The Cretto di Burri is the largest land art work ever created in Europe: eighty-six thousand square metres of white concrete poured over the ruins of Gibellina Vecchia, the Sicilian village pulverised by the Belice earthquake of 14-15 January 1968. A stone shroud that does not commemorate the 296 victims with a stele, but, by following the entire layout of the old streets, old alleys and old courtyards, transforms the whole urban plan into a monument.
Arriving at the cretto di burri from the A29 motorway, the first vision is disorienting: a white chessboard of two hundred and eighty by four hundred metres, spread across a clay hill, that from afar looks like a city under construction and from up close reveals itself as a buried city. Alberto Burri, doctor, reluctant American partisan, informal painter among the most respected of the European twentieth century, worked on this commission from 1984 until his death in 1995, and the work was completed posthumously in 2015 for the centenary of his birth.
This guide reconstructs in depth the history of the cretto di gibellina: the 1968 earthquake, life in the village before the shock, the birth of Gibellina Nuova eighteen kilometres further west under the impulse of mayor Ludovico Corrao, the biography of Burri, the conceptual meaning of the grande cretto, its construction in two phases separated by twenty-two years of interruption, the criticisms and controversies over restoration, and everything needed to visit the cretto di burri today in 2026, from logistics to lighting tips for photography. Italian searches on the keyword cretti di burri exceed eighteen thousand a month: a sign that this abandoned land art work continues to engage a much wider audience than contemporary art insiders.
Where the Cretto di Burri is located
The cretto di burri stands within the municipal territory of Gibellina, in the province of Trapani, on the hill of Ruina where the old village rose before the 1968 earthquake. The exact coordinates are 37.789253 N, 12.970251 E, about 18 kilometres east of Salemi and 25 kilometres south of Castelvetrano. Geographically, we are at the heart of the Belice Valley, the clayey hilly area of western Sicily that separates the province of Trapani from that of Agrigento.
The site is reachable in twenty minutes by car from Gibellina Nuova, taking the SP 5 towards Salaparuta. The provincial road runs alongside wheat fields, vineyards and olive groves for about eight kilometres, then a short asphalt deviation leads to the free car park at the foot of the cretto. From there, a pedestrian ramp of a few dozen metres gives direct access to the work, which from the ground appears as a white labyrinth bounded by concrete blocks about one metre sixty high.
The overall area exceeds eighty-six thousand square metres (eight and a half hectares), distributed across a slightly irregular quadrilateral of about 380 by 280 metres. By surface, it is the largest land art work ever created in Europe and one of the most extensive in the world, comparable in spatial ambition to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah or Walter De Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico.
From an administrative point of view, the cretto di gibellina falls entirely within the municipal territory of Gibellina, but is not directly managed by the municipality: artistic ownership belongs to the [Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri](https://fondazioneburri.org/) of Città di Castello, which oversees the conservation of the work in partnership with the Sicily Region and the Municipality of Gibellina. Access is free, gratis and without hours, twenty-four hours a day.
The Belice earthquake of 14 January 1968
To understand the cretto di burri, one must start from the night of Sunday 14 January 1968. At 1:28 PM that afternoon, a shock of moment magnitude 6.0 struck the Belice Valley. It was only the prelude. Between one and three in the morning of the night of 14-15 January, three main shocks of increasing magnitude followed: 5.5 at 02:33, 5.1 at 02:34 and finally the devastating shock at 03:01 of magnitude 6.1. The epicentre was close to Gibellina, at a relatively shallow depth of about ten kilometres. For the inhabitants, it was the end of a world.
Official Civil Protection data speak of 296 dead, more than a thousand injured and 98,000 homeless. Independent sources, based on parish registers and subsequent censuses, have hypothesised a higher real toll, around 400 victims, but the figure of 296 dead remains the one officially accepted by Italian institutions. Most victims did not die in the daytime shock at 1:28 PM, but in the night shocks that caught the population in their sleep, in the beds of houses of raw stone and heavy tiles typical of mid-twentieth-century Sicilian rural architecture.
The most affected villages are Gibellina, Poggioreale, Salaparuta and Montevago, where destruction is practically total: 100% of housing units collapsed or irreparably damaged. In Gibellina alone, 1,980 buildings destroyed are counted, out of a population of just over 6,000 inhabitants. Seven other centres (Santa Margherita di Belice, Santa Ninfa, Partanna, Salemi, Camporeale, Contessa Entellina, Vita) register destruction rates between 60 and 80 per cent. In total, fourteen municipalities of the provinces of Trapani, Agrigento and Palermo are seriously affected.
The institutional response is slow, chaotic and marked by one of the worst pages of post-war Italian history. The tent cities remain in place for over ten years. The sheet-metal shacks, built as provisional shelter in the first months, will house displaced families until the 1980s. The so-called Special Law for Belice (Law 241 of 18 March 1968) allocates funds but distributes them with such bureaucratic slowness that it becomes the emblem of southern public inefficiency. Even today, according to official data, not all reconstruction funds have been spent, and the area remains among the most economically depressed in western Sicily.
