Gibellina Nuova sits in the center of Sicily, and it doesn’t feel like most towns on the island. That’s because it was built from scratch between 1970 and 1990, meant to house as many as 100,000 people displaced by an earthquake that devastated the Belice Valley area.
Today, the population is about 4,000. The town was laid out with the infrastructure, plazas, and civic buildings of a place built for far more people. On a hot summer afternoon, that mismatch can read as lifeless, especially in the “sistema delle piazze,” a public square system designed by architects Franco Purini and Laura Thermes in 1990.
For contractors and designers who work in masonry and the wider built environment, Gibellina Nuova is a reminder that scale is not just an urban planning issue. It’s a construction and maintenance reality. Big plazas, wide streets, and monumental exteriors create more surface area that has to be maintained, repaired, cleaned, and kept safe for the public over time.
What makes the town worth studying is the architecture itself. After the quake, then-Mayor Ludovico Corrao commissioned a deep bench of postmodern Italian talent. Highlights include the orb-like Chiesa Madre church by Ludovico Quaroni and Luisa Anversa, completed in 1985, plus a curving glass-and-metal theater by Pietro Consagra from 1976. There’s even a pharmacy that reads like a simple house attached to boxy concrete blockwork, designed by Purini and Thermes in 1980.
That mix stands apart in a region where many urban environments are defined by centuries-old stone masonry or straightforward postwar concrete-block buildings. In Gibellina Nuova, there’s no single style, only a time capsule of civic ambition, expressed in built form.
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