Burri e Pistoia

e that had completely destroyed the old city. He had the impression of
visiting a cemetery, in which the only source of inspiration was a strong
sense of pity, and nothing else. His reaction had been to go home without
having been able to satisfy the earnest requests of the mayor, Ludovico
Corrao. He said that it was only over the course of a quick lunch that he
began to feel the distress turn into a sense of rebirth, and came to the
conclusion that the thing to do was create a cretto that would reproduce
the plan of what had been the city before the earthquake.
I had already been to Gibellina and could not help but share the feelings
expressed by the artist. I was also to follow almost every phase in
the operation through the reports I received from friends in Città di
Castello and occasionally from Burri himself.
Five long years of work and tons of white concrete to cover an area of
90 000 square meters: completed in 1989, it is recognized as the largest
work of Land Art in the world.
The desire to go back Gibellina grew ever more pressing and in the
March of 1996 I was able to persuade a group of some thirty friends,
mostly architects, engineers and art lovers, to make the trip. We hired
a coach and set off for Gibellina. Arriving in the vicinity of the city and
making a pit stop at the insistence of my friends, under a sky heavy
with storm clouds, we were treated to a scene that was transcendental
to say the least: the menacing clouds parted to let through the sun,
whose rays picked out the Grande Cretto, leaving us all dumbfounded.
Once we reached the massive work another stimulating surprise rewarded
us for the fatigue of the long journey. In fact, the roads of the
cretto, around 160 cm deep, offered the bizarre sight of a number of
people moving around the work with only their heads visible, sticking
out from the trenches.
On the return journey each of the participants expressed his reactions
to the experience. Some of them were really appropriate, like the friend
who recited almost the whole of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno, putting
the emphasis on a tercet that seemed to sum up the emotion stirred by
the Grande Cretto: “Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say / What was this forest
savage, rough, and stern, / Which in the very thought renews the fear.”
che quando è arrivato sul luogo dove stava
sorgendo la nuova Gibellina ha capito
che non avrebbe mai potuto realizzarvi
un lavoro. Prima di ripartire ha voluto visitare
anche le macerie lasciate dal sisma
che aveva interamente distrutto l’antica
Gibellina. L’ impressione è stata quella
di trovarsi immerso in una necropoli, la
cui unica fonte ispiratrice era quella di un
forte senso di pietà e nient’altro. La reazione
era stata quella di tornarsene a casa
senza poter soddisfare le calorose richieste
del sindaco Ludovico Corrao. Soltanto
nel corso di una rapida colazione dice di
avere avvertito che l’angoscia si stava trasformando
in un sentimento di rinascita,
raggiungendo la sicurezza che ciò che ci
sarebbe stato da fare era un cretto che ri-
Il biglietto di auguri che
Alberto Burri inviò a Giuliano
Gori in occasione del suo
sessantesimo compleanno
The greetings card that
Alberto Burri sent to Giuliano
Gori on his sixtieth birthday
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