Pizzo [pìz-zo]
pl. -i
1. lace: a robe with lace on it
2. beard covering only the chin dim: goatee
3. sharp peak of a mountain: palu pizzo
4. extreme, pointed part of something: the tip of a handkerchief
5. (inf.) sum extorted by a Mafia organization from merchants and entrepreneurs

Etymology: ← voice of expressive origin; inf. sig., from pointed “extremity, edge,” hence “marginal part, piece, section.”
–– Garzanti

The word pizzo is derived from the Italian word pizzicare, which means “to pinch.” This word is thought to have been used in reference to the Mafia’s practice of extorting money from businesses, as the Mafia would “pinch” or squeeze their victims for money. The word pizzo eventually came to refer specifically to the money that was extorted by the Mafia, and it is now commonly used in Italy to refer to any kind of bribe or protection money paid to criminal organizations. The word pizzo has also been adopted in other parts of the world, particularly in countries where Italian is spoken, as a way to refer to this type of extortion or bribery. In this way, the etymology of the word pizzo is closely tied to the history of organized crime and corruption in Italy.
–– ChatGPT

In his writings on architecture and the unconscious, Christopher Bollas observes that “each city has its ghost towns,” with reference to those structures that are lost over time to demolition or other changes but which still linger in the (public) consciousness. No longer visible or extant, these “ghosts” continue to affect one’s perceptions of the location, as if the observer were in possession of a kind of X-ray vision capable of revealing the layers and agglomerations of the past in the present, which together constitute the genius loci of a given place.

But what of the ghosts that refuse to go away? Scrambling over the rocks and trying to pull myself up onto the concrete ledge (a carport?), I’m struck by the silence of the place. Hovering over the faint din of the city below, the only noticeable sound up here is from the occasional bird or breeze… but then suddenly there’s a piercing whistle, seemingly directed my way from a nearby home down canyon, one of roughly fifty that were actually completed and are inhabited today. Were they trying to get my attention, having spotted me moving around the hillside and entering the vacant construction, warning me to leave? I wonder what it’s like to live among the ghosts of Pizzo Sella, the ones that are not invisible and cannot be unseen. There’s a rawness to contemporary ruins; they don’t operate just on a subliminal or latent level, but are a conscious reminder of the conditions that led to their very formation. Like zombies, they occupy an intermediary realm in the (public) imagination, neither fully dead nor alive.

Limestone is a biological sedimentary rock formed in shallow waters from the accumulated skeletal fragments of marine organisms. The oldest rocks on Monte Gallo are limestones from the Lower Lias and Upper Triassic periods, dating back almost 200 million years. Throughout history, limestone has been prized as a building material for its hardness, durability and availability. Limestone is also used in cement, which when mixed with water, sand, and crushed rock, hardens to form concrete.

The ancient Romans were the first to perfect and utilize concrete as a building material on a vast scale, creating a mixture so durable out of volcanic ash, lime, and seawater that some 2,000 years later, their monumental architectures and infrastructures still stand today. Concrete – often unfortified – was also central to Palermo’s building frenzy of the 1960s and ’70s, when scores of residential tower blocks were thrown up, and vast natural and garden areas were covered over, a period known as “the sack of Palermo.” Pizzo Sella serves as a symbol of this drastic modern-day reforging of the ancient city, but is not unlike scores of other decaying, never-completed residential developments and public-works buildings throughout southern Italy and Sicily. Their prevalence and use of concrete as a defining characteristic has led to the coining of an architectural style known as Incompiuto Siciliano, or “Incomplete Sicily.”

Telluric currents or earth currents are defined as low-frequency electric currents that occur naturally over large areas at or near the surface of the earth. This electromagnetic energy is induced by changes in the earth’s magnetic field that are typically generated by interactions between the solar wind and the ionosphere (part of the upper atmosphere), but can also be impacted by man-made electrical phenomena, depending on and specific to the given area. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of telegraphy and telegraph lines in which the circuit is completed by the earth, it was found that “earth currents” at times seriously interfered in their functioning. In modern geophysics, low-frequency electric currents produced in the earth are measured to provide information about the direction of current flow and conductance of sediments in the surveyed area.

Readings were taken at various structures on the hill with the intention of utilising the telluric currents present in the soil to determine the “acoustic signal” of the specific architecture. Metal probes/electrodes were inserted into the ground along foundation walls, and the active electromagnetic energy was converted into audio signal and recorded as it passed around and through the buried foundations. The recording offers an alternative, speculative way of interpreting these architectures through sound, giving acoustic form to otherwise inaudible and invisible phenomena existing in or beneath the earth.