Politically, the Belice earthquake becomes a symbolic wound for the entire Mezzogiorno. Pier Paolo Pasolini visits the shantytowns in 1969 and writes very harsh pages in Il Tempo speaking of "concentration camps for earthquake victims". Leonardo Sciascia, originally from nearby Racalmuto, denounces the abandonment as "the second death of Belice". The national gaze quickly turns away, but in western Sicily the wound remains open for decades. It will be precisely in this context of unresolved trauma that, sixteen years later, the idea of entrusting a contemporary artist with the task of transforming the ruins into collective memory will be born.
Gibellina before the earthquake: an agricultural village of the Sicilian hinterland
Before the night of 14 January 1968, Gibellina was a small municipality of the Trapani hinterland with just over six thousand inhabitants, distributed across six districts around the mother church dedicated to San Rocco. The village stood on the hill of Ruina at about 250 metres of altitude, on a clayey rise that dominated the valley of the right Belice. The urban layout was that typical of Sicilian rural villages born between the 15th and 17th centuries: narrow streets, stepped alleys, irregular squares, low houses of limestone and roofs of tiles.
The economy was entirely agricultural. Durum wheat was cultivated (the local variety "Russello" was prized for artisan pasta), olives (the Nocellara del Belice cultivar is still a recognised DOP today), vines for blending wine, almonds, figs. Very few artisans: a blacksmith, two carpenters, a saddler, two barbers, a few seamstresses. No cinema, no restaurant, only one inn, two bars, no bookshop, no permanent newsstand. The newspaper arrived by bus twice a week from Trapani, when it arrived.
Living conditions were hard even by the standards of southern Italy of the immediate post-war period. On the eve of the earthquake, the majority of houses in Gibellina did not have running water. Only ten dwellings out of about one thousand five hundred had a private well; six had an internal bathroom. The remaining families drew from the communal fountain of Piazza Mariano Cefalu and used external latrines. Electricity had arrived in the 1950s but power cuts were frequent. The telephone was a rare service: the communal switchboard counted just over thirty private subscribers.
The demographic structure was already strained by emigration. In the 1950s and 1960s, dozens of Gibellinian men had left for Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, northern Italy (in particular Turin and the Milanese industrial belt). The remittances of emigrants were often the first source of monetary income for families. The population that the earthquake caught in their beds that night was composed for more than half of elderly, women and children, exactly the category most vulnerable to a sudden collapse.
Historically, Gibellina boasted documented origins from the 14th century, as a fief of the barons of Salaparuta. The toponym Gibellina probably derives from the Arabic jabal, "mount", to recall the hilly position. The mother church of San Rocco, rebuilt in the 18th century above a 14th-15th century structure, was a small baroque building of rural periphery, with a bell-gable and three narrow naves. Nothing comparable, in terms of artistic importance, to the great centres of baroque Sicily like Noto or Modica. It was a village like there were hundreds in the Sicilian hinterland: poor, conservative, in slow demographic decline, cut off from the great tourist and commercial flows of the coast.
The exodus and the birth of Gibellina Nuova
In the days immediately following the earthquake, the survivors of Gibellina are evacuated to makeshift tent cities set up at Santa Ninfa and Salemi. The tents of the Italian Army, mounted on the January mud, house entire family nuclei until spring, when they are replaced by prefabricated sheet-metal shacks in corrugated metal. Those shacks, built as a "provisional six-month" solution, will remain in place until 1981, housing some families for thirteen consecutive years.
While the population lives in shantytowns, the political decision is taken quickly: Gibellina will not be rebuilt on the original site. The clayey ground of the hill of Ruina is considered seismically unstable, the ruins are too vast to be reclaimed, and the very logic of "reconstruction of the past" is rejected in favour of a project of a modern city ex novo. In 1971 the site of the new city is identified: the territory of Salinella, about 18 kilometres west of the old village, in a flatter area closer to the Palermo-Mazara motorway axis. The new Gibellina will therefore have nothing of the old village: new site, new urban layout, new architecture.
The director of this visionary choice is the mayor of Gibellina Ludovico Corrao (1927-2011), lawyer, intellectual of progressive Catholic formation, former parliamentarian of Christian Democracy and then of the Independent Left. Corrao conceives the reconstruction not as technical operation, but as cultural manifesto. His intuition: if Gibellina must be born again, let it be born as a city-museum of contemporary art, a sort of Italian laboratory of avant-garde urbanism. He therefore summons artists and architects among the most important in Europe and invites them to contribute free of charge, in the name of solidarity with the victims.
