Speaking voices

The Gran Camposanto in Messina - which I have stubbornly always called the monumental cemetery – is huge. I begin to move past busts, medallions, dedicatory sculptures and angels. All around, I read life stories and of suffering, joys, woes and sorrows.

I am steeped in silence and nothing seems to be happening but, as soon as you start reading, this place reappropriates the cultural, historic and social identity of all those who lived before us. As if in some kind of Dante-like circle, I embark on my journey across a landscape of column shafts and tree trunks, noble chapels, marble busts and statues set in thick vegetation left untended and testimony to the artists, artisans and commissioning clients’ passion and love of art.

What happens is that I keep coming across 28 December 1908, a date that is emblematic of a fracture, one perceived in all its appalling tragedy here in the city of the dead. There is a density of the earth and you gain a sense of the catastrophic earthquake that took entire generations with it. It is here, in the monumental cemetery, that the final act was performed. It is here that you realise that Messina is still a city arrested.

The Famedio is a pantheon of Messina’s people and a shadow of the monument it once was. It must have towered like a Parthenon over the Strait of Messina. I can see it, a great white temple, an icon of the city. Yet, on approaching the monument’s steps, I perceive a large flat area with only capitals and truncated columns. The entire construction has been swept away. The earthquake certainly arrested a story, life, but the neglect and oblivion of subsequent years have deprived the Famedio and the culture of Messina. The quantity of bronze and rusty iron decorations sprawled across the untended grass surface is distressing. Beneath my feet, I feel a constant presence of decorative and architectural features from monuments. Nature has regained the upper hand here.

  I would like to have revealed how many cities, how many Messinas, are enclosed in this simulacrum. How many lives dissolved along with all their dreams and hopes but also the simpler, more human things that each one of us might do every day. All this prompted me to follow a path, one of many possible ones. I have constructed my story and I have narrated my encounters, the things I have seen and the voices I have heard.

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