PALERMO - The Belìce devastated by the earthquake and revisited after a slow and incomplete rebirth.
It is a journey through images, but not only through images, on the great tragedy of over half a century ago what the National Institute of Volcanology proposes in the book "Belìce punto zero" (Ingv edizioni, 191 pages).
The layout of the volume is mainly based on the shots of the photojournalists of L'Ora taken from the archive of the newspaper acquired at the time by the Central Library of the Sicilian Region.
Those photos tell of destroyed countries, broken lives, faces devastated by pain.
The visual narration of the tragedy of January 1968, which filled the pages of the newspaper, is now updated with photos of the students of the photography course of the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.
Back in Belìce, they found ghostly scenarios (weeds, ruins and rubble) but above all reborn towns such as Gibellina, Salaparuta and Poggioreale completely rebuilt in other places according to urban visions that have sparked discussions for having erased memories, cultural systems, models of life .
The most recent images, writes Mario Mattia researcher at Ingv, "show us the extreme hardness of a very slow and awkward reconstruction process and finally those of the Belicino area as it appears today, with its wounds still open, on display for those who still want to 'look' at the living and still bleeding body of this social fabric ".
In addition to some testimonies of survivors and symbolic characters, the book contains the contributions of experts, scholars, journalists.
Among other things, the technique of enhancement of the photographic image by the newspaper L'Ora is described and it is framed, with the contribution of sociological studies, that already before the earthquake was a frontier territory that has always struggled with problems with missed or delayed development.