The response is extraordinary. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pietro Consagra arrives at Gibellina (who signs the famous Stella di Consagra, the great Porta del Belice in white steel 26 metres high), Pietro Cascella, Mimmo Paladino, Mario Schifano, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Carla Accardi, Franco Angeli, Mimmo Rotella, Andrea Cascella, Toti Scialoja. On the architectural front contribute Ludovico Quaroni (Mother Church), Vittorio Gregotti, Franco Purini and Laura Thermes (System of Squares), Alessandro Mendini (Civic Tower). The result is what is today considered the highest concentration of contemporary public art in Italy, and probably in Europe. In May 2026, Gibellina Nuova was officially named by the Ministry of Culture Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026: a recognition that crowns fifty years of urban experimentation.
Among all the protagonists called by Corrao, however, only one decides not to work on the new city. Alberto Burri wants to return to the site of the old village. It is the decision that will change the history of the work.
Alberto Burri: from military doctor to artist of matter
To understand the grande cretto di gibellina, one must know its author. Alberto Burri (Città di Castello, 12 March 1915 - Nice, 13 February 1995) was not an artist by training: he was a doctor. Graduated in medicine and surgery at the University of Perugia in 1940, he had been drafted into the Italian army as a medical officer during the Second World War, and had served on the Libyan front until his capture by British troops in 1943.
It was in captivity, in the Hereford internment camp in Texas, that Burri discovered painting. Without orthodox materials at his disposal, he began to paint on the jute of food sacks, using improvised colours and a coarse waste canvas as support. It was a choice dictated by necessity that would become, in the post-war period, the most recognisable stylistic signature of all his production: the use of "poor, industrial, non-pictorial" materials as support and subject of the work. Jute, plastic, sheet metal, burnt wood, cracks of dried earth, cellotex, rusted iron. From 1949 until his death, Burri would build a poetics of mortified and resurrected matter that would place him among the absolute protagonists of European Art Informel.
In the 1950s Burri exhibits in Rome with avant-garde gallerists, participates in the first editions of the Venice Biennale, is invited to the United States where his work meets the favour of critics like Sam Hunter and James Johnson Sweeney. His "Combustioni", surfaces of plastic burnt with a gas torch, frozen on the canvas in the instant of deformation, enter the collections of the MoMA in New York, the Guggenheim, the Tate in London. Doctor Burri, as he would continue to be called by intimates even after having abandoned the medical profession, is now one of the most respected voices of European art of the second twentieth century.
The Cretti proper are born as a pictorial cycle in the second half of the 1970s. Technically they are surfaces of kaolin and acrylic resins spread on Cellotex support, which on drying fissure spontaneously forming a network of cracks similar to those of clay soil dehydrated by the sun. The cracks are self-generated by the matter itself: Burri does not engrave them, he lets them happen. It is a poetics of the necessary wound, of death as a matrix of form. The Cretti are presented for the first time in exhibition at the National Picture Gallery of Bologna in 1976.
The idea of creating a monumental Cretto, on the scale of a landscape, will be the natural consequence of this research. When mayor Ludovico Corrao proposes to him to work at Gibellina in 1984, Burri will be sixty-nine years old and have a thirty-five-year career behind him. It will be his last great work, and the most radical.
The commission of Ludovico Corrao (1984)
In 1984, sixteen years after the earthquake, Ludovico Corrao summons Alberto Burri to Gibellina to ask him to contribute to the artistic rebirth of the city. The initial invitation is classic: a sculpture for one of the squares of the Gibellina Nuova under construction, perhaps a commemorative monument of the earthquake, to be placed alongside the other works of colleagues (Consagra, Cascella, Paladino) already active on site.
Burri visits Gibellina Nuova, observes the construction sites of the public art works in progress, but decides to refuse the commission as it had been proposed to him. He asks Corrao to take him instead to the ruins of the old village, still visible on the hill of Ruina, eight kilometres further east of the new city. Walking among the rubble of the old historic centre, in front of the remains of the church of San Rocco and the dangerous walls of private houses never cleared, Burri matures his idea. He turns to Corrao and tells him: "I do nothing for the new city. I work here, on these ruins".
The decision is radical and almost counter-intuitive. Corrao had built the entire project of the rebirth of Gibellina on the idea of rupture with the traumatic past: new site, new architecture, new contemporary imagination. Burri proposes instead to return to the place of the trauma and to transform it into the work itself. Not a monument next to a square, but an entire city reduced to monument of itself. Not a sculpture to look at, but a landscape to cross.
Corrao accepts. The commission is formalised in 1984 with a modest initial budget (a few hundred million lire of the time) and the approval of the Sicily Region, which provides the landscape authorisation and necessary expropriations. Burri works on the project throughout 1984 and 1985, modelling the final layout on a cadastral map of 1965 in which the streets and blocks of the old village are still visible. His idea is simple and definitive: to cover the ruins with white concrete blocks of the dimensions of the original houses, keeping as cracks between the blocks the exact layout of the old streets.
