo stadium should be overlooked, in which a game will never take place: Not only because there are hardly any players in Sicily, but also because the stands do not meet the norm.
The Sicilian Andrea Torrisi calls these building ruins in his hometown "cathedrals in the desert".
They are public projects for which money flowed until it dried up.
Someone has enriched himself;
their essential purpose thus seems fulfilled.
There are ten monumental monuments to corruption in this place of less than 30,000 inhabitants.
Torrisi organized city walks of a different kind with other activists;
they led locals and tourists to these tax graves, told of their history and their effect on life in Giarre.
Torrisi now lives in Brussels;
he accustoms his eyes to "finished and perfect things."
He told his story of the Sicilian Etta Scollo, whose grandmother comes from Giarre.
Scollo is an emigrant like him;
she lives as an artist in Berlin.
She dedicated a book to her home island that has many authors - activists like Torrisi, ethnologists and prosecutors, writers and theater makers.
Also a farmer who wins the biblical manna.
The most famous protagonist in this astonishing collection of interviews and minutes, of poems and stories is probably Leoluca Orlando, lawyer and mayor of Palermo.
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Etta Scollo
Photo: Tobias Dutschke / Corso
How the capital of the island went from a Mafia stronghold to the safest city in Italy (as of 2019) is a miracle, but not a mystery: In his view, the most important thing for this development was a cultural change, a decision against Fear - not only of the mafia, but also of the stranger.
In 2015, the city committed itself to international freedom of movement with the “Charter of Palermo”;
those who live there enjoy civil rights.
“When someone asks me,” says Orlando, “how many migrants there are in Palermo, I don't say 80,000 or 100,000, but: not a single one.” Those who feel at home take responsibility, and that has immediate consequences.
"Today the Muslims are the first to take to the streets in Palermo against the Muslim terrorists."
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Title: Voci di Sicilia: A journey through Sicily / incl. Download link for all songs
Editor: Corso
Number of pages: 256
Author: Scollo, Etta, Storch, Antonio Maria (photo)
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The historian Maria Attanasio speaks of a "dark genalogy", but she does not mean politics, but Sicilian literature.
Attanasio stayed in Caltagirone, the place of her birth, and is researching traces of past life in the archives.
So she came across a peasant woman named Francisca, put on record by the Inquisition - from whom she escaped safely - as a woman who wore men's clothes.
Attanasio also tracked down Rosalia Montmasson, who died in 1904: the only female participant in Garibaldi's "Train of the Thousand", which is considered the founding act of the Italian state and which has been forgotten by historiography.
In the meantime, thanks to Attansio's work, it has become naturalized again in the memory of literature.
The revitalization of Sicilian music is a concern of Scollos, who is above all a composer and singer.
The opulent and carefully designed book is accompanied by a CD with songs of Arabic origin and traditional ballads, but also with her composition “Suite for Lampedusa”, based on a speech by the island's mayor, Giusi Nicolini, on the situation of the refugees.
"I was elected in May 2012, and by November 3rd, 21 corpses of people had already been handed over to me ..."
Scollo's anthology captures the present and memory;
in its poetic polyphony it is as impressive as it is stimulating.
One of Scollo's most beloved heroines is the folk singer Rosa Balistreri.
Balistreri came from the countryside, from wretched circumstances;
she captured the wrath of the poor in words and tones and was hugely popular during her lifetime.
"I found parallels," says Scollo, "to their angry chants in the rough rendition of Bllie Holiday's version of
Strange Fruit
, the song that has become a symbol against the lynching of the American southern states." Scollo carries songs from with a clear, beguiling voice Balistreri in front.
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