And then there are the houses, the gardens, the rose beds, the churches, the old noble palaces, the vegetable plots, the storehouses, the remains of old rural buildings, the chairlift, the astronomical observatory, the natural history museum: all settings that reveal the passage and the action of human beings. Thus Scalia\u2019s photographic atlas, mixing broad views and details, allows us to discover the masterpieces of the Chiesa Madre (from the eighteenth-century funerary monument of Placido Caruso to the marvellous triptych by the Flemish master Rogier van der Weyden; from the marble Notarbartolo Chapel of 1524 to the exquisite Eucharistic tabernacle carved in silver); the surviving frescoes of the Church of Santa Croce, the Baroque inlays of the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the paintings and sculptures by masters such as Domenico Gagini, Donato Creti and Joannes de Matta, kept in the churches of Santa Margherita, San Gandolfo and the Carmine. Pages of masterpieces, often rendered through close-ups, interspersed with windows, cloisters, tufa walls, richly carved portals and gates.
But inside the churches themselves \u2013 as in San Girolamo or Santa Maria delle Grazie \u2013 the photographer\u2019s eye also comes across secondary spaces, awaiting restoration or temporarily used as storerooms, among stacks of school desks, cling-wrapped furniture, graveyards of old organs, kneelers, chairs and worn shelves. Once again the time of human narrative and of present life slips away from the images, fostering a feeling of eternal suspension.
The same is true of certain decaying residences, of rusty little merry-go-rounds sunk in the grass, of bare gardens with threadbare furnishings, of the wreck of an overturned car abandoned in a corner of the woods, but also of the collections of stuffed animals kept in the Museo Ambientalistico Madonita: still, silent places and finds, from which a deep sense of melancholy seeps through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And everything interpenetrates within the pages of the book: indoor and outdoor spaces, lived-in and untouched places. The same interpenetration that can in fact be observed in the \u201cgreat theatre of delights\u201d of Polizzi Generosa, to borrow an apt expression from Vincenzo Abbate\u2019s text: here nature embraces, pervades, creeps in, bursts forth, accompanying the flow of days and drawing horizons beyond every window, opening, bend, threshold and frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Helga Marsala (artribune.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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