It will not be a reconstruction, but a conservation through burial. The houses are not restored: they are enclosed within the concrete, sealed forever. The streets are not restored: they are left open as cracks in the monument. The visitor who will walk in the alleys of the cretto di gibellina will travel exactly the routes that the inhabitants of the village took before the earthquake. It is a gesture of spatial memory, not figurative: Burri does not represent Gibellina, he preserves it under a shroud of concrete.
The Grande Cretto: a shroud for memory
The poetics of the grande cretto di gibellina is as simple as it is vertiginous. Burri explained his gesture in a few words, in one of the rare interviews granted on the project: "I went to Gibellina where there had been the earthquake. People were trying to build a new city but the old one remained there, among the rubble. So I thought: let us make it so that it remains forever, by covering it all over".
There is no rhetoric in the formulation, no explicit symbolism. There is only the idea of crystallising the trauma in its geography, of making permanent the urban plan of a place that physically no longer exists. The 296 victims of the earthquake are never named on the monument: there are no plaques, no epigraphs, no inscription of any kind. Only white blocks and cracks. The cretto does not commemorate the people, it commemorates the space in which they lived. It is a monument to the social landscape even before it is one to individual lives.
At the level of land art, the cretto di burri represents a singular conceptual position. Many artists of the movement (Smithson, Heizer, Holt, De Maria) built interventions on virgin or almost virgin territories: deserts, salt flats, forests, coasts. Burri works instead on a landscape already marked by human history, on ruins, on a place of mourning. His land art is not a celebration of the primordial, but archaeology of the contemporary. He does not add a form to a neutral landscape, he translates into form the geography of a trauma that has already occurred. It is abandoned land art in the strongest sense, built upon ruin itself.
The other peculiarity is the monumental scale. With its 86,000 square metres (more than twelve football pitches), the cretto exceeds in surface almost all the great American land art works. Smithson's Spiral Jetty measures about 4,600 square metres of spiral surface. Turrell's Roden Crater, still under construction, is certainly more extensive but is a modified volcanic crater, not a work built ex novo. The grande cretto di gibellina, by dimensions and ambition, remains a unicum in the panorama of environmental art of the second twentieth century.
Critics like Cesare Brandi, Maurizio Calvesi, Achille Bonito Oliva have written important pages on the work since the 1980s, reading it as one of the points of arrival of Burri's research on matter as time. More recently, the philosopher Massimo Recalcati dedicated to the cretto a 2018 essay (La ferita della bellezza) in which he reads it as a "secular aesthetics of mourning", distant relative of Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin: both works that refuse figuration and that spatialise memory through geometry.
Construction: the two phases of the cretto (1985-1989, 2007-2015)
The construction of the cretto di gibellina is a story of interruptions, waits and stubbornness. Burri imagines the work from 1984, but the works effectively begin in 1985 and take place in two phases separated by over twenty years of abandonment.
First phase: 1985-1989
The works begin in the summer of 1985 with a preparatory operation entrusted to the Italian Army. The sappers of the Military Engineers demolish the few walls still standing of the private houses of the old village, collect the rubble with bulldozers, compact it directly on site and contain it within metal nets and steel rebar cages. Each block of the old urban layout is thus transformed into a monolithic block of compressed rubble, of about 10 metres by 20 of base, of the same plan as the old courtyards.
On each block, a team of local concrete workers pours white Portland concrete mixed with marble powder for the desired chromatic effect. The upper surface is smoothed, slightly inclined for drainage of rainwater. The final height of the blocks is one metre sixty, chosen by Burri to be "slightly higher than the average height of a Sicilian of the generation of 1968": a precise anthropometric choice that prevents the visitor from seeing beyond the blocks when walking in the cracks. The cracks between the blocks, two to three metres wide, faithfully retrace the old layout of the village's streets.
The works proceed until 1989, when they cover about 60,000 square metres, i.e. three quarters of the total surface foreseen. Then the financing runs out. The Sicily Region, under pressure for other emergencies, does not renew the allocation. The western part of the old village, corresponding to about 25,000 square metres, remains uncovered. Burri categorically refuses that the work be "abbreviated" or reformulated to smaller dimensions: for him, the cretto must cover the whole village or not be created at all. Works stop. For twenty-two years, the work remains unfinished.
Long abandonment (1989-2007)
For almost twenty years, the cretto di burri remains a suspended site. Burri dies in Nice on 13 February 1995, without seeing completed what he considered his major work. The part already created is visited in the 1990s by a few enthusiasts of contemporary art, but suffers from neglect: spontaneous vegetation (thistles, agaves, prickly pears, brushwood) grows in the cracks, rainwater partially erodes the concrete surfaces, some blocks show structural cracks, the metal reinforcements begin to rust and cause the detachment of parts of concrete (technical phenomenon called "spalling" or "splitting from corrosion").
