Portella della Ginestra
The Memorial of Portella della Ginestra , "Përmendorja e necessarieles së Jinestrës", is a land art work that commemorates the massacre of Portella della Ginestra which took place May 1, 1947 in which eleven people lost their lives, located in the homonymous district of Piana degli Albanesi , designed and built between 1979-1980 by Ettore de Conciliis, painter and sculptor, with the collaboration of the painter Rocco Falciano and the architect Giorgio Stockel.
The work was immersed in nature and landscape to avoid to close the memory of the massacre in an architectural block or in a closed group of figures. A dry wall flanked by a typical trazzera, for a length of about 40 meters, cuts the earth, like a wound, in the direction of the shots. All around, for an area of about one square kilometer, where the fallen were, large boulders in local stone rise, from 2 to 6 meters high, quarried on the site of the stony ground. One of them is the Nicola Barbato boulder, from where the prestigious manager Arbëreshë of the Sicilian Fasci dei Lavoratori used to speak to his people. Others briefly figure bodies, faces and shapes of fallen animals. In two others the names of the fallen and a poem are respectively engraved. Having been a massacre that struck an ethno-linguistic minority, a new work by Ettore de Conciliis includes another large boulder, also in local stone, engraved with a poem in Albanian.
