Tears on the Ruins of Poggioreale

A photo composite of multiple exposures taken during several hours of the meteor shower night. From the photographer: “It is the night of the Perseids and we decide to go to the ruins of Poggioreale. Everything is still, the image of an ancient Sicilian village abandoned after the earthquake of 1968. We set off along the access road, observing from above an ancient drinking trough that, almost by magic, is still fed with water; perhaps the action of a local shepherd watering his flocks there. The villages follow one another silently like old Sicilian stone skeletons whose façades, balconies and sometimes frescoed roofs still survive. We arrive at the piazza, the central place of life in Poggioreale.

A single chair stands in the center of the space and immediately we are overwhelmed by the sense of emptiness. It is a simple chair, moreover partially damaged, but its symbolic power is immense. It represents emptiness, absence, loneliness, suspended life. It is all the inhabitants who are no longer there. The chair is silent but it cries out a warning so that the place is not stripped of the only virtue it still possesses: memory. A manger inside a stable, an old bakery, a ceiling with frescoed decorations, a partially destroyed theatre, a roofless church of which only the stucco remains, a fire engine buried by rubble, an oil mill in which the presses survive. Everything is still recoverable to the memory of Sicilian history, but the buildings are collapsing, the walls are inexorably crumbling, and the new generations follow on, unaware of the drama that happened here. I frame the square and realize that the chair MUST be the central element in defiance of the rules of photographic composition. On it rises the Milky Way and the constellation Perseus. On the chair radiate the Tears of San Lorenzo, shooting stars associated with the Saint’s torture and which seem to accompany the pain experienced here. But they are also the guardians of our desires and to them I entrust mine.”