As Sicily’s Niscemi crumbles, families race to save what the Earth hasn’t taken

After losing their home in the Sicilian town of Niscemi in a massive landslide last week, Benedetta Ragusa and Toni Rinnone raced to salvage their pizzeria, retrieving appliances and kitchenware from the site as the ground shifted beneath them.

Firefighters stood by, assessing cracks in the walls and monitoring earth movements before offering a helping hand, pushing a refrigerator up the street and to safety.

“Unfortunately our house was first to collapse in Niscemi, so we didn’t even have the chance to recover our mementos from inside that little home,” said Rinnone.

“We still had faith in the shop, in the premises we had, so we wouldn’t completely fall apart. Instead, it seems that that, too, is collapsing, bit by bit. It’s a bit tough to deal with,” he said.

With a population of around 25,000, Niscemi sits on clay and sandstone cliffs, dominating a plain in southern Sicily that leads to the Mediterranean sea some 30 km away. It has experienced landslides since the 1790s, with the last major rupture recorded in 1997.

Despite warnings of instability, nothing was done to shore up the town’s fragile foundations, and on January 25, following a ferocious storm that drenched the land, a four-kilometre-long stretch of hillside collapsed.

Buildings slipped into the void, others were lacerated by cracks spreading across their walls. Authorities hastily created a “red zone” down the eastern edge of the town, 150 metres deep, and ordered the evacuation of some 1,500 people.

Those who want to retrieve anything from inside the cordoned-off area have to be accompanied by emergency crews and must move quickly. No time for reminiscing.

“It feels like we’re at war,” said Ragusa as she rushed to gather glasses, plates and pans, piling them into a van.

Ariel views show a dramatic beige scar down one side of Niscemi, with mounds of earth lying on the plain below, the surrounding greenfields crisscrossed with cracks and crevices suggesting the whole landscape was being torn apart.

Buildings and severed roads hang over the edge of the land that remains intact. Below it, the broken stubs of drains and water pipes poke out from newly exposed earth.

BUREAUCRACY, DISPUTES THROTTLE PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS

“Unfortunately, the situation is truly critical. We have a city, its historic centre, seriously at risk,” said Gianfranco Di Pietro, a geospatial data engineer.

“It is still too early to know what our future will look like. But we hope to secure this historic part of the city as soon as possible, to rebuild, to provide housing again to those who have lost it, and to stabilize the entire slope.”

Locals could be forgiven for being sceptical.

After the 1997 landslide, experts said parts of the town had been built on unstable ground and urgent work was needed, including installing proper drainage to stop the ground from saturating during storms.

But plans for such work stalled amid a mix of legal disputes and local bureaucracy that regularly throttle public works projects across Italy.

Niscemi Mayor Massimiliano Conti told reporters his town had only in December received funding needed to pay for safety work tied to the 1997 disaster. But that plan had been washed away, like the cliffs it was meant to safeguard.

The public prosecutor’s office in nearby Gela has opened an investigation into negligent disaster.

“It is right that those responsible for this should pay,” Conti said.

With much of her pizzeria equipment secured, Benedetta Ragusa said she now faced a period of grief over her lost home and the dreams destroyed along with it.

Looking at drone footage, she can only make out her old bathroom wall with a mirror still attached. She was relieved she hadn’t got back earlier and tried to save her belongings.

“Losing everything is terrible, losing your first home is terrible, but we were saved, because honestly I don’t know what would have happened if we had been inside,” she said.

Astonishingly, lives were not lost in the disaster.

While Sicilians have a reputation in Italy for riding roughshod over regulations, locals rejected accusations on social media last week that they had ignored building rules while developing Niscemi.

“We risk losing everything, and people still find the time to talk badly about us, and that’s not right,” said French teacher Daniela Ferraro, whose home lay within the red zone.

Recent renovation work was carried out with the required permits and the property had been earthquake-proofed, she said, refusing to face the prospect of moving away from Niscemi.

“We will go to work like every day, we will keep rolling up our sleeves because we don’t give up. Our land must be saved.”