Seven thousand souls live in the small town of Gangi, 1011 meters above sea level in the heart of the Madonie, Sicily. Among them, the photographer Arianna Di Romano, that BARNUM readers already know (see https://www.barnum-review.com/portfolio/the-gazes-of-the-last-ones-by-arianna-di-romano/). The town’s official and non-official sites remind us that Gangi was elected the finest Borgo dei Borghi d’Italia in 2014 and that the mayor, Giuseppe Ferrarello, has invented a system to rescue the homes in ruins, placing them for sale for only one euro (provided the buyer restructures them within 5 years).
Arianna, urged by BARNUM, gives us, with the photographs that follow, her vision of this place where the lost time finds itself, without searching too much. It shows us its inhabitants “festive, welcoming, endowed with a strong community spirit and a rare religious sense.” She confesses that “in this corner of the world and in her vanedde (lanes) we are gladly lost ” and that in the headquarters of the Società Operaia we meet to play cards, to read the newspapers and to confront the facts of the day, challenging each other at billiards. ” Presents us Luciano Ienna in front of his museum House of the Ancient Memories; introduces us to the barber shop of “Cataldo Domina, in which you can still receive a beard and hair treatment with the criteria and the attentions of the past”; the bartender Pino Seminara is praised: “his granite, drowned in the exquisite tea of the house, is capable of regenerating souls”; she suggests La capra canta, the laboratory where “Fabrizio Fazio produces medieval and imperial drums with goatskins, wooden sieves and recovery tin”. Details are revealed that narrate everything: hands that talk and mummies that scold.
