Italy, Piazza Armerina: like one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a non-place. A town which, because of its name, most Italians still mistake for a square (that’s what Piazza means). A village in the heart of Sicily doomed by its own name to an existential limbo, a chronicized crisis of identity. To which the problems of every village in the island add up: unemployment, degradation, the sensation of having been left behind by the rest of the country, the resulting fatalism. All of this seems to contribute to a general distress which is higher among the people of Piazza than in the average Sicilian: we see it in the faces of those Piazzesi who finally gave up to it, becoming its prey to the point of losing sanity. Faces which seem to ask, rather than for help, to simply be recognized as human.
Mario Noto