In the 2000s, appeals for completion of the work multiply, launched by the Burri Foundation of Città di Castello, by art criticism and by public figures like Vittorio Sgarbi (who has nevertheless had on other occasions polemical relations with Corrao's legacy). Sgarbi has defined the cretto several times as "one of the most powerful monuments of Italian contemporary art, a cemetery that is also a rebirth", and has publicly supported the necessity of completion.
Second phase: 2007-2015
In 2007, under the regional administration of Salvatore Cuffaro, the Sicily Region finally allocates the funds for the completion of the cretto: about 5 million euros intended for the covering of the western part still uncovered. The works, however, start only in 2011 after a long bureaucratic procedure for tenders, and conclude in October 2015. The work is formally inaugurated on 17 October 2015, in coincidence with the centenary of the birth of Alberto Burri (12 March 1915).
The second phase is carried out in close collaboration with the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, which provides the original technical specifications of 1984-1985 and supervises fidelity to the project. The part completed in 2015 differs today from the part of the 1980s for a slightly lighter colour of the concrete (the mix formula was slightly different) and for a better state of conservation, due to less climatic exposure.
With the completion of 2015, the grande cretto di gibellina reaches its definitive extension of about 86,000 square metres, officially becoming the largest land art work ever created in Europe.
Criticisms and legacy of the cretto
The alberto burri cretti of Gibellina was not received unanimously. Since the 1980s, several voices have expressed reservations, some of an artistic nature, others of an ethical nature, others finally of a conservative nature.
The most radical critique is that of those who have read the cretto as a form of "aestheticisation of trauma", of transformation of a collective drama into a contemplative object for art tourists. According to this reading, supported in particular by some local intellectuals of the Belice Valley in the 1990s, Burri would have imposed his own private poetics over the pain of a community that had not been consulted. The families of the survivors, in some cases, have recounted having returned to the ruins of the old village in the 1980s and having found their houses of origin enclosed in the concrete without any explanation or ceremony. The debate on this point remains open.
A second critique concerns the choice of material. Reinforced white Portland concrete is not an eternal material: it has an estimated lifespan of fifty to eighty years before requiring important structural restorations. Burri himself seems to have been aware of this fragility, and according to some witnesses (including the critic Bruno Corà, president of the Burri Foundation) he would have accepted the idea that the work degrade slowly with time, according to the same logic of "mortified matter" that had characterised all his painting. The question of whether the cretto should be restored to be perfectly preserved or left to decay as part of its poetics is today at the centre of a lively debate among Italian contemporary art restorers.
Between 2012 and 2015, the first systematic conservation interventions were carried out, with replacement of the most deteriorated concrete, treatment of oxidised reinforcements, removal of spontaneous vegetation and biocide treatment on the blocks. On the theme of restoration methodology, the restorer Giuseppe Basile of the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro wrote a much-cited methodological essay of 2008 in which he addresses the "methodological problem" of the work: does restoring a work conceived to age equate to betraying it?
Despite these polemics, the artistic legacy of the grande cretto is today undisputed. The work is cited in all manuals of art history of the second twentieth century, is the subject of international academic publications, is a destination for pilgrimages of contemporary artists and architects from all over the world. The nomination of Gibellina as Italian Capital of Contemporary Art 2026 is largely a direct consequence of the presence of the cretto on the municipal territory. And its aerial image, recognisable throughout the world, is today one of the most powerful visual icons of Italian art of the twentieth century, alongside Burri's own Combustioni, Fontana's Tagli and Manzoni's Concetti spaziali.
Visiting the Cretto di Burri today: access, duration, photo
In 2026, visiting the cretto di burri is a free, gratis experience accessible to all, twenty-four hours a day. There are no entry tickets, no opening or closing hours, no gates. The work is considered a public landscape, not a museum.
Practical access
The official free car park is located at the foot of the work, at the intersection between the SP 5 and the asphalt service road leading to the cretto. It is well signposted on Google Maps as "Parcheggio Cretto di Burri" and has a capacity of about 40-50 cars. Tourist coaches and campers are authorised. From the car park, a pedestrian ramp of about 80 metres leads directly to the entrance of the work.
Once on the cretto, the visitor can walk freely in the cracks that separate the blocks. The routes faithfully follow the streets of the old village, and after a few minutes of disorientation one begins to recognise the urban logic of the original village: a main street that crosses the village from east to west, stepped lateral alleys, two wider squares where the mother church of San Rocco and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie stood. The paving of the cracks is beaten earth, with pebbles and some elements of original paving still visible in places.
