Palermo, Italy
Mission Title: Parking Palermo - Italo Rota and La Kalsa
Mission By: Marco Orazi, Dionigi Biolatti
Mission Finished on Date: 09-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Visit the Foro Italico and document its new appearance.
- Visit the Kalsa quarter and check out its redevelopments, asking locals about them.
- Walk down to see Rota's park and show the statues and people around them. Highlight kids playing, mothers chatting and kids hanging around. Talk to people, ask them what do they think about the new space and features in the Foro.
- Get to the seaside and show the open water, trying to highlight the whole path as an opening from the tight alleyways in Palermo to the openness of the sea.
- Use the quarter and your exploration of it as a metaphor for how Sicily, more fifteenth than twenty
- first century in its attitudes, is attempting to reform itself from within and without.
- Is the park successful, or is it just another place for trash on an already trashed seashore?
TRAVEL BAG
Can a park open a city to the sea?
After being flattened by American air raids during the Allied invasion of 1943, Palermo pushed all the rubble from the city center to the seaside, transforming a swathe of its picturesque coastline into landfill to make way for a brisk (by Sicilian standards) reconstruction. As decades passed, rather than rehabbing the despoiled site, they instead erected a merry-go-round and started hawking tickets. Even the view of the open water, the last remnant of its former beauty, was replaced by a depressing wasteland of garish (though some might say entertaining) Luna Park attractions. After several decades the officials, with some inspiration from the UN conferencing on transnational crime in town, decided to go ahead and try to give the area a more pleasant twist.
Palermo had to solve the rather tricky task of connecting the old Arab quarter of La Kalsa, to the sea, but architect Italo Rota seems to have pulled it off. He cleared the area, covered it in greenery and opened the city center to the seaside. He also added a playful touch, by putting thousands of ceramic statues - including a lot of small ones portraying the famous profile of Eleonora D'Aragona - all over the place. The air of Palermo is still filed with dust and brine, the Mafia still rules the city like a satrapy, and some of the most beautiful areas of Italy are still wracked with poverty and, corruption, crime, and grime, but the changes in the district, a nod to the increasing local industry of tourism, are not to be ignored.