It’s not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time.
–– Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque

It’s not often that you see buildings being both broken down and built up at the same time. There’s a strange tension to the buildings of Pizzo Sella, which are seemingly caught between a state of dissolution and one of becoming. In fact, calling them “buildings” is an exaggeration, even if their simple forms and proximity to one another make them recognisable as (potential) domiciles. “Building shells” might be more apt, a vestigial state that points to but never achieves the actual status of the dwellings they were ostensibly built to be. Occasional scaffolding or wrought-iron terrace railings as decorative elements reinforce this emergent impression, which taken together reads like an accidental postmodernist vernacular.

During several years of seemingly intense activity, streets were cut into the hill, footings dynamited out, pylons and foundations poured, walls built up and stuccoed. And then the entire development was abandoned overnight, as if hit by a natural or man-made disaster that turned the hill into a radioactive no-go zone, making a resumption of work impossible. Frozen in this embryonic state ever since, and resistant to various efforts to demolish or repurpose them, these skeletal structures have been left to slowly decay – streets have grown in, driveway ramps obscured, concrete split and cracked. In its desertedness, the whole thing suggests a kind of “anti-ghost town,” one not haunted by former residents but by the feeling of what was lost or what could have been that still hangs over the hillside today.

For years after leaving, I kept having dreams of being back there, but always in a different apartment and in a version of the city that never existed in reality. The neighbourhoods still looked familiar and somehow related to one another geographically in a real-world way. But the light was different; buildings were in the “wrong” places; some streets defied the laws of physics. In one dream, I lived in a house near the top of a “hill” consisting of a cantilevered strip of a street spiralling upward over a void with the buildings stacked next to one another on the inside of the spiral. Attempting to drive up it, I kept finding myself at the bottom, never able to reach my destination. In other dreams, I would enter what seemed from the outside like regular apartment buildings or residences, but whose interior spaces proceeded funhouse-like from one room to the next, each one more fantastic in form and dimension than the one before. I felt like I had won an apartment lottery.

It wasn’t until I went back for the first time a decade later that the dreams finally stopped. Being able to re-inhabit the city and reconnect with my past that I had abandoned ten years earlier somehow brought it back to scale, made it life-size again. I had been haunted by that loss, by having turned my back on the future and a version of myself that I could have had there – a haunting that was magnified by the monumentality of learning to live in a different language and culture, what felt like a total reforging of my former identity at the expense of a future self.

Via Grotte Partana is the lone name for all the streets comprising the “subdivision” of Pizzo Sella. They connect, if all were still passable today, the hundreds of unfinished, vacant structures on one side of the hill to the completed and inhabited few on the other. Named after the nearby township of Partana, the street name also presumably refers to the various caves (grotte) that are a geological feature of the slopes of Monte Gallo, of which the promontory of Pizzo Sella forms the highest part.

The presence of caves in the greater landscape, carved naturally out of the mass of carbonate rock by erosive forces over hundreds of millions of years, as well as by more recent man-made ones, are of extraordinary importance for prehistoric settlements in the area of Palermo. Many of these, including those of neighbouring Monte Pellegrino, visible in the distance across from Pizzo Sella, have yielded significant deposits of mammal bones, pottery fragments and even traces of a prehistoric necropolis, attesting to the uninterrupted presence of man in the region from the Paleolithic to the Arab-Norman age. Caves served not only as the first dwellings for primitive societies in the region but were also inhabited in more modern times by smaller communities of farmers and the poor, whose living quarters were hollowed directly out of the side of the mountain.

Pizzo Sella is known as la collina del disonore, “the hill of dishonour,” a name rooted in the city’s history of entanglements with corrupt public officials, administrative malfeasance, and the criminal underworld. From the late 1970s to early ’80s, one-million square meters of the promontory were parcelled off and built on by a local construction company. Zoning concessions and rushed building permits were issued by the municipality, but before the criminal dealings came to light, the skeletons of some 170 villas had been constructed on protected land. Years of investigations and court battles followed, involving the unsuspecting owners who had purchased the properties in good faith. A ruling in favour of confiscating and demolishing the structures was later overturned; roughly fifty-eight completed homes are inhabited today.

The roots of modern organised crime in Sicily and the uomini d’onore, the “men of honour,” can be traced back to private armies that emerged in the lawlessness of the nineteenth century – and even earlier to the Middle Ages, when secret societies supposedly formed to overthrow the island’s various foreign conquerors. The cornerstone of their code of honour, known as omertà, was silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders. Violation was punishable by death. This self-preservation strategy later evolved into non-cooperation with law enforcement and the government, especially during criminal investigations, or willfully ignoring and avoiding interference in the illegal activities of others.

Many of the building skeletons are constructed around a vertical axis, like boxes stacked on top of boxes, accentuating their overall height. From the outside, they almost suggest the enclosed headframes of mine shafts extending deep into the earth, complicating the sense of how the interior spaces relate to one another. On the inside, compact rooms and floors are built around a single stairwell, forming an open shaft that runs the entire vertical length of the multistory structures, threatening to pull you into the void.