Duration and route
The average recommended time for the visit is one to two hours. A quick walk along the main axis takes about forty minutes round trip. A more in-depth visit, exploring all the lateral ramifications and including some photographic stops, comfortably takes two hours. For those who want to document the work systematically, it is convenient to plan half a day: the light changes very rapidly on the cretto and the shadows of the blocks on the cracks offer continuous variations.
Best light for photography
The two ideal photographic windows are early morning (06:30-08:30 in summer, 07:30-09:30 in winter) and late afternoon (18:00-20:00 in summer, 15:30-17:30 in winter). At these hours the grazing light exalts the relief of the blocks, lengthens the shadows in the cracks, gives the white concrete a warm golden or pale pink tonality. At noon the vertical light flattens the volumes and makes it difficult to grasp the geometry of the work.
The work lends itself particularly well to black and white photography (to exalt the contrast between block and crack) and to elevated framings taken from a ladder (from the north-east edge a good portion of the cretto can be seen). For really suggestive aerial framings a drone is needed, but attention: amateur drone flight on the site is subject to ENAC regulation and requires registration of the pilot, prior authorisation for flights over cultural sites, and no flight closer than 50 metres from visitors. In recent years the Gibellina Local Police has intensified controls on abusive flights, especially on high-season weekends. Authorised professional flight remains possible but requires prior formal procedure.
Practical advice
- ●Best season: April-June and September-October. Summer is very hot (40°C is not rare on the hill of Ruina) and the reflection of the white concrete amplifies the heat. Winter can be windy but offers exceptional quality light.
- ●Footwear: light trekking shoes or robust sneakers. The cracks have an irregular bottom with pebbles and roots.
- ●Water: bring at least one litre per person in summer. There are no fountains on the site.
- ●Services: no public toilets at the cretto. The nearest toilets are at Gibellina Nuova (15 minutes by car).
- ●Bar/refreshment: the nearest bar is at Salaparuta (8 km, 12 minutes).
- ●Reduced accessibility: the cracks are practicable in a wheelchair only on the main axis and with some difficulty on the irregular ground.
How to get to the Cretto di Burri
The cretto is reachable from Palermo (140 km, 1h30), Trapani (75 km, 50 min), Castelvetrano (25 km, 25 min) and in general from the main centres of western Sicily.
| From | Means | Duration | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palermo | Car via A29 (Salemi-Gibellina exit) | 1h 30 | Toll €6.80 | Best route, free parking |
| Trapani | Car via A29 (Salemi-Gibellina exit) | 50 min | Toll €3.40 | Towards Palermo, exit at Salemi |
| Catania | Car via A19 + A29 | 3h | Toll €12 | Long but smooth |
| Palermo | Train to Salemi-Gibellina + AST bus | 2h 30 | €8-12 | Rare train, bus 1x per day |
| Trapani | Direct AST bus | 1h 13 | €5.50 | Frequency every 4h, reduced on holidays |
| Organised tours | Tourist bus from Palermo | Day | €50-80 | Often with Gibellina Nuova included |
The most practical option remains the automobile. The A29 Palermo-Mazara del Vallo motorway directly serves the area: exit at the Salemi-Gibellina Nuova interchange and follow the road signs for "Cretto di Burri" (brown signs of tourist-cultural interest). From Gibellina Nuova to the site there are still 18 kilometres of well-asphalted provincial roads.
For those who do not drive, the Salemi-Gibellina railway station (on the Palermo-Trapani line) is 11 km from the cretto and is connected by infrequent AST buses. More reliable is the train to Castelvetrano (Trapani-Castelvetrano-Palermo line via Mazara), from where it is possible to rent a small car (Hertz, Avis have offices) or take a taxi (about 35 euros each way).
For a full day in the area, we recommend combining the visit to the cretto with a tour of Gibellina Nuova (the "city-museum" with the Stella di Consagra and the works of Quaroni, Pomodoro, Paladino) and with a stop at Salaparuta (rebuilt) or at Poggioreale Antica (the ruins of the ghost village 12 km from the cretto). The Cretto-Gibellina Nuova-Poggioreale Antica axis constitutes one of the most powerful cultural dark tourism itineraries in Italy, and is comfortably travelled in one day. For those wishing to explore other spots in the area, we have dedicated a [broad section to abandoned places in Italy](/blog/luoghi-abbandonati-italia) with our selection of the 14 most iconic sites of the peninsula.
Gibellina Nuova: the open-air museum
18 kilometres west of the cretto, Gibellina Nuova is today one of the most singular urban realities in Italy. Built from 1971 onwards on the territory of Salinella, it hosts more than sixty public art works signed by the greatest names of the Italian twentieth century. A half-day visit allows one to grasp the sense of Corrao's project.
