Beginning January 14, 1968 a series of earthquakes struck western Sicily's Belice Valley, though seismic activity in the region had been building in the preceding days; the strongest shocks flattened towns including Gibellina and Montevago, killing an estimated 231 to 400 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless in Italy's poorest region.
In the middle of January 1968, the ground beneath western Sicily's Belice Valley began to move and did not stop for days. A sequence of tremors rolled through the valley's hill towns, and the strongest shocks, which struck at night, reached a magnitude of roughly 6. By Mediterranean standards that was a moderate quake, but it was devastating for villages built of rubble stone and unreinforced masonry on unstable slopes. Gibellina, Montevago, Salaparuta and Poggioreale were almost entirely destroyed. Partanna, Santa Ninfa, Santa Margherita di Belice and Salemi suffered heavy damage. Estimates of the dead range from about 231 to 400, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes in the middle of a Sicilian winter.
The Belice was among the poorest places in Italy, a region of small farms and steady emigration, and the disaster exposed how little the state had invested there. Relief arrived slowly. Survivors spent the first weeks in tents, then moved into prefabricated shacks that were meant to be temporary. Many families lived in those shacks for years, and some for decades, while reconstruction funds became tangled in bureaucracy and political patronage. Thousands of residents gave up and left for northern Italy or abroad. The phrase "the Belice" became shorthand in Italian public life for a botched recovery.
Gibellina's response became the most famous. Rather than rebuild on the ruins, the town was relocated about 18 kilometres away. Its mayor, Ludovico Corrao, invited artists and architects to make the new town an open-air museum. The old site received an unusual memorial. The artist Alberto Burri poured white concrete over the rubble of the abandoned town, sealing the ruins in blocks roughly the height of a person. He left channels where the streets had been, so visitors can still walk the old routes through a frozen map of the vanished town. Burri's Grande Cretto, one of the largest artworks in the world, covers more than 80,000 square metres of hillside.