The Phoenicians, the founders of Ziz – what would later become Palermo – practised a tradition of burying their dead inside chambers that were cut into the rock and accessible from the surface by entering through a vertical shaft. The dead were placed inside the hollowed-out cavity on their backs, laid out in an extended position. A number of pottery and jewellery items were included as burial offerings along with them. The vertical shaft often led to one or more enlarged burial chambers. When no adjoining burial chamber was cut, stone slabs were carved or built into the shaft to form a roofed chamber at the bottom. On occasion, staircases or steps cut out of the side of the shaft formed a crude ladder, facilitating access to the burial chamber below. Shaft tombs were usually designed for multiple interments and were likely family-owned. They were often reused, and earlier skeletal remains were set aside in the chamber. In some instances, the shafts themselves were also used as rock-cut tombs for burying the dead.

Standing at the base of Pizzo Sella and trying to make out the road snaking its way up and around the hillside, between concrete forms and tall grass, I’m reminded of the statue of the Genio di Palermo, the “Genius of Palermo,” the mysterious pagan god protector and personification of the city and symbol of its inhabitants. A number of different versions of the statue exist, but this divine spirit is mainly depicted as a venerable old man with a beard, sitting on a throne and crowned, holding up a serpent that winds its way up and around his legs, in the act of sucking or biting his chest.

The origins of the Genio are likely pre-Roman but, like its symbolism, are ambiguous, uncertain. According to myths passed down from Ovid in the first century, the statue symbolises the metamorphosis of an animal spirit into a masculine human figure. A seventeenth-century interpretation traces the serpent back to Scipione l’Africano, a Roman military commander aided by Palermo in the war against Hannibal and the Carthaginians. During the riots of 1848, a version of the statue located in Piazza Rivoluzione became a symbol of the desire for freedom and emancipation of Palermo from Bourbon rule. Conflicting traditional interpretations of the snake as a symbol of fertility and renewal, but also of evil and chaos from the underworld, play into the ambiguity around whether the Genio serpent represents a benign force or one that inflicts pain. The inscription Panormus conca aurea suos devorat alienos nutrit often appears at the base of the statue: Palermo, the golden land, devours her own and feeds the foreigners – popularly interpreted as Palermo is a benevolent place but forsakes its own citizens.

The geographic location of this mountain complex makes it a visual landmark from the urban setting as well as from the sea, and constitutes the primary identifiable feature by those traveling maritime trade routes upon arrival in Palermo;

Considering the promontory’s extreme natural complexity due to the numerous aspects shaping it, it is observed that the promontory is characterized geologically by Mesozoic limestones that are evidence of the site’s orogenesis;

Stratigraphic studies date its formation to over one hundred and fifty million years ago, a period when it appeared as an entirely submerged reef. During a subsequent phase of uplift, it was connected, in various stages, to the landmasses, a process coinciding with glacial and interglacial periods;

It is believed that these fluctuations during the process of the promontory’s formation resulted in the biogenetic colonization of the site and subsequent emergence of micro species and genetic “drift,” giving rise to mimetically endemic punctiform animal and plant life;

These endemic species, to the extent that they are both native and restricted to this area, represent a unique and irreplaceable heritage, and are therefore deemed worthy of protection and conservation.

(Commission for Cultural and Environmental Heritage and Public Education, Riserva Naturale Orientata Capo Gallo Sferracavallo, 2001)

Most erosion occurs on a macroscopic level. Crystalline structures don’t lose many molecules by direct impact, but at their edges, along fractures and dislocations, while other molecules get in and loosen bonds. Repeated small oscillations (fatigue), and pure impact energy or freeze/thaw cycles chip off other bits. Water and wind serve as mediums for carrying particles of rock, dirt, sediment at relatively high speeds into whatever is in their path, providing the energy for and creating collisions that cause breakdown and deterioration.

There’s a monumentality and seeming permanence to the buildings of Pizzo Sella. They dominate the hillside in a way that makes it difficult to imagine what things were like before construction began. Still, there’s a resonance to the landscape that transcends what’s become of it, perhaps more so as nature takes back the hill. Roads and “driveways” are obscured or erased, concrete surfaces and cinderblock walls weathered or fragmenting, creating the impression that as the hill merges into the structures, the structures are merging into and becoming the hill. Haphazard designs and patchwork construction add to an underlying sense of precariousness, as if everything was only ever built simply to disintegrate. In effect, the forces that aspired to subdue the promontory and remake it in their image are themselves being remade by the forces of nature that have always dominated the hill. Fracture by fracture, bit by bit, the concrete skeletons are dearchitecturalised and recycled back into the rocky slope, in a continual process of degeneration and dissolution played out over geological time.