The unmissable places include the Stella di Consagra, the great Porta del Belice by Pietro Consagra (1981): a structure in white steel 26 metres high and 22 wide that functions as a symbolic entrance arch to the city. The Mother Church designed by Ludovico Quaroni (1970-2010): a large white sphere of concrete 50 metres in diameter, divided into two asymmetric wings, one of the most experimental sacred architectures in Italy. The System of Squares by Franco Purini and Laura Thermes: a monumental alignment of public spaces conceived in the 1980s, partly left unfinished, that crosses the city centre. The Cretto di Burri itself, although physically on the other side of the valley, is conceptually part of this public art system.
Among the other artists present at Gibellina Nuova: Arnaldo Pomodoro, Pietro Cascella, Andrea Cascella, Mimmo Paladino, Carla Accardi, Mario Schifano, Mimmo Rotella, Franco Angeli, Alessandro Mendini (Civic Tower). The density of works is such that officially Gibellina is the Italian city with the greatest concentration of contemporary public art per inhabitant.
In 2026, Gibellina has been named Italian Capital of Contemporary Art by the Ministry of Culture, first edition of a recognition inspired by the French model of the European Capitals of Culture. The nomination has been accompanied by financing for the restoration of some works, for new acquisitions and for an annual programme of temporary exhibitions. It is a good time to visit the territory.
Other abandoned places of Belice nearby
If the cretto di burri has struck you, the Belice Valley offers many other places that deserve a stop. The density of sites linked to the 1968 earthquake and its consequences makes this area one of the most interesting in Italy for the exploration of memory, abandonment and urban rebirth, true abandoned land art territory.
- ●Poggioreale Antica (12 km from the cretto). The most complete "ghost village" of Belice. Unlike Gibellina, the earthquake left about 20% of the structures standing, and it is today possible to walk through the alleys of the old village among dangerous walls, gutted facades and ancient squares. It was the set of Cinema Paradiso, L'uomo delle stelle and Malèna by Giuseppe Tornatore. Access with symbolic ticket (5 euros) managed by the Poggioreale Antica association, open every day from 11 to 18:30.
- ●Salaparuta (8 km from the cretto). It too razed to the ground by the earthquake, rebuilt ex novo. The ruins of the old village are less preserved than those of Poggioreale but are nevertheless worth a visit for those who want to understand the extent of the Belice catastrophe.
- ●Santa Margherita di Belice (20 km south). Homeland of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (author of The Leopard, partly set right here), the village preserves the Palazzo Filangeri di Cutò (partially restored), which was one of the places of the writer's childhood. The 1968 earthquake destroyed much of the historic centre, and the restoration is still partial.
- ●Ruins of Gibellina on the north slope (on the site of the cretto itself). A small portion of the ruins of the old village was not covered by the cretto and remains visible on the northern slope of the hill of Ruina. It allows one to visually compare the "original" ruins with the conceptual transposition of Burri's work.
For a complete map of all the urbex spots in Sicily, consult our page dedicated to Sicily on Urbex Maps, which catalogues over 380 sites between Trapani, Palermo, Agrigento, Catania, Ragusa, Syracuse and Messina. For Italians in search of a national framework, we have produced a pillar article on abandoned places in Italy with our selection of the 14 most powerful sites of the country, from Castello Sammezzano in Tuscany to the sanatoriums of Piedmont. The province of Trapani, of which Gibellina is part, is also documented in our global database with verified GPS coordinates for each site.
FAQ: frequently asked questions about the Cretto di Burri
What exactly is the Cretto di Burri?
The cretto di burri is a land art work created by Alberto Burri between 1984 and 2015 above the ruins of the old village of Gibellina, destroyed by the Belice earthquake of 14-15 January 1968. The work covers about 86,000 square metres with white concrete blocks 1.60 metres high, whose cracks faithfully retrace the layout of the old streets of the village. It is considered the largest land art work ever created in Europe.
When was the Cretto di Gibellina built?
In two distinct phases. The first phase took place between 1985 and 1989, covering about 60,000 square metres before the interruption of works due to exhaustion of funds. Burri died in 1995 without seeing the work completed. The second phase started in 2011 and concluded on 17 October 2015, in coincidence with the centenary of the artist's birth. Only then did the cretto reach its definitive extension.
Can you visit the Cretto di Burri for free?
Yes, access is completely free and gratis, twenty-four hours a day. There are no tickets, no gates, no opening hours. The car park at the foot of the work is also free. It is one of the few great Italian contemporary art works accessible at no cost.
How long does the visit to the Cretto last?
The average recommended time is one to two hours. A quick walk along the main axis takes about 40 minutes round trip. An in-depth visit that explores the lateral ramifications and includes photographic pauses comfortably takes two hours. For those who want to document the work systematically, plan half a day.
Can you fly a drone over the Cretto di Burri?
Amateur drone flight on the cretto is subject to the ENAC norms in force in Italy. It requires registration of the pilot on the D-Flight platform, mandatory third-party liability insurance and respect of safety distances from visitors (minimum 50 metres). Professional flights for commercial filming require prior formal procedure. In recent years the Gibellina Local Police has intensified controls on abusive flights. Flight discouraged on high-season weekends without formal authorisation.
Who was Alberto Burri?
Alberto Burri (Città di Castello 1915 - Nice 1995) was one of the most important Italian artists of the second twentieth century. Doctor by training, he discovered painting during captivity in an American internment camp in Texas in 1944. His work, marked by the use of unconventional materials (jute sacks, burnt plastic, cracks of earth), placed him among the protagonists of European Art Informel. The grande cretto di gibellina is his work of largest dimensions and one of his last creations.
How many people died in the Belice earthquake?
The official toll of the Belice earthquake of 14-15 January 1968 is 296 dead, more than a thousand injured and 98,000 homeless. Some independent sources speak of a higher real toll, around 400 victims, but the official figure remains the one accepted by Italian institutions. The most affected villages were Gibellina, Poggioreale, Salaparuta and Montevago, all destroyed practically 100%.
Why is it called "Cretto"?
The term cretto in Italian indicates a fissure, a crack in matter. Burri had created from the 1970s a series of pictorial works called "Cretti": surfaces of kaolin and acrylic resins on Cellotex that on drying fissured spontaneously. The cretto of Gibellina is the monumental translation of this formal research: the cracks are not painted, they are the very streets of the old village left as cracks between the concrete blocks.
Where exactly is the Cretto di Gibellina located?
The cretto stands on the hill of Ruina in the territory of the municipality of Gibellina, in the province of Trapani, at GPS coordinates 37.789253 N, 12.970251 E. It is located 18 kilometres east of Gibellina Nuova, 25 kilometres north of Castelvetrano, 75 kilometres east of Trapani and 140 kilometres west of Palermo. Access is from the SP 5 in the direction of Salaparuta. The verified GPS coordinates are available free of charge on our interactive map.
Is the Cretto destined to deteriorate?
It is one of the liveliest debates among Italian contemporary art restorers. The reinforced white Portland concrete used by Burri has an estimated lifespan of fifty to eighty years before requiring important structural restorations. Burri himself seems to have accepted the idea of a slow natural degradation of the work, according to the same logic of "mortified matter" that had characterised all his painting. The first systematic conservation interventions were carried out between 2012 and 2015. The Burri Foundation of Città di Castello today supervises maintenance interventions.
Conclusion: what remains of Gibellina
Walking in the cracks of the cretto di burri, it is impossible not to feel the weight of what one is treading on. Under the sole, under the beaten earth of the ex-streets, under the white concrete blocks that incorporate the walls of the old houses, there is an entire city: six thousand daily lives of a Sicilian agricultural village of the mid-twentieth century, interrupted at 03:01 in the night of 15 January 1968. Burri did not resuscitate it, did not commemorate it with a figurative sculpture, did not give it a new face. He sealed it under a stone shroud, leaving only the layout of the streets as the only visible trace of its past existence.
It is a total and almost unsustainable artistic gesture: the renunciation of representation, the acceptance of trauma as a matrix of form, the refusal of consolation. The grande cretto di gibellina does not offer the comfort of a monument: it offers the naked geography of a loss. And precisely for this reason, paradoxically, it is one of the most powerful works of Italian art of the second twentieth century. Not for what it says, but for what it silences.
Visiting it today, in 2026, means coming to terms with a double memory: that of the seismic trauma that erased a village, and that of the artistic response that transformed the erasure into a permanent monument. It means measuring the distance between a private pain (the 296 victims, the ten thousand displaced people) and a public form (the 86,000 square metres of white concrete). It means questioning the legitimacy, the limits and the force of contemporary art when it confronts history, death, the geography of mourning, a singular example of abandoned land art facing collective trauma.
For those who want to continue the exploration, we recommend combining the visit of the cretto with the tour of Gibellina Nuova (the city-museum wanted by Corrao) and with the stop at Poggioreale Antica (the real "ghost village" of Belice, where the ruins are still standing). To extend the journey in the rest of Sicily, our page dedicated to abandoned places in Sicily catalogues over 380 verified spots. And to frame Gibellina in the vaster Italian heritage of places of memory and abandonment, we refer you to our pillar article on the 14 most iconic abandoned places in Italy, in which the cretto naturally finds its place alongside Poveglia, Consonno and the other great sites of the peninsula.
Have a good journey, in the Belice Valley and beyond.
Explore more dossiers
Iconic spots of other Italian regions:
- ●👻 Poveglia: the cursed island of Venice
- ●🏰 Castello di Sammezzano: the Moorish pearl of Tuscany
To explore all the abandoned places in Sicily, see our dedicated regional dossier: Urbex Sicily: the complete guide to abandoned places (coming soon).
Or discover the 14 most iconic urbex spots in Italy in our pillar article: Abandoned places in Italy.
